by Jess van Heerden.

In a recent review for Artist’s Chronicle, I detailed the communicative pairing of Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and James Tylor: Turrangka... in the shadows at the John Curtin Gallery. In these two exhibitions I encountered powerful considerations of redaction and disclosure within photography. Here, I would like to hone in on a particular facet of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency to interrogate a commonplace cry-wolf of conservative and leftist art critics alike. Although typically flagged in very different contexts, there is often much ado about voyeurism. The National Gallery has incited the full political spectrum of accusations of voyeuristic exhibitions, particularly in relation to three blockbusters held in consecutive years; Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie (currently on display), Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao (2024), and Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (2023). Given that the latter is currently on show in Boorloo, it feels fitting to sift through these shades of discomfort.
        The most common criticism of The Ballad is that it is a voyeuristic project—a response that was particularly prominent during the first two decades of its exhibition.[1] This was so much the case that Goldin has responded directly to such accusations on multiple occasions, arguing “I am not a voyeur. Voyeurs photograph through closed windows and with me the window is always wide open,”[2] and “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.”[3] The NGA’s recent rendition of The Ballad has not entirely spared the artist of the same accusations. A News.com.au art critic, Alison Kubler, for example, wrote that “…the images are sometimes voyeuristic, at times graphic.”[4] I think we can approach the question of “voyeurism” in Goldin’s work in a more nuanced manner than simply calling the artist a voyeur because her work confronts viewers with usually concealed intimacies.
        Voyeurism describes a privileged dynamic of access, where viewers are allowed into spaces of vulnerability that are typically guarded. This is usually discussed in terms of a power imbalance (i.e. where the subject is objectified or consumed in engagement with the image). At its crudest, voyeurism entails exploitation and a strategic minimising of agency. This will always be the case if the subject is encountered in a scenario where the viewer can observe from an inactive and detached position. Where Goldin’s work is concerned, perhaps viewership does involve a level of voyeurism; viewers of The Ballad are gazing onto private scenes in which they did not remotely partake. However, the viewing relationship that Goldin establishes via very intentional compositional and technical choices, is neither conducive to passive reception nor belittling of the subjects it portrays.
        In preparation for this review, I attended The Ballad’s corresponding ‘Art Lab’, a free workshop put on by the NGA for today’s youth to engage with art and artists. It typically involves a curator talk or panel discussion, and an artist-led activity. Two Sundays ago, we heard from JCG’s curator and made zines under the guidance of photographer Claire Fletcher. It was a great event! I met some cool people, and we chatted about Naarm casualties (Boorloo loyalists appear to be thinning), competitive rentals, and how nice it is to stumble across a place for emerging creatives to come together and exchange notes. During a group discussion, Fletcher’s PowerPoint rested on a slide titled ‘ethics.’ It was during this point that the NGA representative present took the reins to chat about political correctness (cue groan). She cited Goldin’s images of children dancing beside ‘skinheads’ and empty bottles, venturing that these images would cost her job, if she had snapped them. Thus, it is important that art is read in context, she reasoned. Take for example, the current exhibition at the NGA, which is heavily Picasso-saturated (oh no). Equating Goldin to Picasso, the representative dismissed the oppositional voyeuristic criticism that both shows were met with, using the same argument in defence of each; that appreciation is owed to discrepancies between sets of social norms.
        It feels almost too obvious to state that between Picasso and Goldin, there is an incredible discrepancy in each artist’s treatment of subjects that this one-size-fits-all explanation fails to consider. We don’t need to look far. Take the main promotional image for Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationalgalerie, Woman in a multicoloured hat (Tête de femme au chapeau). Goldin’s consistent acknowledgement of sitter’s names provides a personalisation that Picasso’s consistent, objectifying use of “woman” lacks. Even without knowledge of biography (which, spoiler, does bode not well for Picasso’s defence), we encounter a vacant and voluptuous sitter who can be little but a vessel for wandering eyes (either that or a hat stand). The NGA representative’s blasé, skim-the-surface, un-nuanced attitude is unfortunately in keeping with their instructional rhetoric. The possessively titled Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao, guards his status as a ‘great artist’ by the sheer fact of its exhibition, but also via omission of any commentary to point to his consistent construction of female sitters as sexualised and possessed ‘others’. This was noted too by Tai Mitsuji, who wrote in their Guardian review of the NGA’s strange decision to make no reference in didactic text to the artist’s status as ‘an emblem of French colonialism in the Pacific, and paedophilic, syphilitic sex tourist who took child brides as young as 13.’[5] Even the ‘appropriation and reclamation’ learning resource produced alongside the exhibition skirts around the exploitation of subjects in prominent works such as Three Tahitians, The Brooding Woman (Te faaturuma) or the last work in the exhibition, Tahitian Woman II (to name only a few—I am spoilt for choice). Participants are offered probing prompts like ‘reflect on how the experience and power of portraiture shifts when you are in control of representing yourself’.[6] It is these just-removed questions that keep hairiness at bay. Why is being “in control” a Gauguin-specific concern? The link is not quite made, as if the institution gestures vaguely at the elephant and calls it a day. 
