Nan Goldin's portraits
Discontents and, some might say, compassion
A friend recommended this exhibition. I had been dreading its promotional posters everywhere. As anything dreadful, it captivated me as much as it repelled me. The poster’s main image is this curly haired girl looking straight at you with shadows casted over her. Straight diagonal shadows, as if the sunlight was entering from outside the room where you are both looking at each other. It’s claustrophobic in and of itself. The girl is serious, “can’t say” she seems to utter. I got so much life and can’t say anything about it.
The title couldn’t also be clearer: “This will not end well”. So, I kept postponing looking into it. The fact that it was at Stedelijk also attracted me, I usually like what they do. But what was “this”? And what is it “to end”, and what is “well”? What would mean for things to end good? Is anything that ends, good? I’m not even into thinking about things as such closed chapters.
But eventually someone I trust said that he had been to the museum and that it surprised him and that he liked it a lot. He added “there’s a depiction of a relationship with a relative that is very moving”.
So it just turned out to be that a couple of friends were going to Amsterdam that weekend to visit the Rijksmuseum, and for that you need tickets much in advance, and the Goldin exhibition was two weeks prior to closing down and right next door. So I checked online and they still had tickets and that same day I decided to go.
The museum was quite busy. I was wearing red lipstick and a nice grey cardigan and on a video call with my parents when I was on the train on my way there they said “so French of you”. So I was ready to let it talk to me.
But the first shock came just upon arrival. The exhibition was located on the underground floor. Welcome dungeons. The first physical move was, then, to go down. It was darker there too, under the busy park square and far from the natural sunlight coming through the big windows of the museum. Most of the exhibitions that I recall having attended were located on the first and second floors.
I entered the space reserved for the exhibition. If you have Richard Serra in mind, it looked a bit like that. Big black curved velveted walls divided the space. I looked at a map standing next to the entrance. Six rooms only. I read the exhibition description. It had some information about what the topic was about, the whole carnivalistic drag queen/drugs/alternative/underground scene that Goldin lived in the 80s in New York and the portraits of that lifestyle. But it also said that this exhibition had been prepared hand in hand between the artist and an architect for this show. I am checking now online, because I didn’t note down the name, Hala Werdé. Wikipedia says she's from Lebanon and I can’t help but remark that a woman. I already like that there was some specific thought on my experience in the museum, becasue one of the other elements that refrained me from visiting the exhibition was that it was photography.
I don't feel like I know how to look at pictures. Sure, I read The camera lucid by Barthes when it was the time to, and I was very into László Moholy-Nagy when they told me about him. His quote on the illiteracy of images truly stuck with me, maybe because I was always so afraid of being so vulnerable to them and precisely ignorant. However, I was never very comfortable with Susan Sontag, and the whole fake “witnessing” of cameras sort of made me feel awkward. It’s the same with holocaust literature.
So I was happy to see that that awkwardness would not be reproduced in the exhibition visit. It was planned like, one could say, a thematic park. Six different halls, six different experiences. When choosing one of the entrances to each room, a small note with a poetic message next to it mentioned the title, the idea behind it, and the years or place where it had been taken. It also asked visitors not to take pictures, which I thought was a fun remark in itself too. Next to the text, a door opened to little corridor that led you to a smaller room where you could, surrounded by strangers, sit down or stand in silence by looking at the pictures that were being projected with a three to five second interval. The projection setting reminded me more of a video projection at a wedding or a birthday party, where, so as not to bore the audience, pictures of the ones who are being celebrated pass at an agile rhythm. We all get the vibe. And should we all pretend like we can truly analyse the beauty and mastery, the chiaroscuro of each picture, without looking pretentious? On top of that, there were thousands of pictures, the material was so enormous. One of the projected videos lasted 40 minutes. You could leave the projection room at anytime, and certainly, there was a quite constant flow of little groups of people coming in and out, joining the secret wedding show and then leaving it.
That idea was being repeated in the six rooms. However, in and of themselves, they were also staged differently. The first one, with a lot of happier images of drag queens and party vibes, it was a square room, with merely three benches in front of it. The second one, instead, was a circular room, and the single one bench obliged many people to sit on the floor. That one was dedicated to children, and it showed the games and playfulness of their age. Somehow, the circularity made it so tribal, so like a group gathering, more playful.
