Heading image: Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, NYC, 1983, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 1994 © Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency 
John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University
Until September 14 (free entry)

When Nan Goldin first presented The Ballad of Sexual Dependency it was not in any of the conventional spaces for a collection of photographs that would come to be celebrated as amongst the most significant of the late 20th century such as a gallery or museum.

The roughly 700 “snapshots” of her chosen family or “her tribe”, as she called them — the friends and lovers who inhabited the sexually freewheeling Weimar-ish world of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s — were initially shown in a 45-minute slide show in the bars and clubs where she herself worked to support her art.

Goldin, who had arrived in New York from Boston in 1978, had no access to a darkroom, which meant she showed the photographs in slide form, carefully arranged and accompanied by music — a mix of dreamy 1950s love songs, opera, cool Velvet Underground numbers, Europop and, of course, the Brecht and Weill classic from The Threepenny Opera from which show’s title is taken.

Unfortunately, this slideshow, which eventually found its way out of bars and clubs to be shown in galleries around the world, is not the one that has just opened at the John Curtin Gallery. It is a selection of 126 Cibachrome prints — a kind of a best-of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 2021 (last available set that was in Goldin’s personal collection).

However, seeing these eye-popping deeply saturated images laid out side by side instead of between the covers of a book or tucked inside of a website get a sense of what it must have been like to have experienced The Ballad of Sexual Dependency the story in a bar or club, with her family sitting side by side as they were in reality. 

You also fully grasp what Goldin means when she say that her work has more in common with cinema than photography, with the images in the show like frames in a movie that have been edited around particular themes — female nudes, women in front of mirrors, couples in bed, club scenes, the men in her life and, most shockingly, her beating at the hands of her lover.

National Gallery of Australia photography curator Anne O’Hehir has not chosen to include any of Goldin’s carefully chosen music, but it would not be difficult to put together a Spotify soundtrack from the list in the 1986 text serving as the current show’s catalogue and listen to it while you walk through the exhibition (this is what I’ll be doing when I go back for another look).

“I think of my slideshows as movie stills,” Goldin told Hillary Weston in an interview on the website of the upscale American home-video distribution company Criterion.

Even though cinema was the most important art form in her life during her formative years she chose to pursue photography rather than filmmaking because “it was easier.” Indeed, she says it took her a long time to treat photography as seriously as she does painting and cinema.

“I was interested in the whole history of cinema,” she continues.  “We would go to the Harvard Film Archive and see all of the films with Marlene and Marilyn, all of Douglas Sirk’s films, all of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis — all of the Hollywood goddesses we were obsessed with.

“I saw a lot of European cinema: Antonioni, Robbe-Grillet, and Jacques Rivette. I’ve also been very influenced by Andy Warhol’s films since I was a teenager.

“I’ve absorbed cinema so fully that my work has unavoidably been influenced by it. Antonioni, Visconti, the colors of Sirk — they still have an effect on me. Cassavetes is actually the common denominator in many periods of my life.” 

Of course, viewing The Ballad of Sexual Dependency through the lens of cinema is not the only way into the work of Goldin, who shattered the objectivity that was seen as the measure of a great photographer.

When Goldin began in the 1970s celebrated photographers tended to either dispassionately record the life of the streets (a tradition of photo-journalism that stretched from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Robert Frank) or were more in painterly tradition of studio-based portraitists such as Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and soon-to-flourish Annie Leibovitz.

Goldin, in striking contrast, used her camera like a diarist, capturing her family or “her tribe” — the post-punk, queer subculture that would soon be decimated by HIV/AIDS. 

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read,” wrote Goldin in the 1986 book. “People in my pictures say my camera is as much a part of being with me as any other other aspect of knowing me. It’s as if my hand were a camera. The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.”

O’Hehir says that when Goldin started working there was a clear division between the photographer and their subject. 

“To be considered a serious artist you needed to have objectivity. You had to maintain distance from your subject. Goldin broke through that barrier,” says O’Hehir, who travelled to Perth for the opening of the John Curtin show.

“Goldin also made no attempt to glamorise her subjects,” continues O’Hehir. “Look at the shot of Suzanne crying. She does not make her pose attractively or bathe her in beautiful light. Goldin shoots her with a basic 35mm camera and a flash, giving it a harshness. She was going beyond artifice to record the reality of the moment.”

However, seeing the exhibition as not simply a collection of images but a cinematic narrative  brings into sharp focus what she is really doing with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which critics have tended to see as a bit of a Diane Arbus-like freak show.

The key to that narrative, according to O’Hehir, are the images of violence she suffered at the hand of her lover Brian, who went for her eyes and burned her diaries.

“These images, which would have been shocking when first shown and still are today, brought into the focus theme of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — that despite men and women being from different planets they’re drawn together, even if those relationships are destructive,” explains O’Hehir.

“Unfortunately, people box in [The Ballad of Sexual Dependency] as about sex and drugs. It’s about a lot more than that. It’s about the difficulty in relationships,” said Goldin in a 2021 interview on the website of the Hasselblad Foundation, who awarded her their international photography prize in 2007.

“I often fear that men and women are irrevocably strangers to each other, irreconcilably unsuited, almost as if they are from different planets. But there is an intense need for coupling in spite of it all. Even if relationships are destructive, people cling together,” writes Goldin in the 1986 text.

“It’s a biochemical reaction, it stimulates that part of the brain that is only satisfied by love, heroin or chocolate; love can be an addiction. I have a strong desire to be independent, but at the same time a craving for the intensity that comes from interdependency. The tension this creates seems to be a universal problem: the struggle between autonomy and independence.”

Which is a story best told by a series of interconnected images or, to put it another way, a movie — a narrative that is told over and again by her favourite film directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and Wong Kar-wai.

See this stunning show for pictures. See it again with a Spotify playlist — there is one already there — for the movie.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is on until 14 September,
John Curtain Gallery, Curtain University.

For more information, visit:
https://www.curtin.edu.au/jcg/exhibitions/nan-goldin-the-ballad-of-sexual-dependency/