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Photographies

ISSN: 1754-0763 (Print) 1754-0771 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpho20

The Caravaggio Within Nan Goldins Gina

Ian Leask

To cite this article: Ian Leask (2017) The Caravaggio Within Nan Goldins Gina, Photographies,
10:2, 131-143, DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2017.1289115

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2017.1289115

Published online: 27 Apr 2017.

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Ian Leask

THE CARAVAGGIO WITHIN


Nan Goldins Gina

This article offers a reading of Nan Goldins 1991 photo Gina at Bruces dinner party,
NYC, giving particular attention to the presence within it of a reproduction of
Caravaggios 1597 Bacchus. It considers some similarities and differences between the
two images and, drawing on Kierkegaards problematizing of the possibility of repetition,
suggests that the presence of Bacchus within Gina questions any uncritical assumption
of origin or even re-presentation. It also suggests that, when we consider the wider
oeuvres of both artists together, the impossible repetition that Gina enacts becomes more
than a general point about representation and takes on an altogether queerer significance.

While Nan Goldins stature as one of the most significant of contemporary photo-
graphers seems beyond reasonable doubt, the level of close, scholarly, attention given
to her work is curiously limited.1 Certain aspects have received some critical
scrutiny;2 and general summaries abound. Yet, despite their emotional impact and
semiotic abundance, specific photographs or groups of photographs remain under-
analysed: it is almost as though Goldins influence and the analysis of her oeuvre are
inversely related.
In part, this critical lacuna is probably an effect of the highly autobiographical
nature of Goldins work. Charlotte Cotton, for example, has suggested that the sheer
intimacy of her photography means that aesthetic critique can too easily be taken as a
moral judgement.3 Meanwhile, Ben Burbridge has extended this insight to argue that
the apparently personal texture of Goldins photography has effaced the deliberate
exhibitionism of her approach: for Burbridge, Goldins images are far more con-
ceptually mediated than so much discussion (especially that emanating from and
influenced by Goldin herself) might allow; and questions of artistic volition the
decision to make a private life visible seem to have been subsumed by Goldins
supposed status as unpremeditated recorder of lives being lived (see also
McClure 109).
Notwithstanding the importance and seriousness of this critique, its trenchant
nature risks obscuring the achievement of Goldins work in helping to craft a distinctly
queer re-presentation (and even, as Michael Jay McClure has suggested, a queer
memory).4 Accordingly, in this article I want to counter the lack of close reading that
Goldins work has received while also recognizing what we might term her queer
accomplishment. Specifically, I provide concentrated focus on the 1991 picture Gina

Photographies, 2017
Vol. 10, No. 2, 131143, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2017.1289115
2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
132 PHOTOGRAPHIES

