Screaming in the Streets

‘Gina at Bruce’s dinner party, NYC’ (1991)

In the retrospective​ currently on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe’s glass cube in Berlin, six of Nan Goldin’s works are displayed inside large black felt-lined structures. Each has a different kind of entrance: one made of sumptuous velvet, another a cold blue corridor. Inside are slideshows made up of photographs taken across fifty years. Goldin’s instinct is to be with a person in their pain – or their euphoria, or wildness, or ambivalence. She has said that the show’s title, This Will Not End Well, refers to Gaza, Lebanon, the US, climate change, Sudan, Germany and more besides. Whatever ‘this’ is, it’s still ongoing.

The exhibition is the first properly to consider Goldin as a filmmaker. When The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979-86) came to Berlin in the 1980s, it was played not in an art gallery but at the Arsenal cinema. Goldin reveres Visconti, Antonioni, Cassavetes, Jack Smith. Her images – I’m thinking of a self-portrait at a window, in which she has a curl at the nape of her neck and scratches on her exposed back – form part of an autobiographical narrative, one that reveals in order to keep battling against denial and revisionism. They push back against the decisive moment.

Goldin’s sharp eye makes her stories simple, but it doesn’t make them easy. Sisters, Saints and Sibyls (2004-22) is a tribute to her elder sister, Barbara, who was institutionalised when she hit puberty and killed herself aged eighteen. A few years later, Nancy – as she was then – ran away from home. She was fostered and in 1968 landed in a ‘hippy free school’ called Satya, in Massachusetts. She spent as much time as she could at the Brattle Theatre and the Orson Welles cinema in Cambridge. The school had a grant from Polaroid, which was based nearby, and Goldin was one of the students given a camera. ‘Photography,’ she said recently, ‘was a way to walk through fear.’ As a teenager she was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.

After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous pictures of their friends from this period, many of whom were trans or drag queens, appear in The Other Side (1992-2021), named after the bar where they all went to have a good time. She only finished adding to the slideshow four years ago, but many of the pictures were taken in the 1970s – not an easy time to be a drag queen in Boston. To Goldin her friends were ‘stars’ – and that’s how she photographed them.

The advantage of a slideshow over a film, Goldin has said, is that a slideshow can be ‘constantly re-edited’, as these were before the exhibition’s first stop, in Stockholm in 2022 (after Berlin it travels to Milan and then Paris). Fredrik Liew, the show’s curator, describes The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a ‘developing container for images’, which explains why the book version (published in 1986) appears in one of the later photographs, covered in lines of white powder. In the introduction, Goldin writes that ‘if each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to memory, a story without end.’ The last photographs in the slideshow point to endings: rooms emptied of people, an open window, a wedding photograph on a dresser, beds made and unmade, graves, a casket – signs that tell the audience the work will soon be over. Yet after the credits and acknowledgments have come and gone, there is the purr-click of the projector, and a blink of colour as the first photograph comes round again. Cyclicality – its rhythms, its humour – is central to her work. A title such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, with its reference to a song (from The Threepenny Opera), indicates something of the claim the work makes on the viewer’s memory. These slideshows get stuck in your head. Watching them is hypnotic, thrilling, like singing or seduction.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the only slideshow Goldin began before 1992. While studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she began a portrait of her life in colour, something that wasn’t really done at the time: fine art photography came in black and white. ‘I responded very strongly against the obsession with technology that was in the photo world in the early 1970s,’ Goldin told BOMB magazine in 1991. ‘When we went to school, it was the rocking tree school where your photographs had absolutely no content, but you made perfect pictures and perfect prints. And photographers, particularly male, only discussed their cameras and equipment.’

She didn’t have access to a darkroom so to pass the course she made slides of the life she was leading in Provincetown. She took the pictures into bars and showed them on a projector, asking the audience – many of whom featured in the photos – which they liked and which they wanted taken out. She presented them to a wider crowd at Frank Zappa’s birthday party at the Mudd Club in 1979, the year after she moved to a windowless loft in the Bowery in New York. A DJ boyfriend started to spin songs to play over the slides, then she developed a playlist herself. The soundtrack to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – from Dionne Warwick’s ‘Don’t Make Me Over’ and Maria Callas singing ‘Casta Diva’ to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ ‘My World Is Empty without You’ and Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’ – has been fixed since 1987.