        I think Joe Frost‘s Artist Profile review said it best with, ‘While the NGA has not exactly dodged the difficult issues, its current exhibition, Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao, is resolute in holding them at arm’s length.’[7] The same effect is created by individualising potential antagonism. Rather than focusing on the still-felt structures that both sustained Gaugin’s conquests and exploits, and valorise them via large scale exhibitions today, the NGA poses “The Gauguin Dilemma.”[8] The post-text to the audio guide description—a gushing 200-worder about ‘international acclaim’ and ‘forging new grounds’—asks of listeners “Can you love the art but loathe the artist?”.[9] This microscopic focus is on par with unproductive byproducts of cancel culture; maintaining harmful systems of power that allowed the problematic person in question to have a platform in the first place. Does the National Gallery’s shallow “…acknowledgement of the French master’s misdeeds in the Pacific…” count for much when his work is celebrated in a four month, ticketed solo exhibition?[10] I’m not convinced.
        Set against the lameness of this heavy-handed, hospital grade sanitisation, it is a wonder that the NGA was responsible for Goldin’s work touring nationally (one is tempted to ask, quite frankly, who was off sick the day Goldin got the green light?). I think rather than the NGA’s Oscar Wilde-esque blind eye turning (‘I could deny it, I could deny anything if I liked’[11]) it is useful to examine how voyeurism might operate differently—perhaps not negatively—in Goldin’s oeuvre, compared to the DWM (Dead White Men) consistently afforded pride of place at our national institution. Let’s not beat around the bush. Goldin’s work is confrontational. The Ballad contains people bruised and scarred, engaged in sex acts, laughing unguarded, or caught in moments of inconsolable despair. The images shown included in Golden’s famed The Ballad series are a section from her broader dedication  to recording her friends and adopted family of queer Downtown New Yorkers. Accompanied by both ‘viewer advice’ and ‘content warning’ disclaimers, the exhibition is an unfiltered collection of behind-the-scenes subject matter. By all description, it sounds as if viewership is a perversive trap. Yet, in The Ballad, Goldin establishes conditions where vulnerability and honesty encourage relationships of emotional connection rather than power or pleasure. In The Ballad we are met with people first, and bodies, queers, and outcasts only incidentally and after-the-fact.
        Perhaps a key protector of each subject’s dignity and agency (tendencies that are nurtured simultaneously with extreme vulnerability) is the way that each portrait is stretched with dynamism; there is a sense that the frame does not contain a complete tableau but rather a snatched fragment from something expansive and inaccessible. A common way that Goldin achieves this effect is through the close cropping of images. A consequence of these deceptively colloquial gestures is that viewers encounter a sense that the narrative lives outside the frame—denying the viewer a full understanding or the ability to make a concrete judgment about the image’s goings-on. Perhaps this is why Goldin’s works are often described as ‘unmoving film’.[12] Joan at Breakfast, Provincetown, Mass, 1977, for example, depicts an undressed woman sitting crossed-legged. She grabs her right arm with her left, so that her three-ringed left-hand conceals her lower torso. The frame finishes harshly above her nose, leaving the unreadable expression upon her turned head clouded without the aid of a telling eyebrow raise or slanted eye. Does she sling an arm across her body self-consciously? Or is her body folding in on the precipice of an unguarded laugh? Present too in this image is Goldin’s consistently strange leveling of objects and subjects. In Joan at Breakfast, for instance, the background contains a teal green kitchen shot in the same crisp focus as the sitter’s hand. A metallic red toaster on the counter and tin cut-out of a posing man propped haphazardly against it form a backdrop drawn closer to the plane of the woman via utilitarian focus. It is as if each of these scattered elements of the composition (woman, watch, vinyl floor, utensil) equally suggest a far wider life.
        Seemingly casual compositions are in fact careful to suggest the varied convolutedness of subjects with lives, just like us. Amongst Goldin’s purposefully inconsistent images of friends and lovers, are her own competing experiences of loving and leaving an abusive partner. The images of Brian gayly chatting to friends (Brian on the Phone, New York City, 1981), blowing out birthday candles (Brian’s birthday, New York, 1981), and reclining luxuriously as he enjoys the mock audience of the camera (Brian in hotel room with three beds, Merida, Mexico 1982) are set in sombre contrast against later images, Nan after being battered, 1984, and the mugshot-like use of flash and narrow framing for the photo directly before it, Brian’s Face, West Berlin, 1984. Despite being invited to map our own experiences against the incredibly human moments captured throughout The Ballad, Goldin stipulates that there is nothing singular about these people and their nuanced, unknowable lives. Goldin takes seriously her intent to capture those she loves with integrity and compassion.
        With their casual composition, stillness, and often yellowed tones, the photographs within The Ballad seem to accidentally entice the viewer. One becomes slowly engrossed in the specifics, the relatable, and the obscure within each image. With the familiar, nostalgic tone of chrome photography, each slightly oversaturated image takes on the appearance of a family photograph. Thus, one is encouraged to approach the images with as much naivety as can be expected in a university gallery. This is aided, too, by the modest scale and colloquially scattered hang (imitating Goldin’s arrangement of images in the 1986 photobook). It is only after being drawn into the work that we begin to remember that these are strangers. We catch ourselves as onlookers. Now privy to inner circles and well-worn patterns we do not take part in, there is a sense of shame at trespassing so far in. We are too close, but only our comfort is at stake. It is as if the vibrant, self-possessed subjects do not care for our gaze or its absence. Radically unguarded displays of pure joy and deepest hopelessness are challenges for viewers to chart against these expanses of human experience, our own most closely guarded moments. Goldin wrote of this intention, “it’s about trying to feel what another person is feeling. There’s a glass wall between people, and I want to break it.”
        The shape of this voyeurism encountered in viewership is not exploitative. Rather, it is entirely humanising. And it is here, in the creation of portraits that show human experiences at their rawest, that the inseparable political impulse of the work emerges. In Goldin’s glimpses of lives, we feel alongside each subject; each encounter requires viewers to draw from their own horizons of emotional experience. Far from making use of private moments as spectacle, Goldin’s snapshots establish a context for viewers to recognise their most tender moments within ways of being that were, and in different ways remain, largely perceived as threatening. Goldin’s Ballad evidences that not all ‘bunches of naked people’ are made equal.[13]

