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This transmission is being sent in response to this request. I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR
Edited by NAN GOLDIN, DAVID ARMSTRONG,
AND HANS WERNER HOLZWARTH
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Curated by ELISABETH SUSSMAN
AND DAVID ARMSTRONG
Nan Goldin
With contibutions by DAVID ARMSTRONG
JAMES FENTON
NAN GOLDIN
MARVIN HEIFERMAN
J. HOBERMAN
WALTER KELLER
COOKIE MUELLER
DARRYL PINCKNEY
LUC SANTE a
JOACHIM SARTORIUS
ELISABETH SUSSMAN -
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ
Scalo Zurich Berlin —New York Cover image: Seon on te tin, Geman 92
Library of Congres Cataloging in-Publcaon Data
Sussman, Fhiabeth 35
Nan Goldin Elsabet Sussman; with oneibutons by James Fenton . [eta
Fhibion ealog. elas bibiigrphislrefeences.
1. Portait phocogrphy—Eshibitions. 2. Photog, Erot— Exhibitions
5. Goldin, Nan, 1953- —Eshibioas. 4. Goldin, Nan, 1955 —Criticiom and interpretation.
1. Goldin, Nan. 1953~ Fenton, James 1949 IN Whitney Muscum of Amerian Art. 1. Tie
rrvey2—dcso cP
ISBN or427-103-9 (pape)
ISBN $-93148-35-0 (loth)
© 1993 hes Fenton, “For Andeew Wood”
(© 1996 Marvin Heserman, “Patares of Lie and Los
© 198 Este of Cookie Moc, Richt Trey, Executor, “Case #7: Dora”
© tpt Esote of Cookie Mocler, Rihard Ti, Executor “A Las Lever’
© 1996 Darl Pinckney, "Nis Manan”
‘AIL Tomorcow’s Parties” word aid mse by Low Revd © 1966 Renewed! 1994)
‘OAKFIELD AVENUE MUSIC LTD, ll Rights Conte and Administered by
SCREEN GEMS. £41 MUSIC INC. All Righs Reserve, Incrnational Copyight Secured
Used by Permission,
© to80 David Wojarowice, “Potand fom Americ: X-Rays fom Hell 1989
All other rots © 1996 Whitney Meum of American Are
AIL Non Goldin mages P1996 Nan Goin
© 1996 Whitey Museum of American Ar 943 Mason Avene, New York, N¥ 102
and Scalo Verlag AG, Weinbergirase 222, CH-8008 Zach, Switeeland
All ght served. No pat of his publicson may be reprdoced or casted ip any
form or by any means electron of mechanic incaing owcopy ecoring oF any other
information storage and rere stem, otherwise without written person fom
the Whieney Moseuns of American Ar
Footy photographs include inthis volume ae rproed from The lla 9f Seal Dende
(Apert, 98), courtesy of the Aperture Foundaaon, New York A Tenth Anniversary Fain,
featuring anew Aferwoed by Nan Goldin, ha just been plished In/ Of Her Time:
Nan Goldin’s Photographs
ELISABETH SUSSMAN
NAN
OLDIN 18 the impassioned historian of love in the age of fluid sexual-
ity, glamour, beauty, violence, death, intoxication, and masquerade. An uncanny
attention and attraction to the drama and the commonplace of life structure her
photographs. In front of her camera, women weep in bars; couples make love on
unmade beds in messy apartments; beautiful, naked male torsos lie atop cars:
women stare into bathroom mirrors,
Given a camera as a teenager, Goldin at once began to record those around
her—a simple enough gesture, but one that combined with a sense of history. As
she continued to take pictures of her friends, she began to accumulate their
histories, and history itself emerged as an imperative that would thenceforth
govern her operation. By capturing the present, Goldin instinctively knew that
the record would ultimately deliver a past. Out of the flux of experience, she
captures moments that cumulatively tell stories of love, friendship, desire, and
their aftermaths. Her camera freezes the comings and goings of the social e:
perience of desire: love and hate in intimate relationships; moments of isolation,
self-revelation, and adoration; the presentation of the sexual self freed from the
constraints of biological destiny. Nor is Goldin’s an abstract history. It is re-
counted through the lives of people who are part of her life, with whom she
dances to the music of time.’ In Goldin’s work, the vastness of experience boils
down to remembered incidents: the flux or duration of life can be captured in
images of the days and nights of familiar people. Although an individual image
may be devastating in its intensity and beauty, Goldin, like a novelist or film-
maker, thinks both of single images and of sequences of linked images that form
a narrative
As single images, Goldin’s work can be seen as “social portraiture.” In this,
sense, it relates to the work of August Sander, the great documentary photog-
rapher. Sander’s photographs of different types—peasants, artists, aristocrats,
der Zeit (Pace of
Our Time), in 1929 in Weimar, Germany. The book was described at the time as
