Larry Gagosian’s prestigious New York gallery is currently drawing a diverse crowd. It includes the usual art world professionals, as well as many young people who appear to be art students. One attendee, his body covered in tattoos, carries a drawing board on his back, secured with leather straps and a bicycle chain. His girlfriend, sporting pink hair, wears a bunny ear headband with a disconcerting level of seriousness. Further along, a young man with an androgynous look has a green keffiyeh draped around his neck, a sign of support for Palestine.
All have flocked to Chelsea to see Nan Goldin, a leading figure in the artistic underground, known for her commitment to a range of social causes (AIDS awareness, LGBT rights, feminism, ecology, and addiction recovery). They studiously take notes in front of the artist’s slideshow Stendhal Syndrome (2024)—named after the condition that overwhelms a viewer with emotion in response to the beauty of art—a piece that would not be out of place in an art school curriculum. The concept is simple yet innovative: Nan Goldin juxtaposes photographs of classical masterpieces from the world’s most prestigious museums with autobiographical portraits of her friends, lovers, and family.
The visual similarity between these raw contemporary photographs—color-saturated snapshots on slides—and the classical works of art history (paintings and sculptures arranged according to the aesthetic conventions of their time) is striking. Displayed on the gallery walls in a grid format or projected on screen, their composition, subjects, forms, colors, and the posture of the figures are remarkably alike, if not nearly identical. This blurring of lines between past and present, intimate history and official art, the profane and the sacred, ultimately dismantles traditional art hierarchies. Amateur aesthetics get their revenge.
In a voice-over, accompanied by a score from Soundwalk Collective, Nan Goldin reinterprets six myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She draws connections between the great figures of mythology and the members of her own community with whom she has shared, or still shares, her life. Transvestites become muses, while her former lovers are transformed into potential Narcissuses. The body of Tony, Goldin’s lover dressed in jeans, mirrors the Death of Orpheus, wrapped in a blue sheet in Émile Lévy’s 1866 painting. Goldin’s companions, through their fortunes and misfortunes, blend into their mythical counterparts. Beauty, death, love, and sex echo one another across centuries.
A second film, You Never Did Anything Wrong, marks the artist’s first foray into abstract work. Like Stendhal Syndrome, it is projected inside a futuristic black box-like structure, custom-designed by Goldin in collaboration with Franco-Lebanese architect Hala Wardé. This capsule, an art piece in itself, serves as a portal to another world. It takes its name from the epitaph on the tombstone of Goldin’s cat Milky, a large black-and-white feline buried in Paris in 1986. The piece centers around a solar eclipse, filmed by Goldin in Super 8 and 16 mm, inspired by an ancient myth where animals steal the sun. It borders on the fantastical.
On screen, cats, dogs, sheep, birds, and pigs appear haloed in a divine light, set against a twilight atmosphere reminiscent of Stephen King’s works. The soundtrack—featuring melancholic music by Valerij Fedorenko and Mica Levi, along with ambient nature sounds recorded during the eclipse—heightens the uncanny sense of this video installation. A feeling of tenderness arises for these celestial animals, whether they are depicted as residents of the Sulala Animal Rescue in Gaza or mourned by their owners, who have adorned their graves with funeral wreaths in pet cemeteries such as the one in Asnières-sur-Seine, near Paris. Mad love and its loss remain Goldin’s enduring themes.
Nan Goldin’s “You Never Did Anything Wrong” can be seen at Gagosian Gallery, West 21st Street, New York, from September 12 to October 19, 2024.
