Coming to the end of this century, some of these refrains may not seem unfamiliar. There’s the furtive glance back to the beginning, performed like a cat first contemplating its quixotic tail then chasing it. Though since we’re at the end of it, and that’s supposed to mean something in itself, the way death means something, we’re supposed to be at the end of it, the end of the Twentieth Century. Which reminds me again of that movie of the same name, as good a metaphor as any. By now some of the cars have become derailed or separated from each other. In the time after modernism, otherwise known as postmodernism, certain beliefs, especially faith in the new, in progress, in self-referentiality, have come under scrutiny and are in the train station, with a bad wheel or engine. But can anything be left behind and what’s in front and what’s in back? Does coming to the end of a century have anything to do with an end anyway? Will a postmodern menu offer us something different, other metaphors, like one from column A, column B and column C? Will recipes with generous amounts of asymmetries and hardy dashes of anti-closure not be recipes? My view is necessarily one-sided, seeing the past through the present, my version of the present, seeing The Futurist Cookbook darkly, when I might have concentrated on nature versus culture, formal art issues, Futurism’s influence on art practices generally, the sheer fun of it. My reading is no doubt compelled by forces from within and without. A recipe may be inscribed in me that I’m unaware of and whose powerful tastes simply, unconsciously, overcome me. Though really, I think to myself, I ought to be at the end of at least this trope.
G is for Goldin
The Devil’s Playground
Nan Goldin is a photographer whose work is a record of her life. If this were the 19th century, she might be called a diarist. Her formal compositions have depicted her friends in candid moments — in bars and clubs, funky bedrooms and bathrooms, hanging out, having sex, doing drugs, looking warily at each other, themselves or the camera. Often these characters were estranged from society, but not necessarily from each other, and especially not from the photographer. Anything and anyone Goldin shot were intimate to her. In exhibitions and in books, she has included some self-portraits, a few of which presented devastating views of her own self-destructiveness. But, she suggests, no portrait of her could be complete without the people she loves and what’s around her. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” the work in which she first documented her friends and herself, her scene, forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last 20 years.
Her sprawling new book, The Devil’s Playground (Phaidon), jars loose memories of her early photographs. As before, she presents what she has and likes in front of her — breakfast on a tray, friends having sex, and young, nude men and women. But now her stage is broader, set in a more expansive world, maybe it’s global, and the characters and scenes have changed.
The book opens with large-scale vistas of the natural world and friends dwarfed in it: men in blurred landscapes; fiery red and somber blue apocalyptic skies; single characters floating in placid seas; and the base, or face, of a gnarled, grotesquely green redwood tree. Goldin tells her most recent life story in pictures of places she’s been — now, instead of the old bars and clubs, they are romantic countrysides or beaches, elegant hotel suites, balconies and terraces.
Goldin also turns her eye to biological families, a grouping that was absent or infrequent in her previous work, and even includes a series with her own parents and a photograph of her brother. Handsome parents frolic with their lovely children. The pristine portraits of her friends’ children nestle against shots of the parents serenely touching and kissing. Goldin hopes to expose unguarded instances of sexual and familial love, maternal and paternal affection.
In one series, a couple and their son roll around on the bed, the parents alternating between attention to the child and each other. In another, Goldin shoots a woman on one bed, a man on another; he’s tenderly touching their child’s head. A sequence of the couple making love follows, with their child out of the picture. Goldin’s mothers are sexual beings, never just maternal. A nursing mother’s breast will also be an object in her husband’s mouth.
All children wonder about their parents’ devotion to each other and to themselves, and compete for their love. Freud said that it was the primal scene children longed to see, that sexual curiosity was the source for the desire to know. Everyone’s Garden of Eden. Any photographer is outside the scene, watching. But wanting to get inside the familial embrace, or, like a child, into its parents’ bed, Goldin is necessarily pitched outside the family’s frame, and as a result the collection carries a startling melancholy.
The many formal, austere portraits of Goldin’s friends add to that feeling. Often they are standing or sitting, darkness surrounding them. Like the photographer, they are solitary, and, looking at her solemnly, they could reflect her singular position. Set in the dark or against a blurry background, Goldin’s subjects feel as if they are cut from time, disconnected, not anywhere or in any place. Oddly, place seems unimportant here. Even the book’s numerous landscapes seem to represent just an outside to an inside, an impersonal, exterior world to an elusive interior one. Or maybe the pictures document a huge, gorgeous, alienating world.
A section titled “Empty Rooms,” which lies at the center of the book, insists on what’s lost or gone. Goldin is traveling, staying in hotel rooms, visiting friends, returning home and leaving. There’s a portrait of a plumped pillow on a bed, rumpled sheets and two pillows that stand in for bodies that once lay there, a mirror that reflects light only on an ordinary bureau, golden paintings above a bed’s backboard, and all are stage sets for memory. Juxtaposed with those images are a photograph of Christian Schad’s painting of a masturbating woman, taken in Zurich, and a fire in Napoleon’s Elba fireplace. In a way, the two photographs disrupt the narrative flow, but then remind the viewer of other ways to be on your own, by having sex alone or by being an outcast or prisoner.
Hotel rooms usually mark transitoriness and freedom from daily life, but they’re haunted by the many bodies that have passed through. The photographs are also haunted by her absent friends, some of whom have died and some of whom are far away. Temporary stations themselves, the empty rooms emphasize the inadequate hold anyone has on life, how it all just goes, finally. So the collection ends with religion and death, which makes sense, since Goldin’s work is about how a life spans and spins, sometimes out of control. Fire, skulls and crossbones, skeletons in monks’ robes, votive candles blazing. The last image is a tombstone for a 14-year-old: “You Never Did Anything Wrong.”