artisans, civil servants, students, ete—were published as Autlitz
‘a kind of cultural history, even a sociology of the last thirty years.”” Goldin’s project differs from that of Sander’s, however, because the lives she records are
those of her friends. The stories that she builds from single images, moreover, are
not narrative in the literary sense, They are filmic, corresponding to Siegiried
Kracauer’s “cinematic story forms which assert themselves independently of
the established literary genres...found stories” to be captured by the intuitive
observer.’ Goldin’s tales resist commentary or text. Their meaning emerges
through the editing and sequencing of individual images and, in the case of her
slide shows accompanied by music, through lyric and sound.
The history of desire that surfaces through sequenced images recording the
life of a friend is exemplified in the trajectory of the photograph Cookie at Tin
Pan Alley, NYC
Cookie Mueller seated at a table in a bar, a half-filled glass of beer in front of her,
1983, p. 261). The photograph shows the actress and writer
a cigarette burning in a nearby ashtray. Her eyes are cast down and her expre:
sion is somber. Goldin made this photograph during the production of Bette
Gordon's film Variety, a story ofa ticket taker in a Times Square sex theater who,
crossing the line from voyeur to participant, pursues her own fantasies with one
of the theater's customers. Goldin avoided Gordon’s fictional narrative, but was
sympathetic to its political assumptions: that the sex industry, in addition co
exploiting its participants, furnishes women with income and can be a vehicle
for women’s fantasy.
Goldin integrated the film still into her own documentary sequences, shot
in Tin Pan Alley, a Times Square-area bar. The bar served as a kind of street:
wise academy in the e:
ly 1980s for a group that included Goldin, other artists,
and its own regulars. In Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, Mueller is actually posed in front
‘ofa wall hung with the sculpture of John Ahearn, casts made from the figures of
people Ahearn knew. Goldin took this photograph during the filming of Variety
and inserted it into her first book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), in
a section titled “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues.” Here four photographs —
one of them Cookie at Ti Pan Alley—show four women alone, introspective,
offerin
© gesture of ingratiation toward another person. The photograph re-
appeared in 2 1990 exhibition and 1991 publication devoted entirely to images
of Cookie Mueller, who had died of AIDS in 1989. Seen in this sequence, the
photograph fianctions less as an element in the documentary topology of desire
chan as a fragment of a memorial to a specific woman, whose life epitomized her
era and whose loss is of particular poignancy to her friend, the photographer. PO
GOLDIN FOUND HER point of view as an artist before she consciously de-
termined to be a photographer. A group of small black-and-white photo-
graphs taken from the late 19608 until 1971 are at first glance dismissable as mere:
snapshots. But their informality and intimacy so engaged Goldin that she re-
tained their aesthetic. These portraits and snapshots depict various friends
who constituted a family for Goldin, her own biological-family relationships
having been wrenched asunder by the suicide of an older sister in 1964. The
family had been living outside of Washington, D.C., but then moved to the sub-
urbs north of Boston.’ Goldin, as a young teenager, found traditional school and
family life difficult. She eventually moved in with foster families and enrolled
in an alternative school in Lincoln, Massachusetts, called Satya Community
School." It was at Satya that Goldin began to photograph and work in a dark-
room and it was at Satya that several defining relationships were initiated
and her sense of identity began to emerge. In small black-and-white photo-
graphs and Polaroids, she captured the pulse of her own life. The subjects of
these photographs are Goldin and her friends, seen in and
ound Satya. The
snapshots slowly reveal a transformation from unaware adolescence to self
conscious adulthood: Goldin’s friends cut their hair or let it grow, try on dresses
and shoes; and as they pose for the camera, they are the person they dream of
becoming. Among these black-and-white snapshots are the first pictures of
David Armstrong and Suzanne Fletcher, who became the focus of extended
portraits over long periods of time.