At the time, Goldin was working as a dancer in New Jersey (‘because you didn’t have to take your top off in New Jersey’), before spending some time as a sex worker. Then the radical landlady at the Tin Pan Alley bar in Times Square gave her a job. She told Goldin that her photographs were political. In its most recent form, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency runs for just under 42 minutes, with around seven hundred colour snapshots appearing for a few seconds each. The narrative is given shape by the songs, and by the fact that the images seem to be arranged in chapters. Wax figures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in white tie are followed by Goldin’s own parents pictured against a restaurant’s flowery banquette. Punchbags, knives and snakes appear in quick succession. Fiery orange lighting turns couples into religious icons. Drinks come in blue and citrine; the only food is birthday or wedding cake.

There is no suggestion that these people have jobs, at least of the 9 to 5 kind. Here, living is a spectacular form of work in itself. Goldin’s friend Suzanne is shown gazing into a mirror in front of a framed print of the Mona Lisa. Her boyfriend, Brian, reclines next to the TV, cigarette dangling from his mouth, while The Flintstones casts a blue glow over the scene. There are painful images of Goldin in 1984 after Brian punched her in both eyes and burned her journals. The interiors are bedrooms and bars, basements and dank living rooms, wallpapered or splattered brown or plastered with notes and images. As the sequence progresses, associations form, with visual jokes and provocative contrasts. Mouths keep mashing against ears, chins, other mouths; arms wrap themselves around necks and waists; hands hold other hands. Her subjects’ lonely, compulsive need to get tangled up in other people leads them to ‘Just Remarried’ wedding cars and side-by-side mausoleums.

In the afterword to the book of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin writes that she spent the two years following its publication alone in her flat doing drugs. In 1988, she went into rehab and ‘discovered the light after years in the dark’. (‘Until 1989 I didn’t know what daylight was.’) When she returned to New York, her friends were dying from Aids. She was asked by the gallery Artists Space to curate an exhibition: Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, a group show in which twelve artists reflect on the impact of Aids on their – and Goldin’s – community. In the catalogue, David Wojnarowicz wrote a furious lament titled ‘Postcards from America: X-rays from Hell’, leading the National Endowment for the Arts to withdraw its funding. Naming public figures with grotesque positions on the HIV epidemic (in the first draft, one cardinal was a ‘fat fucking cannibal’), Wojnarowicz wrote about his desire to bring private suffering into the public sphere:

There is a tendency for people affected by this epidemic to police each other or prescribe what the most important gestures for dealing with this experience of loss would be. I resent that, and at the same time worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death of their lovers, friends and neighbours and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets.

As Cookie Mueller put it, ‘it’s a war zone, but … it’s not bullets that catch these soldiers, and there’s no bombs and no gunfire. These people are dying with a whisper.’ Mueller died late in 1989, Wojnarowicz in 1992. It’s striking that several of the artists involved in the Witnesses show mentioned the ‘spirituality’ of their community, meaning, I think, an intensity of spirit.

‘I guess if you photograph someone enough,’ Goldin told an interviewer, ‘they achieve a kind of star magnitude. They become a star in the movie of my life.’ Her aspiration for The Other Side ‘was to put the queens on the cover of Vogue’. Here portraits of ‘gender euphoria’ stretch across three decades, and around the world, from New York to Manila, Berlin to Bangkok. The focus is on the detail – the rhinestones, the mink, the wigs. Her subjects are participating in the creation of their own images, whether it’s Colette Modelling in the Beauty Parade, C Performing as Madonna or Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC (which echoes the shot of the aristocrats in their carriage in Visconti’s The Leopard). These are faces that want to be seen. Caravaggio’s Bacchus is tacked to the wall behind a portrait of a woman staring into a bowl of grapes. Her body language echoes that of the god looking over her; her expression is a version of Bacchus’s but not quite a repetition. Goldin’s art-historical (and pop-cultural) doubles appear like guests from a different time.