To the room with the larger video you were forced to enter next to the screen, and that was the only entrance, so every time someone came in it was very obvious. Being the longer video, there were about eight rows with benches located as if in a small theatre.
The whole thing was playful, it allowed you to come in and out, there was a secrecy shared with the rest of audience, that was constantly shifting. As we all know, sometimes when you are visiting a museum you are stuck with the people who entered right before you, stopping in front of the same paintings or installations as you wander down at a similar path. You are often forced to hear the intellectual couple whisper at each other insightful aspects they point at each other, the father explaining things to his son and the other way around, or see the same adolescent half distracted with the phone stare with a certain boredom at a work or another. But in this exhibition, the group gathered in the dark and left in the dark too. It was hard to even recognise someone you may have watched the same video with five minutes earlier. In a way, I think now, it was very nightlife too, as if when clubbing together, you see some faces for a while who disappear in the darkness.
I must add that music was also accompanying each piece, and that the pictures had been grouped purposefully sometimes years earlier, as cinematic experiences, more than static independent images, for what the little texts were explaining.
Around two hours later and quite exhausted by the intensity of the gazes and the energy in the pictures, I was ready to leave. However, when I was about to, I had the feeling that I was missing still one room. I looked at the map again, and certainly, there was a sixth room I hadn’t been to. I had to orientate myself and then went to find, behind two of the larger rooms, another big structure.
This time I had to climb some metallic stairs that led to a first amphitheater balcony. Below, at floor level, empty of people, there were three screens. I knew this would be the harder one. I had read that it was about the artist’s sister, who was interned in a medical centre and who had the kind of death you don’t wish to anyone. In this projection, Goldin’s voice was narrating the facts of what happened. We could see images of her sister, the house, the centre. I didn’t see much more, to be honest. I thought it so sensetive to have the audience looking at it from afar. To be clear, it was as if looking down from a balcony, no seats, at something projected down below. The distance helped. Moreover, my friend explained me that he had read it was also a reference to a saint that had the same name of her sister and whose story was about being locked down in a tower, so, in a way, the audience, was locked out and distanced too.
But I didn’t stay long. That was, probably, one of the things that didn’t end well. When my friend would ask me, on Monday, if I had liked the exhibition, I would not be able to say that I did. I found the common place yet accuarate word “visceral” to describe it. We had an interesting talk about it. The show, in the end, portrayed the very hidden drag and queer world. I don’t feel entitled to discuss their identity, if it was respectful or true to it or not, because I don’t know about it. In fact, the world of masks, make up, colorful and exaggerated personas created in that scene mostly overwhelms me. The show often paid tribute to the many deaths they carried in that communiry. Not only because of being black or asian, or a woman, but also because of having an identity that provoked others up to the point of wanting to suppress them, attack them. It was sad. The level of anger transmitted by the images also talked about a strong powerful rebelliousness against the mainstream, against the all gender-adequate capitalist establishment in which not everyone thrives, against which some declare themselves different. The offuscating narratives, of conformism to the rules, made visible by sparks of light, by glitter, by hair, by drugs, by new forms of perception. But then, the tiredness that comes with it, the absence of money, the absence of good healthcare, the hatred by others who are compassionless.
Yet I went. Because that was also stepping out of my comfort zone, and it was listening. Listening to the stories of others. Embracing their thoughts, what they have gone through. It can’t be denied that a part of society, asfixiated by jobs, family patterns, specially in those years and in some cosmopolis, phenomenalised, in their lives, a certain rebuke to repetitive and pre-planned confirmative lives. And they used everything, their bodies, their dressing, everything that could be a signifier of that sign, in a basic linguistics Bakhtinian sense.
So I was happy to practice embracing what confronts me. It is not always easy to hear the discontents, thinking with Sigmund Freud’s old book, when one could so easily project always forward. But I guess it’s also healthy to be able to bear that which could distort us. And still be ourselves.
I want to thank FKJ’s Just Piano Version Youtube video that accompanied me during the writing of this text.
Mentions
Nan Goldin. This will not end well. 7th October 2023 - 28th Jan 2024. Stedelijk Museum, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam
Rijksmuseum, Museumstraat 1, Amsterdam
Richard Serra
Hala Werdé
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
László Moholy-Nagy
Susan Sontag
Mikhail Bakhtin
Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its discontents
FKJ, Just piano