Goldin’s world was one of self-definition in a constructed, self-created
space, recorded by constant picture taking, Unburdened by traditional stereo
typing, Goldin and her friends reinvented themselves, inspired by the films and
fashion magazines through which they learned about the visible manifestation of
sex and desire. Siegfried Kracauer described this exchange with cinematic
images, crucial to the modern world, in 1938: “Films seek to adapt themselves
to the tastes of their audiences, who, in turn, model themselves after films.”
Goldin and her circle delighted in the pleasures and glamour of cinema and
European fashion magazines. They were attracted by the shimmer of disap-
peared elegance
Cecil Beaton, Baron de Meyer, Hollywood movies of the
thirtie:
and forties, and the flamboyance of the fashion photography found in the
pages of Italian and French Vague (Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin), Warhol's
magazine Interview, and the East Village Eye. —— — =
As if sensing that the camera would reveal a new identity,
independent of conventional society and relating to a world
constructed of each other and of a fantastic symbiosis with
glamour, Goldin’s friends became ¢
amored of picture taking
and posing, Mirroring fashion’s rash elegance and sexual mas-
querade, the portraits capture a birth of identity that is linked
with a performance for the camera. One of David Armstrong's
,
coldin, Nan in velvet own, Fayette St, Boston aad
(1971), catches the phantasmagoric exchange of the young
early portraits of
woman with images and with herself as the camera’s subject
her arms framing her body, Goldin mimes the glamour of the
photographs David Acton
the wall (one by Baron de Meyer) that flank her seduc~ 2m" Aumont
tive image. One of Goldin’s early portrait studies of Armstrong, David ar Fite St. Be
the Lindemann’s house, Lexington, Ma. (1970), captures his striking femininity
stressing its gentle, domest
aspects by setting his seated figure in counter pand arse
point with Lindemann’ ho
softly out-of-focus black cat perched on a white rug in the
middle distance of the book-lined room. Another
regular who emerges as a striking identity in
the photographs of this period is Suzanne Fletcher
Her thrift-shop finery, deeply shadowed eyes,
smoothly coiffed hair, and strong, long neck in
Suzanne as a ghost, Payette St., Boston (1971) project
a persona for Goldin’s camera that exudes a near-
Edwardian glamour.
But Goldin also relished the icy eroticism of
contemporary fashion photography. That this subculture of the
media world had become paradigmatic of the society of the
spectacle was made clear in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film
Blow up, a film Goldin admired, The central character of the
film, a fashion photographer who coldly converts the photo.
graphic act into a facsimile of violent sex, eng:
ges in erotic
studio sessions with his model in order to procure extreme
orgasmic postures that function to display clothes. The studio
scenes in Blow up were reasonable approximations of some real
fashion photography studios in the sixties and seventies, whose — Sezumne aa gho Foyt St, Boston, 19 setups had undertones of sex and violence to lure consumers through suggestions
rous. A typical Guy Bourdin ad
; of dramas that were erotic, glamorous, and dang
a 0 for Charles Jourdan shoes in the mid-seventies has two sequential photos: in the
peer om first, a clothed woman stands by a pond; in the second, her
clothes and shoes are shown on the shore and she is seen
curled up and undressed in a boat on the pond.
