By Nina Cerasuolo | News / Culture | February 14, 2024
Cover Illustration: Of Beauty and Pain by Nan Goldi at Stedelijke Museum. Nina Cerasuolo / The Amsterdammer
Culture Reporter Nina Cerasuolo discovers the works of American photographer Nan Goldin, whose exhibition was hosted by the Stedelijk Museum.
Sunday, Jan. 28, was the last day visitors of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum could visit Nan Goldin’s monographic slideshow exhibition “This Will Not End Well.”
I went to the exhibition twice and it has been on my mind ever since, but my connection to Goldin’s work did not start in January 2024; it started a while back, in 2016.
At fourteen, I had the immense luck of encountering one of those teachers whose lessons manage to survive outside of the classroom. He was a short, slim man with a white moustache straight out of a comic book. When I arrived in his classroom, his career was about to come to an end. Yet he would keep repeating, frustrated, hopeful: “You don’t have to know, you have to understand.” Understand Art, he meant.
One day, I understood. He had turned on a beamer and projected a slide: on the top, the title “What is Art?” Below, two pictures. In the first, a young woman, red curls around her face and a livid bruise on her eye, a cheek so swollen that the left eye can barely stay open; still, gazing directly into the camera lens. In the second, two people having sex. Not pretending to, not about to, not right after; they are captured in action, naked, in between hug and convulsion. I cannot decide if the orange lighting gives me a feeling of passion or disturbs me. The picture is slightly blurred but its lively force is neat. “Nan Goldin,” my teacher said, “here, in a self-portrait after her boyfriend’s attack sent her to the hospital.” He took a break; it must be hard to show raw violence to teenagers and avoid romanticization. “Here, with her boyfriend – I guess you need no background to understand that.”
Since then, the most immediate answer to the question “What is Art?” has always been, for me, “Nan Goldin.” Her work as a photographer and filmmaker, her activism, her response to and reshaping of what life has thrown at her.
Nancy (Nan) Goldin was born in Washington DC, USA, in 1953. Later, in Boston, she had a traditionally unhappy, exceptionally turbulent childhood, marked by the forced hospitalization and consequent suicide of her older sister, Barbara. Barbara’s resistance to her white-picket-fence family, and the mother-daughter conflict that brought her into forced hospitalization, had cost Barbara her life. But that did not tame Nan. Not even 15 years old, she left her family and, after a few years of hopping from one foster home to the next, she ended up at a Community school in Lincoln, where she was introduced to photography. From then on, she never stopped.
Boston, New York, Berlin, London. Thanks to her inseparable friend David Armstrong, Nan was introduced to the Boston queer scene. For decades, she documented every second of the hectic life her and her friends lived, seeking autonomy to break free from a world of rules, norms and traditions. Through snapshots of the lives close to her and of her own, she fixed on film the inherently rebellious existence of young trans folks in a society blind to them; the AIDS crisis first, and the opioids crisis later – always with tenderness, pain, rawness and political intensity. Goldin and her friends would party, have sex, laugh, marry, do opioids, fall into abusive cycles and relationships, have children and raise them together – and she would capture it, adding pixels to the complex image of a community and of a generation.
In the 1980s, Goldin presented her first slideshow: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. In the slideshow, which she has kept curating and re-editing for forty years, pictures are selected and edited with music to inspire deep feelings, a sense of re-found awareness and deep empathy for those strangers allowing the viewer into their intimate moments.
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-2022) was also one of the slideshows on display at Stedelijk Museum until Jan. 28. The other showcased works were Other Side (1992– 2021), a portrait of and homage to Goldin’s trans brothers and sisters in soul; Sisters, Saints and Sibyls (2004–2022), a testament to “our sisters,” who, like Barbara Goldin, were forced to end their life because they refused to conform; Fire Leap (2010–2022), a tender collection of the children in Goldin’s life, the sons and daughters of the friends we see negotiating freedom, addiction and recovery in the other slideshows; Sirens (2019–2020), a tribute to the first Black supermodel Donyale Luna and to her killer: ecstasy; and Memory Lost (2019–2021), an intimate, anxious journey into the prison of drug addiction.
“This Will Not End Well” cannot be visited at Stedelijk anymore, but – while waiting for her next exhibition to land in Amsterdam – you can find Goldin’s life documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” (directed by Laura Poitras, 2022) on Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV. The movie, co-written by Goldin, is an uncomfortably (in the best possible way) raw and profound depiction of the artist’s life and work, and a piece in the puzzle of her fight against investments in pharmaceutical companies sustaining the American opioid crisis. It also includes extracts from the slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
A documentary might not be the same as three hours worth of carefully edited slideshows, but I am sure it will help shape your answer to the question “What is Art?,” just as those two pictures did for me eight years ago.
Nina Cerasuolo is a university student in Amsterdam. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Amsterdammer.