at Bruces dinner party, NYC not the most obviously dramatic or moving of her
photographs, but one given particular significance by the presence within it of a
reproduction of Caravaggios 1597 Bacchus. I want to consider what this Caravaggio
within might mean, and how it might exemplify Goldins queer (and queered)
representation.
To an extent, this consideration will assume two well-established points of reference.
First, there is what we might term the queer reception of Caravaggio: not just Derek
Jarmans eponymous 1986 movie (see also Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio), but also, for
example, Champagne (2015, esp. 5584), who in part locates Caravaggios
homoeroticism in the context of a Counter-Reformation stress on sensuality and the erotic;
Bersani and Dutoit (Caravaggios Secrets), who stress the concealment and evasion that
accompanies the erotic invitation in Caravaggio; Hamill (2000, esp 6396), who locates
Caravaggio as part of a wider, carnal, resistance to Renaissance norms and civilizing
processes; Aebisher (2013, esp. 2065), who concentrates on Jarmans depiction of the
painter; or even the earlier treatment of Posner, who was perhaps first to give detailed
attention to Caravaggio qua homosexual artist (see also Frontain 7073).
Secondly, there is the direct influence of Caravaggio on Goldins work not just in
terms of the naturalistic chiaroscuro of its form, the dark richness of the palette, or the
particular rendition of dramatic tension, but also in the way that momentary dissipation,
especially its erotic variety, can become endowed with a kind of monumental signifi-
cance. It seems wholly unsurprising that Goldin has explicitly acknowledged the way in
which Caravaggios paintings have marked her photographs: although keen to stress the
(supposed) immediacy of her work, Goldin has also stated (and she could hardly be more
succinct) that I am deeply influenced by Caravaggio (Goldin, qtd. in Bright, 175).5
However, my concern is not simply to conclude from these two premises that
Gina makes explicit a general connection to a painter who has assumed emblematic
queer status (however true this may be). I also want to show how the Caravaggio
within problematizes the very question of connection: there is more at play here, I
argue, than the contemporary recollection of an Old Master. Invoking Kierkegaard,
and the way in which he undermines the classical conception of repetition (or
anamnesis), I suggest that the presence of Bacchus within Gina gives us a pictorial
(rather than propositional) questioning of origin and perhaps even of re-presentation
itself: just as Kierkegaard shows repetition to be marginal, always differentiated, and
never simple resemblance, so Gina alerts us to the distance (as well as the proximity)
that constitutes its relationship to Bacchus. All of which is not to imply, furthermore,
that the main significance of Gina lies in its exemplification of a general philosophical
issue regarding the intrinsic impossibility of repetition. For I also want to suggest that,
when we consider the wider use of images-within-images (or meta-pictures) in
Goldins oeuvre, and when we locate Gina (and thus its internal Caravaggio) in this
context, an altogether queerer picture emerges.
To argue for all of this, my article is divided into four main parts followed by a
conclusion: first, a description of Gina, and a comparison with the Caravaggio painting
that forms such a central element within it; second, further focus on Bacchus and its
context; third, consideration of the relationship between the two pictures in terms of
Kierkegaardian repetition (or Gjentagelsen) vis--vis Greek recollection (or anamnesis);
and fourth, further consideration of Gina in terms of Goldins wider oeuvre, with
NAN GOLDINS GINA 133

particular attention to internal picturing and the kind of queerness that this con-
sideration seems to suggest. Overall, my approach is designed to show that Goldins
photography can be taken as a form of thought, in its own right, rather than a mere
example or illustration of a higher philosophical position: her pictorial thinking
constitutes (and does not just represent) reality in its becoming.

Gina and Bacchus

Goldin has been hugely important in establishing a photographic aesthetic casual, grungy,
and appearing to blur divisions between highbrow spectacle and downbeat snapshot6 that
has enjoyed a near-ubiquitous influence on arthouse and fashion photography. (The work of
Jrgen Teller, Corrine Day, Wolfgang Tillmans and Ryan McGinley, for example, seems
unthinkable without Goldins lead.) Her pictures have always presented themselves as being
deeply personal, like a visual diary, and anything but detached and ironic; as Shelley Rice has
put it, [h]er involvement in these difficult, often tragic, scenarios is what holds us all in
Goldins thrall (23). (In one particular scene, she even shows herself after having suffered
domestic violence.) Thus, although her subject matter might seem to establish her as the
natural heir to Diane Arbus, or Larry Clark, Goldin could never properly be accused of
voyeuristic coldness:7 Goldins drag-queens, drug addicts and marginals were her friends,
her family,8 whom she pictured drinking, drugging, sleeping, travelling, dressing and
undressing, making love (or having sex), fighting, even dying. Im not some sort of
documentarian of other peoples worlds, Goldin has said (85); more famously, she has
insisted that Im not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my friends (6). Or, as
Larry Qualls puts it: She is not just an actor analyzing anothers text, but one of those people
like Spalding Gray using their own lives as the canvas. Her works are performances of her
autobiography (31). Arguably, it is the unflinching reality of these early, autobiographical,
pictures, their combination of brutality and tenderness, that helped to establish Goldins work
as a corrective to the crass depthlessness of 1980s postmodernism and thus to secure her
international reputation.9
Despite the singularity of this reputation, and despite the autobiography on which it is
founded, two points of qualification seem worth flagging before we turn to Gina itself. First,
and notwithstanding the layers of mythology that may have built up around her work, Goldin
was not alone in forging a new, documentary, aesthetic: initially, at least, she was part of a
loose movement the so-called Boston School that was united in combining what Uwe
Schneede has termed intimate closeness and analytical distance (8); her associates, princi-
pally Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, David Armstrong10 and Philip-Lorca diCordia, were all
equally concerned with depicting, albeit in multiform manner, the queer community of
which they were members (see e.g. McClure). Secondly, and as already indicated in my
introduction, there is room for a certain caution in accepting Goldins portrayal of her work as
being the spontaneous depiction of life as it was being lived: arguably (and as Burbridge, in
particular, has stressed), the photographs she presents are far more conceptually and
historically mediated than her own claims might suggest.11 I shall return to the issue of the
creation of a queer community in my conclusion; but the issue of Goldins formal and historical
awareness becomes central for approaching Gina, my main concern.
134 PHOTOGRAPHIES