In the black-and-white photographs of drag queens
Goldin took in Boston in the early seventies, she began to
approximate a more straightforward fashion photography of
modish poses in elegant dresses. She went regularly to a drag
bar, The Other Side, and photographed the weekly beauty
contests. Some of the queens became Goldin’s friends and
shared an apartment with her. There she continued to photo:
graph them, dressed in their everyday women’s garb or get-
ting ready to go out to the club. David Armstrong, appearing,
in drag, would also pose for Goldin, as would Suzanne
Fletcher. Thus the group of photographs from this period
represents a coherent microcosm of social relationships and
constructed social identities.
In these works, Goldin dislocated fashion photography’s
transgressive narrative of female glamour by exposing its off
stage domesticity and intimacy and by exploring the subject
of men who live as women. In a photograph that is close to a
runway shot, Roommate onstage at The Other Side, Boston
(1972), Goldin captures a friend on stage at the bar, part of the
catwalk spectacle of the weekly beauty contest. Here her
camera is positioned behind silhouetted spectators, and the
view sweeps over the whole space. She highlights the
spectacle of the ecstatically beaming contestant, in wig, far,
J unadorned
and slinky gown, against the drooping wires a
ceilings and walls, lovingly juxtaposing the architectural reali
ty of the club with the fabricated glamour of star and audi-
ence. In comparison, Roommate in the kitchen, Boston (1972),
dispenses with the glitz of the fashion shoot. Yet it too constructs the feminine
spectacle, Here her friend's willowy curved body is set against the rectangles of door and picture frame, The roommate looks seductively into the camera, the
softness and intimacy of her gaze and the trusting relationship with the photog-
rapher underscored by the placement of her body, defined as feminine by hair
and clothes, against a wall on which hangs a framed photograph of
GOLDIN’S PHOTOGRAPHS WERE recognized as a highly
original body of work by Henry Horenstein, a photographer
with whom Goldin took a night course at the New England
School of Photography. Horenstein saw in Goldin’s photo-
graphs a parallel to the emotionally intense photographs of
Diane Arbus and Larry Clark that had, in shot after shot
broken through the facade of American bourgeois life. Horen
stein showed Goldin Clark's great documentary study of the
speed freaks he lived with, ‘Tulsa (published in 1971). She was
awed by the way Clark plunged into the darkness of his own
life to retrieve images of harsh beauty,
Horenstein’s encouragement was critical, opening Gol-
din’s eyes to photography as an art form that spoke to her and
in which she would find her place. He introduced her to the
tradition of the great realists of mid-century European photo-
graphy: August Sander and Lisette Model. Model, whom
Goldin met in 1974 when she attended a workshop at Im
works in Cambridge, admired the black-and-white work that
Goldin showed her. Model had been formed in the cynical,
satirical, and emotionally expressive ambience of Central
Europe between the wars and had brought that raw vision to
New York City
Goldin gradually became more engaged with the ex-
pressive possibilities of noncommercial photography, and she
enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
‘August Sander,
Heinrich Hoel, 1938
as did David Armstrong, Philip-Lorea Di Corcia, and Mark Morristoe.”
Goldin now began to use a Pentax camera. In her earlier work, she had had to a
shoot in available light. At school she learned how to use a wide-angle Lens and _ =" Sms cy ta
flash attachments, Most significantly, by 1973,, she was beginning to shoot _" i —
Goldin’s fusion of color and artificial light became as critical a defining
mark of her vision as her original decision to photograph her personal life
Rather than ignore the commercial glitz of Guy Bourdin’s color, as a photog-
rapher devoted to the artistic values of the medium would have done, Goldin
embraced it? She also made lyrical use of artificial light and frequently em-
ployed a flash to photograph interiors in color. The resultant intensity of these
images made Goldin’s earlier black-and-white work appear nostalgic. Typical is
Bruce bleaching his eyebrows, Pleasant St., Cambridge (1975, p. 72), 4 composition
in blues and reds. A gorgeous disorder prevails in this portrait; but the stacks of
books and the rumpled bedelothes nonetheless yield to the discordant spectrum.
of the blues and whites, reds and pinks, an artificially lit interior more vivid by
far than the drab asphalt-shingled building glimpsed through a partially un
shaded window. For Goldin, the gleam of artificial light was a stimulant.
