Nan Goldin
C/O BERLIN
Postfuhramt, Oranienburger Straße 35/36
October 10–December 6
Nan Goldin, Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, NYC, 1983, color photograph, 30 x 40".
As a photographer, Nan Goldin has inspired a legion of imitators who tend to confuse certain lifestyle traits with artistic substance, a privileging of content over form with an excuse for taking sloppy photographs. I tend to think of them as the Vice generation, after the magazine that first published many a Goldin copyist under a hipster anti-ethos saturated with attention begging and unwarranted self-destruction. Where one finds a similar mode of annihilative glamour in a Goldin original, it appears more authentic, perhaps accidental. Her subjects, whether laughing or crying, often seem as though their minds are somewhere else, and their eyes are lost in pensive reverie (unlike the random soulless fashion victims hamming it up in, say, a Ryan McGinley). Revisiting The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1981, in this exhibition, one is struck by this generational lapse in the twenty or thirty years since most of the photographs comprising the famous slide show were taken. Whatever happened to empathy?
For it is her empathetic identification with her subjects that has always been at the core of Goldin’s work, from the Ballad to the more recent Heartbeat, 2003, a series of couples captured in moments of intimacy. It is this most “uncool” facet of her output that endows it with its lasting appeal, as the four slide shows that constitute this exhibition––each set to a sound track compiled by the artist––attest.