KEEP LOVE ALIVE
Very few artworks touch the emotional register that Nan Goldin’s seminal slideshow and book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), hits. A tour de force, Ballad is a visual memoir that documents both the grizzly and glamorous truths about being in love and falling out of it. The scenes that compromise the volume are extreme in their intimacy. In them, we see the photographer in bed with friends and her lover; we also see her before the mirror taking account of the bruises he leaves on her face. I could barely look at some of them, and yet these impossible fractions added together form what I consider to be one of the most important double portraits of the era. A pioneer of this kind of explicit self-exploration, Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency sits amongst a halcyon of work from the 1980s and ‘90s toying with autofiction-like tendencies. For proof, a list of masterpieces including but not limited to: Jeff Koons and La Ciccolinas’ pornographic Made in Heaven series, Tracy Emin’s blackbook-turned-tent sculpture Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, Sophie Calle and Greg Shephard’s filmic rocky road epic No Sex Last Night (1996), and Glenn Ligon’s missed-connections-like plaque project, Lest We Forget (1998).
However in the post-9/11 aughts, the