She discovered her color in flashes of electricity. Even when photographing in
natural light, she often unconsciously replicated the effect of artificial lighting, In
many of her works, radiant natural light, such as a sunset, takes on the unnatural
ffalgence of a stage backdrop.
IN 1978, GOLDIN moved to New York and rented a loft on the Bowery
Despite the growing market for photography and her ever-growing accumu-
lation of photographs, she had no commercial success, The one person
who recognized the gritty strength of her work was Marvin Heiferman, then
working for Castelli Graphics. Heiferman had been referred to Goldin
by photographer Joel Meyerowitz, who had seen Goldin’s work while she was
in Boston,
Photography had a much more limited role in galleries and museums
in 1978 than it does today, Nevertheless, many different artists were using
photography, favoring it over other media, because it was more immediately
involved with their culture than painting or sculpture, Among these were artists,
concerned with theories about the mass media, feminism, and the politics of
images. Heiferman, who had previously worked at the Light Gallery, had been
hired at Castelli Graphics because he understood this broad range of con-
temporary photography, Opinionated without being narrow-minded, he was
important to the work of Goldin and others. While he was at Castelli, he
showed the photographs of Lewis Baltz, Ralph Gibson, Robert Adams, and John Gossage, who were primarily involved in the tradition of black-and-
white art photography, a form supported by the Light Gallery and the growing
world of photography historians, critics, and curators, led by The Museum of
Modern Art
Heiferman was challenged, however, by the work of younger photog-
raphers, some of whom were using color and all of whom were testing the
boundaries of what a photograph was understood to be. In addition to Goldin,
he showed Richard Prince, Frank Majore, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman.
As he began to exhibit these artists’ works at Castelli Graphics, other venues —
notably the alternative space Artists Space and Metro Pictures, the commercial
gallery—also organized shows featuring the new photography. In 1979.
Heiferman included Goldin’s work in a Castelli Graphics group exhibition. He
continued to show her photographs in exhibitions at Castelli and to place them
in shows at other galleries and museums. When he left Castelli Graphics, he
handled Goldin’s work as a private dealer. Though sales were insufficient to sup-
port her, Goldin did earn some mon
to put toward her film and printing,
which was supplemented by her bartending. Heiferman also became interested
in the slide shows that she had been showing to friends.
HAVING INTUITIVELY developed her point of view in the snapshot record of
friends, Goldin found in the similarly amateur pastime of the slide show the
answer to the sequencing and editing of images. And she now discovered that
her interest in photography lay in the creation of imagistic narratives, She had
originally begun to show her photographs as slides while at the Boston Museum
School. During a leave of absence in Provincetown, she did not have access to a
darkroom and therefore, to get credit, showed her pictures to faculty as slides,
which she could have developed commercially, The narrative flow of the images
her funds were low or no dark~
in these shows was appealing. Later, when
room was available, Goldin would present her pictures as slide shows, Out of this
evolved her preference for maintaining a strong narrative flow that propelled a
group of images into an affective whole. When Goldin moved to New York in
1978, she gradually began to present her slide shows at more public venues—the
clubs of downtown New York.
The New York club scene at the time was centered in bars in Goldin’s
Bowery neighborhood, CBGB and One University, places that promoted punk, ade, and the violent, anarchic music and performance that had simul-
the homen
taneously sprung up in New York and England in the 1970s. Goldin’s slide
shows—in content and in amateur presentation—had affinities to the punk
movement, With their sequenced flow that approached film, they were booked
into a film screening room. Goldin became loosely aligned, through friendship,
with young filmmakers using Super-8, who wanted to break away from struc
turalist film and make films cheaper, more accessible, more viewer-friendly, and
more closely based on their lives and experiences.