Fig. 1. Nan Goldin, Gina at Bruces dinner party, NYC, 1991 Silver dye bleach print 27 3/8 x 40 inches (69.5 x 101.6 x 4.4 cm).
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee and with
funds contributed by the International Directors Council and Executive Committee Members: Ruth Baum, Edythe Broad,
Elaine Terner Cooper, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Gail May Engelberg, Shirley Fiterman, Nicki Harris, Dakis
Joannou, Linda Macklowe, Peter Norton, Willem Peppler, Tonino Perna, Elizabeth Richebourg Rea, Simonetta Seragnoli,
David Teiger, and Elliot K. Wolk, 2002. Nan Goldin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Here, the immediate appearance of the picture can deflect us from both the craft
that has shaped it and the sensibility that informs it. The depth of field and focus are
such that Ginas face is the centre-piece; but the composition serves to take the
viewers eye in a loop around the main elements of the picture: Gina, dish, tablecloth,
fruit-bowl, flowers, reproduced paintings, crucifix rendered kitsch by cherubim. This
loop means that, in turn, she is echoed by, or is placed in a relationship with, the
Bacchus figure in the Caravaggio (which is roughly on opposite points of the thirds
grid from her face). The fruit-bowl, with all its apparently erotic suggestion, provides
an obvious intersection. So too does Ginas face and the position of her arms.
Simultaneously weary and sultry, she is uncannily like the figure in the Caravaggio:
a Bacchus of the drugged-up New York demi-monde.
Yet the overlap of Goldins Gina and Caravaggios Bacchus is indicative rather
than final: it gestures to more complex layers of associations and relations. To begin
with, there are obvious but important differences of depiction. While Bacchus toasts
us, with a full, proffered glass, Gina is thoroughly underwhelmed by whatever it might
be that she toys with on her plate. Bacchus looks at us directly, Gina looks into the
middle distance, seemingly oblivious to the viewers gaze. Bacchus apparently repre-
sents (Dionysian) invitation and promise, Gina ennui and loneliness. (The black humour
of the title seems to emphasize this disenchantment: in so many respects, the scene
depicts the antithesis of conviviality and bonhomie.) In terms of immediate contrast,
NAN GOLDINS GINA 135

then, Goldin gives us a contemporary Bacchus a deflated Dionysus that matches


and indexes the spent emptiness of her time.
This might suggest, in turn, that the relationship between Gina and the Caravaggio
that it references is self-consciously (and straightforwardly) bathetic the weary,
dejected recognition of a weary, dejected age, via the knowing juxtaposition of an
artless snapshot and its classical Other. There are two principal obstacles confronting
such a reading, however. First, and as already noted, Gina is far from being the
throwaway picture that a first impression might suggest: as with almost all of Goldins
work, there is profound formal depth and philosophical weight here. Secondly, the
Caravaggio does not quite function as Other to the Goldin in the way that it might
appear: rather than blithely assuming the Caravaggios status as a timeless masterpiece,
devoid of context, we might recall that the Bacchus itself is a strikingly gritty (perhaps
even grungy) painting, and itself a meditation on ennui and emptiness. To make more
sense of Gina, this aspect of Goldins reference point demands further attention.

