Nan Goldin, The Labor of Love, and Documenting Trauma

Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a distressing scenery of Goldin's understanding of different kinds of violence in pursuit of love both familiar and impersonal in New York's Bowery neighborhood. As well as documentation of her then-partner Brian who she maintained an uneasy relationship often leaving her physically and mentally defeated but providing an interestingly volatile subject matter. The self-portrait "Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984" serves as a kind of central point of reference for the series as a whole. With a black eye and various degrees of bruising, Goldin is extremely vulnerable in confronting the viewer, in contrast to the way she portrays Brian in the series as a strangely warm yet distant presence. Goldin demonstrates the desperation present in photographing others or yourself as acts of love. She coined the work as a "visual diary" suggesting she is both a silent observer and a member of the scene, straddling a line between separating herself from her subjects, if at all. Yet, in much of the series, her "cast" of subjects, both men and women, are photographed alone, and not always reflecting a nature of being desirable; within that is a kind of honesty that is a form of love. Grief and love are one and the same in Goldin's world as inseparable from each other, you can't have one without the other following close behind.

In reference to her relationship with Brian, Goldin writes that she is, "stimulated by the conflict inherent in relationships between men and women" and that "Things between us started to break down, but neither of us could make the break. The desire was constantly reinspired at the same time that the dissatisfaction became undeniable." Seeking love out of desperation is often treated with a negative connotation but it's times of desperation when we most need care for fear of further spiraling into an unreachable place where you come to believe that even on your knees you're invisible. A general falsity in the world is that we assume that knowing how to love or how to realize love is instinctive. In Bell Hook's book All About Love: New Visions she discusses how the ability to give and receive love are not inherent traits that you are born into the world with but something that can only be learned with experience and at times something we may spend our whole lives learning. She states that schools for love do not exist and that this is an obligation that rests with the family and if the family fails us we're expected to learn through romantic relationships. "However this love often alludes us and we spend a lifetime undoing the damage of not knowing what to do". Desire is a kind of trick when you spend your whole life in a state of want it sneaks up on you and dares you to devour everything within reach and make a mess of yourself but no one wants to look like someone who wants too much. So you bury yourself because to want is to suggest that there's something wrong. So you live in fear of being known because what's left after that?

Goldin asks through her photos if acting upon desire is beyond control and if how we view people through a lens of desire creates a false memory. There's a sense of immortality in that. The last few images in the series hint at a realization that this circular thinking around love doesn't fade with age. We see two empty twin beds pushed together with sheets unmade, a display for Valentine's Day that mimics a kind of offering table or memorial, two graves reaching out towards the sky, an old man and woman with smiles unpracticed, and graffiti of skeletons coupling. Desire is not love but sometimes it feels better, it's more comfortable to desire than to love because we don't have to practice so hard. But in giving into desire fully you admit that you have nothing left, that you're incapable. I find it fitting that many of the people she photographs are involved in sex work in one way or another, Goldin herself did sex work in the making of "Ballad" as a means of supporting herself. There's so much shame associated with the kind of labor that's involved with that and in a way she's rejecting that shame to say, I'm defined by desire but in that, I find a community and through the bonds formed by this shared expression, we learn to love each other despite society's urge to shame any kind of expression around love and sex that is loud and mean but not abusive. That the labor Goldin and her peers underwent does not make them any less deserving of love. I think personally speaking I'm reaching a point in my life where any more nonchalance surrounding intimacy will fucking kill me. Especially in the age of social media where we deal so heavily with issues surrounding persona and how you present yourself authentically whilst at the same time not being too vulnerable, never sharing too much of yourself in a single moment because otherwise you'll be disregarded. You must maintain this song and dance of visual interest and it's so exhausting.

In a passage at the beginning of "Ballad," Goldin makes a dedication to her sister, that all the nastiness involved in the work is a way of apologizing for the life that was stolen from her. Goldin's sister Barbara Holly committed suicide at eighteen when Goldin was eleven at least in part due to the inability of the world, of their parents to accept her sexuality as something which you shouldn't have to bury in yourself. That you should yell to everyone you meet because there is a greater power than anything else that lies in your ability to share intimacy with others without fear, to care for someone, and to be cared for without fearing repression.

https://archive.org/details/all-about-love_202309 -All About Love: New Visions by Bell Hooks

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency | MoMA