Her first performances, at Rafik’s OP Screening Room and at the Mudd
Club, were silent. In 1980, she showed the slides with sound and lyrics provided
by a live band, the Del Byzanteens, whose members included Jim Jarmusch and
James Nares." Goldin later added a taped soundtrack with other songs and lyrics
in order to make the meanings of the images clearer. Later in the early 1980s, she
showed the slides at Tin Pan Alley, where she had been working as a bartender.
The bar was run by Maggie Smith, a politically active woman whose views
impressed Goldin. Times Square was derelict and a center of drugs and prostitu-
tion, and a magnet for artists. At Tin Pan Alley, artists could earn money tending,
bar and some also showed their work there." Kiki Smith, Barbara Ess, Cara
Perlman, Jane Sherry, Cookie Mueller, the Bush Tetras (an all-woman rock
band), Charlie Ahearn, and Jane Dickson were among the artists who mixed
with the bar’s usual clientele of sex workers and local Hell’s Kitchen regulars
It was in che development of slide shows that Goldin made her first real
edits of all the ima
s she had been accumulating. With the public presenta
tion of her work at “The Times Square Show” she established the pattern of
her future practice: she would henceforth edit individual images, ordering and
reordering them into her own brand of narrative.
WHEN, IN 1981, Goldin titled the slide show The Ballad of Sextial Dependency,
the ephemeral performance became a distinct work. However, although it
has retained a consistent narrative core, it has also changed form over time. At
its most recent presentation in New York in 1995, it ran to approximately forty.
five minutes. Goldin is no longer always present to show the slides. The slides
and sounds have now been linked on a computerized disk and the work may
be shown as an installation, But the images continue to change with every
presentation. The Ballad is in many ways an
example of the punk aesthetic: its home-
made quality is undisguised and songs
sometimes stop abruptly rather than
rk
also has a very subtle historical dimen-
segueing into one another.» The w
sion. Or ain, Goldin revealed her
affinities with the harsh realist aesthetic
of Central Europe, previously acknow
jedged in her attraction to the photog,
raphy of Sander and Model. The title of
the show and the opening song of the same name reveal that Goldin has made fjmens nese
an analogy between her work, the sex and drugs of Manhattan in the seventies Misetm Bas Bai
and eighties, and The Threepenny Opera, the famous Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht
work, which was the hit of Berlin in 1928. The title is that of a Brecht/ Weill
performed in English by Lotte
song from The Threepenny Opera. That soni
Lenya in the recording used by Goldin) matches and stresses the mood of the
slides. The Threepenny Opera, based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar’
Opera, was set in the brothels and slums of London. Its jazzy-operatic songs sati~
rized the business of love, gangs, families, and prostitution. Ballads, tangos, and
laments revolve around a sexual plot. Goldin’s slide show chronicles the de-
cadence of a later age—the punk subculture of urban bohemia.
The soundtrack of blues, reggae, rock, and opera structures and syn
copates the succession of images, while the lyrics pulsate with erotic desire. The
changing lyrics, rhythms, and sounds underscore and implicate the imagery
which takes on the narrative flow of cinema. The Ballad is roughly divided into
sequences, which are here described in approximate order, with some indi-
cation of the sound/image combinations. Couples (“The Ballad of Sexual
Dependency”); women looking into mirrors, women alone (an aria from
Norma); women in bed, women dressing up, sleeping women; women dis
traught and battered (the lyrics “hit the girl /kiss the gir!” from the song “Miss
the Girl”); nude women in bathrooms (lyrics from “Don't Make Me Over”)
prostitutes (lyrics from “Working Girl”). There are long stretches of images of
men (Charles Aznavour singing “Tu thaisses aller” and lyrics from “Man
Shortage”—"I want a responsible man”); men in their prosaic, quotidian activi- woman's gaze. For instance, The Ballad contains splendid images of the pleasure
of women in their bathrooms: in Suzanne in the shower, Palenque, Mexico (1981,
pp: 150), Suzanne stands nude in an almost Baroque glory as the nimbuslike water
pours out of the shower head and drips off her skinny torso; in Kathe in she
tub, West Berlin (1984), Kithe’s body, illuminated in refulgent natural light, is
doubled and refl
tub, Provincetown (1976, p. 77), Rryan’s closed eyes radiate an almost fetal peace
ed in the tiles and mirror of the bathroom; and in Ryan in the
as she lies submerged in the gray amniotic water of her bath. The self-contained
pleasure of these women is devoid of the rhetoric often associated with feminism
ot lesbian activism. Goldin’s gaze allows the pleasure to emerge in the beauty of
the color, light, and space of the settings and in the intimate expressions of the
awomen with whom she has been close enough to record.