Bacchus in context
Caravaggios status as a radically naturalistic and realistic painter hardly needs rehear-
sing: it is well established that he rejected so much mannerist fussiness, that he
rendered straight from nature, that he used strikingly direct light sources, and so
on. Nonetheless, to justify claims about the painters grittiness, some particular
details of the Bacchus picture are worth highlighting.
First, we need to register the decidedly queer aspect of Caravaggios painting: as
Puglisi has noted, [t]he figures gaze engages the beholder from under plucked and
penciled eyebrows, in a round, smooth-cheeked face framed by a luxurious mass of black
curls (52); depicted as such, the Caravaggio Bacchus references Ovids Metamorphoses,
which itself references Euripides Bacchae, in presenting the god as garlanded and
perfumed, a stranger dressed like a woman, with hair in ringlets and a curvaceous
figure (Gilbert). More than being apparently feminine, however, Caravaggios depic-
tion of Bacchus seems unmistakably and directly sexualized: with his sullen, provocative
expression (Moir 66), and with his hand apparently set to untie the bow on his sash,
Bacchus offers a carnal (and perhaps crude) invitation (cf. Posner).12 This is a picture
that, like so many of Goldins photographs, almost smells of sex.
What is more, Bacchus is not some solitary depiction. The 1597 work follows a
line of paintings probably depicting the same androgynous model (see Moir): possibly,
Boy with a Basket of Fruit, of 15931594; more certainly Boy Bitten by a Lizard, of 1593,
and The Musicians and The Lute Player, both of 1595. Throughout, the youthful figure is
always rendered in an enclosed, almost claustrophobic environment (cf. Hibberd). And
this airless, sometimes shadowless, private sphere becomes particularly significant with
the depiction of Bacchus for here, in what Alfred Moir has called Caravaggios first
obviously classical work (66), the venerable tradition of rendering Bacchus as an
heroic, out-of-doors figure is rejected in favour of a grubbier yet more charged
depiction.13 Caravaggios god now has dirty fingernails, a pale chest and a farmers
tan; and he sits on a dirty sheet that fails to cover an ever dirtier mattress. Meanwhile,
the foregrounded fruit seems already past its best: burst, tunnelled by worms, its decay
136 PHOTOGRAPHIES

well under way. In part, at least, the Caravaggio is a vanitas, a work designed to
remind us of how life is not just fleeting, but in so many respects empty and
pointless. (As Puglisi puts it: Drink and make love now, Bacchus seems to say, before
it is too late [52].)
Thus, bearing in mind the earthy (even squalid) naturalism of Bacchus, it seems
mistaken to posit Goldins photo as the ironic deflation and undermining of the
sumptuous fullness of the Old Master. To an extent, the Caravaggio has already
done this kind of undermining by itself; and perhaps a fundamental feature of Gina is
that Goldin acknowledges this very point (namely, Caravaggios own iconoclasm). Far
from constituting the opposite or contrary of Goldins Gina, then, Caravaggios Bacchus
begins to appear more like its precursor or even its premonition. Goldin, it seems,
is referencing an important source.

