Nan Goldin talks to Tom Holert - '80s Then - Interview

ArtForum, March, 2003

TOM HOLERT: What is your predominant memory of the '80s?

NAN GOLDIN: I missed the '80s, fortunately--I wasn't very aware of things outside my world. I knew about those photographers who were doing media-related stuff, from Cindy Sherman, whose work I love, to Sherrie Levine and Laurie Simmons and all those other ones, but I was never part of any movement, and I never read theory. I think that was to my benefit.

TH: Did anyone try to put your work into a theoretical perspective?

NC: No, but Lisa Liebmann wrote about me in Artforum in '85. She picked The Ballad of Sexual Dependency slide show out of the Whitney Biennial, where it was part of the film program because it wasn't an installation, and only shown a few times, but she wrote a rave of it. J. Hoberman had also written a rave review for the Village Voice, and Andy Grundberg wrote on me in the New York Times, and then Max Kozloff wrote a piece in Art in America in 1987.

TH: Did anything change after you'd gotten recognition from "outside"?

NG: No, at least not from that degree of recognition. My financial realities didn't change until the '90s. I didn't make any money; I was represented by Marvin Heiferman, who was incredibly supportive, but we didn't sell much. I was marginalized in the art world. I was more known in the photo world--or I thought I was well known, but I wasn't. Then, in 1988, Heiferman decided not to work with artists anymore. He called various galleries, and Pace MacGill took me. The 1993 Whitney Biennial was a big breakthrough for me in terms of the larger art world.

TH: Right at the beginning of the '80s you participated in "The Times Square Show."

NG: I'd been friends with Kiki [Smith] since the mid-70s, and I'd been an outside visitor to [the artists group] Colab [which organized "The Times Square Show"], so I was invited to do my slide show there. It was a one-off thing, a performance, and the woman whose bar in Times Square I worked at came and saw it. That woman, Maggie Smith, recognized its political subtexts--she saw that it was intensely political about gender roles and options, the power of relationships, and women in general. It's about the difficulty in coupling, the struggle between autonomy and dependency, sexual addiction. That's when I started formulating it as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

TH: So "The Times Square Show" slide show prefigured The Ballad?

NG: Yes. Then afterward The Ballad started to evolve as a more constructed piece. It opens with a segment about supposedly happy couples, then goes to different roles for women and for children, and on to chapters on men. There's a long section on violent men, and then there's men lonely and vulnerable. From there it goes to bars, drinking, and drugs, and from parties and fashion back to couples--couples alienated, gay couples, and then sex. It ends with empty beds and twin graves, which I've been photographing since the '70s--long before Sophie Calle. The final image is of two skeletons coupling.

TH: The sequencing of these motifs and the music accompanying them made it political?

NG: It became much more overtly political as it grew--and though I never changed the sound track after '87, the slides changed up to '94. Most of the work comes from the early '80s, and the basic construct didn't change after '87, but I changed slides, lengthened sections, and took out one section.

TH: How was the music conceived?

NG: The sound track is like the slide show's narrative voice. Some of the music is obscure; my friends gave me music, and I collected music from around the world. Wherever I went to do the slide show, people would turn me on to another piece of music. There's a lot of Charles Aznavour. There's stuff from The Threepenny Opera--not just the "Ballad of Dependency"--because I grew up on that. I used "I Put a Spell on You"--then Jim [Jarmusch] put Screamin' Jay Hawkins in Stranger Than Paradise [1984], and the song had much less impact on audiences after that came out. Luc Sante and I were close friends in the early '80s, and he turned me on to a lot of music.

TH: Your first slide show in New York was at the Mudd Club, right?

NG: Yes, in 1979, at Frank Zappa's birthday party. I was holding a projector in my hand and loading the slides one by one. It was totally untechnical.

TH: Mow did the audience respond?

NG: I don't think many people noticed it--it was a big party. Some of my friends came to support me and couldn't get in the door. They were very pissed off-those were the days of the red velvet rope, of who got in and who didn't get in.

TH: Where did you next show slides?

NG: I did a slide show at a place called the Rock Lounge. The Del-Byzanteens played, a band with Jim Jarmusch and Phil Kline--Luc wrote a lot of their lyrics. They were downstairs, and the slide show was upstairs. And there was a place called OP Screening Room on Broadway, run by a guy called Rafik. Jack Smith did slide-show performances there, and I showed my slides there all the time in the early '80s. The audience would be comprised entirely of the people in the slide show, my lovers and friends. I used to do them every few months. Sometimes I had to run home and get another bulb for the projector.