Nan Goldin, Delusion and The Twist.
Rats are an essential part of the history of the world. They are more influential than people. The dynamic between vermin and civilians, creators and destroyers, is the relationship most at the centre of life. Everything else spins around it, because of it. There are Norway rats, Rattus Norwegicus, which have lived and bred underneath New York City probably as long as humans have done so overground. Heaven and Hell are just metaphors.
- Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman.
Sometime in late September, on the last warm day of the year I took a friend to the Tate Modern to see The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, photographer Nan Goldin’s autobiographical slideshow documenting her personal involvement in New York City’s No Wave music and art scene, the deadly heroin subculture of the Bowery and the post-Stonewall gay community from the late 1970s and early ‘80s. My friend is a political reporter. He’s been a journalist since we were sixteen and was the first person I knew to get paid a salary that is possible to live relatively comfortably on, a feat that I am still yet to achieve. I don’t think he particularly enjoys visiting galleries but I suspect that in his field of white, middle-class and mostly privately educated young journalists, an interest in art signifies a broader cultural vocabulary. I reassure him that art institutions do not define culture and that my eager internalisation of this particular artwork makes me feel as much of a philistine as he does for being bored. He tells me I can use his membership card whenever I come to stay.
I first encountered The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a beat-up book in my university library that you weren’t allowed to take out. I became obsessed with Goldin’s gritty and intimate portraits of the chaotic and beautiful characters that dwelled in the hedonistic shadows of New York City’s nightlife. Growing up on the rising tide of the internet I found myself drawn to representations of pre-internet subculture that possess an authentic tangibility that is impossible to mimic online. The world in which Ballad exists seemed so much more exciting than my own watered-down version of rebellion, sneaking small bottles of gin down my tights into bars to decant in the bathroom. Like the hordes of art-schoolers armed with 35mm cameras taking grainy photos of their architecturally debauched nights out, I fetishised and attempted to regurgitate Ballad from its shallowest and least challenging point.
Sitting on a hard bench beneath the slideshow at the Tate I am stunned at how two-dimensional my previous interpretations of Ballad have been. From the other side of adolescence I see all the same hallmarks of the domesticity whose grip I’ve spent the past decade trying to slip out from. In Ballad, Goldin gives us weddings and children alongside beatings and bruises. There are birthday parties with cake and dancing. There is mastrbation and sex. In ‘Couple in bed, Chicago 1977’ a man and a woman face away from each other, one sitting contemplatively upright beside the other laying on her side with a blank stare, as if deflated in the aftermath of some spat. On the opposite page sits ‘Empty beds, Boston 1979’ where unmade twin beds are pushed together with their pillows upright and blankets askew in a portrait that foregrounds the furnishings of familial intimacy. The bed features heavily throughout Ballad, as basic a necessity as human contact and a soft stage around which all of life plays out. In the afterward of a recent reprint of Ballad, Goldin writes: ‘We were never marginalized. We were the world. We were our own world, and we could have cared less about what “straight” people thought of us.’ Goldin’s defiance at being labeled marginalised in criticisms of her work is a refusal to exist in opposition to a clearly defined set of values delineated by the so-called ‘straight’ world. How can you be an outsider when your own circle is so tightly woven it becomes a whole world of its own?
Leafing through my own copy of Ballad at home, I come across two photographs that slipped through the net of my adolescent gaze. ‘Twisting at my birthday party, New York City 1980’ and ‘Monopoly game, New York City 1980’ sit across a double page spread. The first foregrounds a couple doing the twist, a dance move that caused controversy when it spread like wildfire throughout the dancehalls of the early 1960s, but comes across old-fashioned and goofy in 1980s downtown New York. In the second a group of friends are gathered intently around a monopoly game, the table littered with cigarettes, coffee cups and stacks of pastel paper money. Taking in these pictures I recognise the ignorance of my juvenile belief that subverting the oppression of mainstream milestones could only be achieved within the confines of performative intoxication, short skirts and pissing in the street.
‘Twisting at my birthday party, New York City 1980’ by Nan Goldin.
At its core The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is about nurturing intimacy and community, not in opposition to a mainstream culture that suffocates its ‘outsiders’ with violent neglect but defiantly alongside it. In his essay ‘Postcards from America – X-rays from Hell’, artist, activist and contemporary of Goldin, David Wojnarowicz writes: ‘each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a dismantling tool against the illusion of ONE-TRIBE NATION.’ The banal, dorky and domestic scenes woven throughout Ballad allow Goldin to resist her community’s marginalisation, by making their shared vulnerability, intimacy and domesticity public. The light that Goldin casts on her subjects centres them in a world that is entirely their own.