Around the corner from the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Gemäldegalerie houses Renaissance portraits of wimpled ladies, a Virgin Mary with St Anne, two miserable-looking canons from Utrecht. Goldin’s own phantom is her sister. Sisters, Saints and Sibyls is projected onto three parallel screens, like a triptych. It was first shown in 2004 in the chapel of the Salpêtrière in Paris, an octagonal building in the grounds of the hospital where Géricault painted his hyena – the ‘monomaniac of envy’ – and where Charcot lectured on hysteria. It was exhibited in London last summer at the deconsecrated Welsh Chapel on Charing Cross Road, with a gallery designed after the viewing platforms from which hospital doctors once observed patients during lectures. A similar structure has been built for the installation at the Neue Nationalgalerie: although you can choose to sit downstairs, when I visited most of the audience watched the show from the safety of the balcony.

The slideshow opens with images and statues of St Barbara, who, according to hagiographies, was imprisoned by her father in a tower with two windows. She converted to Christianity and had a third window installed as a symbol of the Trinity. The story of Barbara Goldin, which follows, is told – in Nan Goldin’s voiceover – as though by an archivist picking through fragments:

My parents were married on 3 September 1939.

The same day that war was declared.

My father wanted his first child to be a boy.

Barbara Holly Goldin. Date of birth: 21 May 1946.

Sex: female.

Family photographs arrange themselves on the three screens, supplemented by Goldin’s more recent pictures. She tells us that Barbara started playing the piano at the age of four and taking lessons aged six. She liked to mother, and later confide in, her little sister. It’s a story with too many psychiatrists. The boardgame Sorry! is shown sitting on the piano in the family home as we are told that Barbara has been moved from one institution to another, because of her refusal to conform, because she fell for a Black wrestler, wouldn’t shave her legs, started feeling attracted to women. The nurses’ notes describe her as ‘awkward’ and ‘ungainly’; they also speculate as to whether the problem is her mother. In 1965, Barbara lay down on the tracks outside Washington DC and waited for the Capitol Limited commuter train. Lilian Goldin, played by an actress, says: ‘Tell the children it was an accident.’ As they sat shiva, an older man, who said he had been in love with her sister, ‘seduced’ Nan (her word). She was eleven.

The book accompanying the Neue Nationalgalerie exhibition is dedicated to Barbara: ‘if not for you’. When a psychiatrist warned the Goldins that the same thing would happen to Nan, she left home and reinvented her family. ‘Drugs set me free,’ she tells us. ‘Then they became my prison.’ Johnny Cash’s rendition of ‘Hurt’ plays over images of her treatment for self-harm, arms burned by cigarettes. Near the end, three goofy snowmen appear, one on each screen, and it seems like the final triad, a change of mood. But the screens keep changing and there is footage of Goldin positioning her camera to take a picture. This isn’t the ending either: she seems to be priming us for a close, only to refuse us the sense of completion. By the time Leonard Cohen is singing ‘Seems So Long Ago, Nancy’ and Goldin is tending her sister’s grave, endings have begun to feel like mirages.

Goldin’s​ attention to children, her curiosity about what they are and what they could be, is evident in many of her works. It’s hard not to think this must have something to do with her own childhood experience. Fire Leap (2010-22) considers whether children are from another planet. The images show small, helmeted astronauts standing on tin cans, half-clothed aliens wearing sunglasses, a demi-human in a dress with a plastic red elephant’s head, an angel spinning in a beam of gold light. Most are shots of her friends’ children, larking around, crying, laughing, feeding, bathing, but she also captures moments of separation and defiance. These faces are less scrutable than the adults, and the soundtrack is more unsettling: Troy Hess singing ‘Please Don’t Go Topless, Mother’, children’s choirs performing ‘Desperado’ and ‘Space Oddity’ in militant voices. The title alludes to the pagan coming of age ceremony in The Wicker Man.