Recollection, repetition
This premonitive aspect might seem to suggest, in turn, that the relationship between
Gina and Bacchus is one of correspondence and even mutual enhancement, rather than
jarring counterpoint. Beyond formal and structural congruity, after all, the one echoes
the ennui of the other. Each is a meditation on fleetingness, and emptiness; each
eschews classical grandeur in favour of a grim realism; each is a kind of vanitas. And so,
in a sense, the centuries that separate the pictures are overcome by a strange, almost
unsettling, unity.
Indeed, as I have already noted, Caravaggio looms like a prevailing deity over so
much of Goldins oeuvre in terms of form, palette and subject matter. And yet it
also seems considering the various differences between the two pictures that the
relationship of Gina to the Caravaggio which it references cannot be reduced to a
straightforward circularity, whereby Gina becomes a pictorial recollection. If the
photo repeats the painting in any sense, the repetition is far from total; and it is this
distance, or gap, that presents one of the most intriguing and suggestive aspects of
Goldins photograph. To state the issue in more directly philosophical terms, we could
say that the repetition here, in Gina, is best understood not so much as Greek
anamnesis, but as Danish Gjentagelsen in other words, as a repetition that is more
Kierkegaardian than Socratic.
The distance between the two conceptions is vast, given their apparent proximity.
In the case of ancient Greek anamnesis, there is no ultimate gap allowed between
knower and known, between the philosophical subject and the object of its gaze. The
soul finds that to know is to gather up what is always already mine, what is always
already within me; discovery is always rediscovery. Anamnesis means that the Socratic
psyche, or soul, (re)discovers that it already possesses all of its knowledge, that it can
never really encounter anything fully Other, and so that, ultimately, there is nothing
truly heteronomous.
For Sren Kierkegaard (or at least for the pseudonymous Constantin Constantius,
in Repetition, with whom appropriately enough Kierkegaard may not be strictly
identical), there can be no such return to some pure origin: recollection, in its
classical, Socratic, sense, is an impossibility. Any looking back to an assumed original
NAN GOLDINS GINA 137

position only serves to underline our distance from it: describing the attempt to
recreate a previous experience (at the Knigstdter theatre in Berlin), Constantius
finds only that this re-creation is unachievable. What returns, Kierkegaard suggests,
always returns in new ways; what has happened can never, strictly speaking, re-
happen. Any exercise in repetition thus reveals repetitions failure: ultimately, there
can never be any genuine repetition. (As Kierkegaard himself puts it: The only
repetition was the impossibility of repetition [Fear and Trembling 170].) Strictly
speaking, then, we can never re-turn: recollection is really about our confrontation
with a discarded garment that does not fit (Fear and Trembling 174).
In opposing Socratic anamnesis, Kierkegaard (or at least Constantius14) does not
only seek to make a point about some arcane issue in classical thought. As he realizes
only too well, the very evolution of Western philosophy as a whole is more like the
progressive, historical, modulation of anamnetic structures, whereby the modern
philosopher might claim systematic ownership of all that once seemed Other to
thought (see e.g. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling 1489). More specifically, the
kind of absolute claims made by and on behalf of Hegelianism at the start of the
nineteenth century suggest that anamnesis has become the model for Western thoughts
overall reduction of everything external to the immanence of subjectivity. For Hegel,
after all, Geist, the collective Western Mind, or Spirit, is now in a position to realize
that its long journey is complete, that it has returned suitably enriched and
developed to its starting point: when the modern subject looks back on all of
the great historical shapes of Geist it realizes that it looks back on itself, on its own
layers and strata. Now, it seems, the philosophical system can declare that nothing
remains outside its orbit, that everything that is can be grasped, philosophically.
For the anti-systematic Kierkegaard, such Hegelian depictions of the Western soul
speaking to itself are precisely the outcome, the full manifestation, of the ancient
transmutation of the unknown into the recollected: Hegel sanctifies a narcissism that
characterizes Western thought as a whole. And it is precisely this systematic over-
coming of heterenomy that Kierkegaardian repetition (or Gjentagelsen) is designed to
oppose: for Kierkegaard, anamnesis can only ever claim its supposed victory by ignoring
its inherent impossibility; repetition is always approximation, never the replication of
some original point. Indeed, it is no accident that perhaps the greatest anti-Hegelian
treatise of contemporary thought, Gilles Deleuzes Difference and Repetition, should take
such important bearings from Kierkegaard, the thinker-comet who bring[s] to
philosophy new means of expression (Deleuze 78). Kierkegaardian repetition,
Deleuze suggests, begins a certain ruin of re-presentation: after it, synthesis and return
are rendered nigh impossible, and the false movement, false drama and false
theatre of Hegelianism (10) might be overcome.
All of which recalls us, so to speak, to Gina. I want to suggest that we can
understand the relationship between Gina and Bacchus as a pictorial enactment of this
impossibility of classical repetition. For sure, Gina seems to suggest, we can draw
comparisons, suggest parallels and posit origins. Indeed, Gina almost demands that we
consider its relationship to Caravaggios Bacchus: the worn reproduction on a kitchen
wall contains such vortical power that it becomes almost impossible not to see Gina in
terms of her sixteenth-century reflection. And yet, even if Bacchus seems to posit itself
as source or origin, the inclusion of this source within Gina simultaneously establishes
138 PHOTOGRAPHIES