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Footnotes:

1. Alison Dean, “Intimacy at Work: Nan Goldin and Rineke Dijkstra,” History of Photography, 39:2 (2015), 177-193, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2015.1038109

2. https://www.instagram.com/p/DFSNNakMVIn/?hl=en

3. https://www.chardarr.com/single-post/2016/10/17/nan-goldin-the-ballad-of-sexual-dependency-excerpts-1986

4. https://www.escape.com.au/experiences/art-and-culture/nga-nan-goldin-exhibition-review/news-story/b1f6efd479a367c642d8a2c82ab1a447

5. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/02/gauguin-world-tona-iho-tona-ao-national-gallery-of-australia-exhibition

6. https://nga.gov.au/learn/learning-resources/appropriation-and-reclamation/paul-gauguin/

7. https://artistprofile.com.au/gauguins-world-tona-iho-tona-ao/

8. https://nga.gov.au/audio-learning-tours/gauguins-world/

9. https://nga.gov.au/audio-learning-tours/gauguins-world/

10. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/02/gauguin-world-tona-iho-tona-ao-national-gallery-of-australia-exhibition

11. A line from his play, The Importance of Being Earnst.

12. As stated in the poster-cum-catalogue essay from JCG.

13. A snap review of the show offered by an acquaintance that I bumped into at Leadlight. He described Goldin’s work to me after I said I was excited to see the exhibition. 

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Image credits:

1. Nan Goldin, Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City, 1983, 1983, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022 © Nan Goldin.

2. Install photography of Nan Goldin: The ballad of sexual dependency at the John Curtin Gallery. Courtesy of the John Curtin Gallery.

3. Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, NYC, 1983, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022 © Nan Goldin.