Beauty and blood

1978 piece The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is what made Nan Golding famous worldwide. It is a piece of performance art, a slideshow of 687 frames accompanied by some thirty songs and a sort of photographic diary of the artist’s life in Boston, New York, and Berlin. Self-portraits, pictures of her lovers, friends, queer people going about their lives alternate to form a colossal opus of the human condition within a tribe. Ever since the beginning of her career, Nan Goldin had wanted to use photography as “an extension of my hand”, a tool to record the lives of a community she feels she belongs in, a community where excess, violence, emotional rollercoaster, illusion, and disillusionment are the norm. Goldin records every detail, like a seismograph. The way she does it – she lets images, in their uncompromising purity, speak, and never cared much for technicalities. When giving interviews, her whisper-like voice says wonderful sentences that sound like the existential summa of a life lived to the limit and of the wisdom that knows how to start all over again each time. It sounds like Nan Goldin speaks about ‘life aesthetics’ at a point where courage, passion, and artistic sensibility meet. It is no chance that this woman had the lucidity and the strength to campaign for public awareness of opioid abuse – which she suffered from herself – and to fight against the manufacturing of a specific opioid drug, OxyContin by Purdue Pharma.