Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror

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Kaplan, Louis. “Photography and the exposure of community: Reciting Nan Goldin’s Ballad.” American Exposures. University of Minnesota Press, 2005. In the 1990s, as The Ballad slideshow toured museums worldwide, Goldin gathered her photos of Mueller and created a portfolio and exhibition dedicated to her. She started photographing empty rooms, landscapes, and skylines. She collected a decade’s worth of her photographs of drag queens for a book and exhibition titled The Other Side. She and Armstrong created a two-person show and accompanying book called A Double Life. In 1994 she collaborated with Nobuyoshi Araki on Tokyo Love, a project photographing young people in Tokyo’s underground cultures. In 1996, her mid-career retrospective, I’ll Be Your Mirror, opened at the Whitney before touring Europe. Nan believes that this is the ultimate act of autonomous independence. In decades of photography life, Nan is not shooting her transvestites, transgenders, and gay friends, but set up a mirror to faithfully reflect the world. She insists on telling people the truth: physical limitations do not hinder the height of the spirit. At first, Nan used an imaging camera sent to her by school and she only took pictures from ordinary life. Everything changed on 1972, when she first met Ivey, Naomi and Klett in the suburbs of Boston. Nan couldn’t hold on to joy when she focused on the three transvestites through the lens, she found her curiosity and affection for the beauty of gender blur, she likes them, she wants to be friends with them and shoots for them.

Goldin struggled with her addiction for three years, at one point almost dying from an overdose of fentanyl. When she emerged after regaining her sobriety in 2017, she once again found that the world around her had changed. This time the epidemic was opioid addiction, the aftereffect of the widespread overprescription of powerful pain-relieving drugs like the OxyContin that had been her downfall. In “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, Nan also preserved her many years of memories: the death of family and friends, the breakdown of relationship, the gathering of friends, and Naomi wearing a gorgeous dance dress with laughing. . Through these photos, Nan not only reveals the fragile and sensitive side of human nature, but also expresses the relationship between desire and loss, joy and sorrow, sex and lovelorn, which seemingly contradictory but symbiotic coexists. She first wants to prove is the universal theme of human destruction: the inevitable collapse of love relationships, the indulgence of desires, the loss of loved ones and friends, and the illusion of escape from reality. urn:oclc:record:1349254867 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier nangoldinillbeyo0000suss Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2rptqthgz9 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0874271029

Activism and Work in the 1990s

Hoberman, Jim. “Nan talking with J. Hoberman.” I’ll Be Your Mirror, New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1996. work of Nan Goldin is a dialogue between the self and the other and, in her own words, a “struggle between intimacy and autonomy” (MoCA), an account of how the I can approach the you without losing itself (or, in the Ballad’s terms, without withdrawal symptoms). “Nan Goldin: I’ll be Your Mirror” was the title of an exhibition and a publication in 1996 by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2020 the Collection Lambert in Avignon, which contains a great many of Goldin’s self-portraits, held a show with a similar title that presented a large section devoted to Goldin. The latter exhibition has served in the present article which contends that when Goldin’s photographs reflect specific others, the artist is reflecting herself, and ultimately, the viewer. In 1989 Goldin curated the first art exhibition in New York about AIDS, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.” Mounted at Artists Space, it included work by Armstrong, diCorcia, Lankton, Morrisroe, Peter Hujar, Vittorio Scarpati, Kiki Smith, and David Wojnarowicz. “I am often filled with rage at my sense of powerlessness in the face of this plague,” Goldin wrote in one of the show catalogue’s essays. “I want to empower others by providing them a forum to voice their grief and anger in the hope that this public ritual of mourning can be cathartic in the process of recovery, both for those among us who are ill and those survivors who are left behind.” In the text for her book, Goldin described The Ballad as a “visual diary” to share with the world. But whereas Robert Frank’s concerns were largely documentary, she was adamant that her pictures “come out of relationships, not observation,” and she included many self-portraits. (A more apt comparison may be to Larry Clark, whose autobiographical 1971 photo book, Tulsa, Goldin has cited as an inspiration.) Goldin wrote in The Ballad, “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.” Goldin had her first solo show in 1973 at Project, Inc. in Boston. The following year she and Armstrong enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (as did Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe, who would go on to successful careers of their own); after graduating she moved with a group of friends first to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then to New York. Goldin had found her “extended family.” With her sister still at the forefront of her mind, she “became obsessed with never losing the memory of anyone again,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. It was this that drove her to constantly photograph members of what she called her tribe.

Goldin was born in Washington in 1953. Her work began to emerge in the New York of the 1980s, when the artist was in her early thirties. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the work that founded Goldin’s place in contemporary art (“The thing that sustains my name,” MoCA) began as an ever-changing slide show projected by the artist herself in underground clubs in New York and around the world. Sound was added in 1980 and the work received its name in 1981 from a song in Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera. In 1985, it was reviewed in the Village Voice and presented at the Whitney Biennial; it reached its definitive form, running for 48 minutes with over 700 pictures and with 30 songs, in 1987. That year it was also shown during the Rencontres de la photographie in the Roman theatre in Arles. Goldin’s work began to be exhibited in France in the early 1990s, first by Agnès b. and then by Yvon Lambert whose gallery she joined in 1995. Lambert chose Goldin and other artists working with photography precisely because she was not a photographer, but an artist using photography: “I’ve always supported the work of that generation which called themselves artists, and used photography as one medium among others, by reinventing it. People like Louise Lawler, Andres Serrano…” (Ibars 67).

Présentation

Ibars, Stéphane. “Entretien avec Yvon Lambert” in Nan Goldin. Trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods. Les Cahiers de la Collection Lambert. Arles : Actes Sud, 2020.