an unpassable distance: the now may necessitate some relationship to the then, in
order to establish itself qua now, but this relationship is never one of total
subsumption; the differences are unsurpassable. In other words, the self-conscious
referencing of Caravaggios Bacchus problematizes the question of origin and alerts us
to the impossibility of re-presentation. In doing so, Gina gestures towards the profound
ambiguity and instability of identity: irreducible difference, it seems to suggest, hovers
around the constitution of reality as a whole.

A queerer picture
Perhaps, though, this enactment of repetitions impossibility also has a more particular
charge to it one that, as it were, queers any generalized claim. (Put otherwise: the
significance of Gina is not simply as empirical evidence on behalf of Kierkegaard!) Gina
may well adumbrate her foundational difference from the classical Bacchus.
Nonetheless, as we have also seen, the relationship with Caravaggio is rich, and multi-
layered: it is not reducible to some straightforward opposition (between, say, a thesis
and its antithesis); and Goldins concern does not seem to be the ironic deflation of
some oppressive Master (in the manner, for example, of Yasumasa Morimura or later
Cindy Sherman). Indeed, the complex and perhaps overdetermined juxtaposition of the
two artists work becomes even more pronounced when we consider the literal,
material, overlapping of layers at which the photograph hints: the same walls on which
the Bacchus hung in Bruce Balbonis home in New York were used to show slides of
Goldins family to her family (Gina included), long before her work was well
known.15 Depictions of Goldins circle were thus quite literally posited on the
same plane as Caravaggios androgynous model; the looking-glass of a Goldin slide-
show allowed Bacchus to burst directly into Goldins work and to become part of her
family. We could say that, even if Gina cannot be reduced to Bacchus even if it
alerts us to its own irrefragable difference nonetheless, the represented Bacchus
remains the nodal point around which the enigma of Goldins Gina is centred. Rather
than a mere reference, the Caravaggio within is more like a lodestone, an animating (if
ambiguous) centre.
We can develop consideration of this ambiguous centrality by considering the
position of Gina vis--vis an important part of Goldins wider oeuvre: the meta-
picture.16 Photographs within photographs, images and reflections within images and
reflections, figure frequently in her work, usually performing quite different functions:
apparently frivolous snapshots of people on the beach in CZ and Max on the beach, Truro,
Massachusetts (1976), for example; sinister, ominous, masks hanging above Greer and
Robert on the bed, New York City (1982); mirrors (and very different kinds of mirroring)
in bathrooms, lesbian boudoirs and drag-queens dressing rooms; and so on. Arguably,
though, the most unsettling of all of these images-within-images comes in Goldins
best-known work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in the picture titled Nan and Brian in
bed, New York City (1983): here, the viewer is confronted with the kind of smouldering,
hyper-masculine, barely contained, violence that had apparently encircled Goldin
herself at the time. (Interestingly, the Brian who is pictured directly, rather than
in the print on the wall, seems more rueful or perhaps just more stoned than he
NAN GOLDINS GINA 139

