This year, Nan Goldin can be seen everywhere. In March, she received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and a major exhibition opened in Stockholm at the Moderna Museet, which, after a stop in Amsterdam, will be shown next year at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
And now the documentary "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" is coming to theaters, in which, on the one hand, director Laura Poitras delves deep into Goldin's artistic work, and on the other hand, tells about Goldin's fight against the Sackler family's pharmaceutical company. The two can hardly be separated from each other.
To call "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" a documentary would be inaccurate. Although Poitras, who won an Oscar in 2015 for "Citizenfour", her work on whistleblower Edward Snowden, is definitely a documentary filmmaker, her film is actually a continuation of Nan Goldin's work. And you realize that the documentary reaches its limits when you deal with an artist who has declared her entire life to be a work of art.
At the Limits of the Documentary
Nan Goldin, born in Washington in 1953, was one of the first artists to report from her very own world and thus achieved world fame. She has become what you could call an established artist, but her work still thrives on photographing her friends, the people close to her. In intimate scenes that are never voyeuristic. She makes her friends the main characters of her own narrative. At one point in the film, she says that relationships are the most important driving force for people. The relationship with the parents, the children, the love partners. For her, these are the relationships with her friends.
Her pictures are also a defiant gesture of self-empowerment in New York in the eighties, where AIDS raged and tore large gaps in Goldin's life. One of Goldin's most impressive photographs is "Cookie in her Casket" (1989), which shows her friend Cookie in a coffin. For many years, Goldin accompanied Cookie with his camera, but also as a friend. When you hear her speak of her today, her voice is full of love and admiration. Poitras keeps letting Goldin speak for a long time, until Goldin breaks off and says, "Can we please stop here."
In one scene, portraits of Goldin's deceased friends are superimposed. There are a frightening number. Almost all of them died of AIDS. Goldin's friends, many of them artists, queer, worked in nightlife. Drugs have always been a big issue. Goldin herself had already gone through rehab in 1989 because of her heroin addiction. In 2014, she was prescribed the painkiller Oxycontin because of an operation on her wrist.
Painkillers that are addictive
She was immediately addicted. It wasn't until four years later that she was clean again and published a letter in the art magazine "Artforum" in which she accused the Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma manufactures the drug. Until then, the Sacklers were also and above all known as generous patrons of culture. At New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, an entire wing was named after them, and almost every major museum has accepted generous donations from them.
Poitras moves along Goldin's most important series of works and gives art a lot of space. "The Ballad of Sexual Dependence" from 1986 is probably one of her most important works. These are almost 700 recordings that Goldin showed as a slide show together with various music in New York clubs and pubs. Again and again she changed and expanded the composition. If their friends didn't agree with some of the pictures, they were removed. Thus, this conglomerate of images was constantly changing and developing and was itself a kind of film through the form of presentation. Laura Poitras fades in these photographs in long sequences.