Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Nan Goldin
American (b. 1953)
SKINHEADS FIGHTING, LONDON (1978)
color photograph
10.875" x 13.875"

STYLE: 70s PHOTOGRAPHY

  

Born in Washington, D.C., Nan Goldin studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and began taking photographs as a teenager. After moving to New York, she began showing her work both in clubs (where many of her photographs were taken) and in galleries, often in the form of a slide show with an accompanying soundtrack. Goldin's earliest works were black and white photographs of drag queens; she has continued working on this subject throughout her career. In the eighties, Goldin entitled her growing body of work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. As this series moved into the nineties, it took on a more somber tone, as many of Goldin's subjects died of AIDS or otherwise prematurely. Later series include Tokyo Love: Spring Fever 1994, All By Myself, and others. Goldin's work has been exhibited worldwide, including a traveling retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum in 1996. There is also a film, I'll Be Your Mirror (1997), co-directed by Goldin, that includes a large proportion of her work and subjects.

Goldin's work closely follows her biography; she almost always photographed her friends, her social circle, the world she knew. In 1978 and 1979, Goldin lived in England, where she photographed punk rockers and the clubs and music scene. These images have a hard, working-class edge, reflecting the ease with which the London punk scene could slip into violence.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Interview with Kathy High, Reel New York, 5/97
"I'm absolutely not a nostalgic person. I mean, I think whatever time you're in, you have to live that time and not be nostalgic about the past in that kind of way. Like this revisionism of how fabulous it all was, you know . . .
I wanted to be a filmmaker long before I wanted to be a photographer -- and I still do want to be a filmmaker -- and I got a Super 8 camera when I was 16 or 17. I was very influenced by early Warhol and Jack Smith. So I would have my friends sit in a room and take their clothes off and then zoom in and out on them. And they were the most boring films ever...
I mean, I've photographed David for 28 years, you know, since I met him. And I photographed Sharon for 20 years since I met her. And the same with Bruce. I've known him for 22 or 23 years. And Greer I knew 18 years or something. It's all about making a record of people's real lives..."
Interview with Tom Holert, Artforum, 3/03
"NG: I'd been friends with Kiki [Smith] since the mid-70s, and I'd been an outside visitor to [the artists group] Colab [which organized "The Times Square Show"], so I was invited to do my slide show there. It was a one-off thing, a performance, and the woman whose bar in Times Square I worked at came and saw it. That woman, Maggie Smith, recognized its political subtexts--she saw that it was intensely political about gender roles and options, the power of relationships, and women in general. It's about the difficulty in coupling, the struggle between autonomy and dependency, sexual addiction. That's when I started formulating it as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
TH: So "The Times Square Show" slide show prefigured The Ballad?
NG: Yes. Then afterward The Ballad started to evolve as a more constructed piece. It opens with a segment about supposedly happy couples, then goes to different roles for women and for children, and on to chapters on men. There's a long section on violent men, and then there's men lonely and vulnerable. From there it goes to bars, drinking, and drugs, and from parties and fashion back to couples--couples alienated, gay couples, and then sex. It ends with empty beds and twin graves, which I've been photographing since the '70s--long before Sophie Calle. The final image is of two skeletons coupling."