Goldin’s camera mirrors many forms of ses
sality. Her presence and enga-
gement are a given, though her subjects may seem unaware of the camera, such
as in the photos of her masturbating roommate or in Bobby masturbating, NYC
(1980, p. 125), where a nude hairy man holds his penis and appears in his orgas-
mic state to be oblivious to the camera. But also included in The Ballad are
distanced, constructed views of sex. These photographs are film stills from
fictional work by women filmmakers on the subject of prostitution and female
fantasy. In the published version of The Ballad are several film stills Goldin made
on the sets of films by her friends: Bette Gordon's Variety and Empty Suitcases,
Vivienne Dick's Liberty’s Booty, and Lizzie Borden's Working Girls. Thus Goldin’s
transformation of her historical record into narrative seamlessly parallels the
fictional form of her colleagues’ films.
ALTHOUGH THE BALLAD continues to be altered for each presentation, its
publication as a book in 1986 marked a closure, The emotional climax of the
narrative is the photograph Nan one month afier being battered (1984, pp. 198-99).
a self-portrait showing Goldin’s disfigured face, her eye smashed and bloodshot,
staring into the viewing lens, after being beaten up by her longtime boyfriend.
This event signaled the end of a relationship and of a period in the artist's life.
She now became increasingly involved in Europe, traveling abroad to present
‘The Ballad to enthusiastic audiences at museums and galleries. By 1986, it had
been seen at two major film festivals in Edinburgh and Berlin. As Goldin’s
audience broadened, so did her community, which more and more included ties (pensive, in bedrooms, in cars, drinking,
shaving, after sex, masturbating). Songs of
longing accompany images of men alone
My World Is Empty”). Pic-
(“Lonely Boy}
tures of women in bars (“After hours”)
then people shooting drugs, dressing up,
going out (“Downtown”), and in clubs. An
acceleration of violence. Couples (“I have a
hard time kissing you babe with a pistol in
your mouth,” sung by Louisiana Red). Male
couples; nude couples having intercourse
Amana in the
ros Btn, 1992 sung by Boris Vian). Finally, still lifes of framed
(Fais-moi mal Johnny
pictures, empty rooms, unmade beds, hotel rooms, graves, an old couple, the
graffiti of two skeletons embracing (Dean Martin singing “Memories Are
Made of This”)
If The Ballad is broken down into its constituent images, a repertory of
themes emerges. Among the most striking photographs are Goldin’s images of
women. A recurrent motif is the woman in the mirror: Self-portrait in blue
bathroom, London (1980, pp. 2—3), Suzanne with Mona Lisa, Mexico City (1981
pp. 152-53), Suzanne in the green bathroom, Pergamon Museum, East Berlin (1984)
and Amanda in the mirror, Berlin (1992). The pairing of a woman with her mirror
Fe athe has long been a conventional subject in art. One recent interpretation of the
Wiat Ben, 1984
theme suggests that by doubling the view of the woman, the mirror increases the
“visual fiction of possession,” that is, the possession of the subject of the painting
by its usually male creator and spectator."
In Goldin’s photographs, the sense of
male possession traditionally suggested by
the mirror image is reversed. Here, the
doubling acts as confirmation, as deepening,
as sometimes playful dialogue between the
woman and herself. It is as if self-know-
ledge or selflove is one plateau of the
broad erotic landscape of The Ballad, and
the mirror reflection is but one aspect of
the self-contained eroticism caught by the "“~__S—sr—=le™iC‘C( i‘i‘(