Two pieces are about drugs. Sirens (2019-20), a single-channel video scored by the musician Mica Levi, repurposes scenes from films by Lynne Ramsay, Kurosawa, Jia Zhangke and others, as well as Donyale Luna’s silent screen test with Warhol – in imitation, as Goldin puts it, of the ecstasy of being high. She made it to distract herself while making Memory Lost (2019-21), also scored by Levi (with some Schubert and Eartha Kitt), which tries to recreate the experience of drug withdrawal. Skies of grey, green, purple, taupe and blue are layered with messages left on Goldin’s answering machine during the two years she locked herself away with her drugs. ‘I’m here three days,’ one person tells her from rehab, ‘and I show up.’ A man describes re-emerging into the world: ‘Ah, they’re putting out apples – it must be the fall.’ A voice complains about someone questioning her memory while on coke: ‘No matter how fucked up, my whole life is based on memory. I remember every word that was ever said to me.’ A different voice tells the machine: ‘I’m not in pain, I’m just trying not to feel anything.’ We see an overflowing bin, an uncanny green cat, a grasshopper, a peacock, birds through windows, doves and seagulls and a lone penguin, horses communing in a circus, sheep, a bear, a seal lying on its back, a brass monkey striking a bell. The animals repel reading. Everything is shown at one remove, filtered through veils, shrouds, bandages, steam, snow, clouds, smoke. A thick mist obscures Christ the Redeemer. The sea is pink, the sea is silver; clouds look like a mirror. One image is called ‘Sunset like hair’. A stone reads ‘I do plead not guilty.’ Indoors, the electric lights look like the aurora borealis. A fire blazes next to a TV screen. The images are blurred, marked with light leaks and burns on celluloid. ‘That slideshow’s based on outtakes,’ Goldin told Musée magazine. More recent conversations have been added to the sequence: a man describes his feelings on learning that his mother never held him as a child; Gabor Maté, a doctor specialising in addiction, outlines the ‘totally sane, totally desirable, totally human’ reasons people take drugs – they want to feel more social, they want to feel more comfortable in their own skin.

After being prescribed OxyContin following a wrist operation in 2014, Goldin relapsed. When she recovered, she set up the activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) primarily in order to ‘shame’ the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, for profiteering from the opioid crisis. Laura Poitras’s documentary about Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (the title is taken from Barbara Goldin’s response to a Rorschach test), includes a scene in which three members of the Sackler family, Richard, David and Theresa, are shown attending a court hearing over Zoom. As parent after parent testifies to the suffering and loss of their child, the Sacklers look on impassively, sometimes impatiently. The actions of PAIN, inspired by those of ACT UP during the Aids crisis, have brought Goldin and her cause to worldwide attention and have led to a reckoning of sorts, with major museums removing the Sackler name from their galleries and refusing further donations. But no one has gone to jail.

Two weeks before the opening at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the German government introduced a resolution calling on art institutions not to lend financial support to critics of Israel. The gallery organised a symposium on the opening weekend to debate ‘antisemitism, racism [and] artistic freedom’, apparently to distance itself from Goldin’s protests against the genocide in Gaza. ‘It is clear to me that the museum organised this symposium as a prophylactic to secure its position in the German discussion – in other words, to prove they do not support my politics,’ Goldin wrote on Instagram. ‘They knew who they were inviting.’ That night, as the gallery filled with cameras and people queued outside in high winds, she told the crowd: ‘69 per cent of the weapons being used in this slaughter are US-made and 30 per cent come from Germany … I hope I am paving a path for other artists to speak out without being censored.’ She called for people to take to the streets: ‘The more of us there are, the more of us there are.’ I thought of Wojnarowicz’s essay in the catalogue for Witnesses: ‘I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbours would take their dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles to Washington DC, and blast through the gates of the White House and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and then dump their lifeless forms on the steps.’ That was 35 years ago. They knew who they were inviting.