is in his internal depiction. The contrast between the two Brians increases the
photographs overall tension, by heightening the sense of instability and volatility;
Goldin herself, we see, remains deeply wary of even the more pacific Brian directly
before her.)
Comparing Gina with Nan and Brian seems irresistible: in both, we have an image,
tacked to the wall, in which, unlike the main protagonists in the photos, someone looks
directly at us and seems to oversee and even exert authority upon the wider pictorial
environment or ensemble; both photos gain so much of their power from their internal
representations. Nonetheless, for all the formal similarity with Nan and Brian in bed, the
Caravaggio Bacchus within Gina produces, or helps to produce, a very different kind of
atmosphere. Brian (or at least Brian of the internal picture) bristles and threatens
violence; Bacchus pouts and threatens seduction. Brian frightens; Bacchus flirts. (As
we have seen, the erotic power of Bacchus is hardly hyper-masculine.) Goldins desire is
implicated, as it were, in both pictures; but with the movement from the 1983 Nan and
Brian in bed to the 1991 Gina, the tension of an apparently strict sexual binary hard
man, vulnerable woman has given way to something much more ambiguous.
Accordingly, I would suggest that, whatever the formal parallels with Nan and
Brian, the sheer queerness of what we might term the Caravaggio within means that
Gina (also) needs to be located in a fairly specific domain of Goldins photographs that
(also) pivot on internal picturing: Ivy with Marilyn, Boston 1973;17 Roommate in the
kitchen, Boston 1972; Christmas at the Other Side (in which the reproduction is brought
directly into the picture, so to speak); or, from later in her career, Santi with his
portrait as a young queen, Bangkok 1992 (and perhaps even Kim Harlow at home, Paris
1992). Certainly, we need to be wary of an assumed homogeneity here: whatever their
common qualities, these queer meta-pictures are all markedly different in terms of
dynamics, composition, degrees of tension and internal drama; in each, the varying
roles played by the pictured picture are crucial in determining the different types of
condensation that are operative (an issue that demands a separate study). Nonetheless,
these photographs still seem characterized by a certain campness albeit an edgy, icy
campness quite alien to Nan and Brian. And, to reiterate, Gina seems to have a
definite membership of this particular group, at the same time as having a relationship
with Nan and Brian. This membership, I would suggest, has decisive significance for
how we might read the recollection that Gina presents.

Conclusion
Admittedly, all of this may seem a tangled cluster of elements: the dramatic centrality
of Bacchus within Gina; the trope of pictures within pictures and the invocation of Nan
and Brian in Bed; the simultaneous invocation of a more specifically queer set of
pictures within pictures (and, not least, the fact that Gina is the only member of
this latter grouping that references a piece of classical, High Art painting). But when
we allow these different aspects to infuse and inform each other, we can start to
address in a more focused way the general, Kierkegaardian, problematizing of identity
and origin noted above. For, as is hopefully now more apparent, any full assessment of
Gina also needs to consider the sheer queerness of this photograph; and obviously
140 PHOTOGRAPHIES

enough the recollection of Caravaggios Bacchus should be viewed with this in mind.
To reiterate: Gina is not solely the illustration of a generalized, Kierkegaardian, notion
of the always differentiated nature of repetition (even if this same notion can help us to
read Goldins picture).
Specifically, then, I suggest that Gina is best approached as a kind of queer
recollection. It may have been produced long after the dissipation of the Boston
School, from which and within which Goldin emerged; nonetheless, it continues the
original mission of that grouping, noted at the start of this article, not just to record
but to create a queer community and a queer memory (Ruddy). Whatever the fate of
Goldins work, in terms of institutionalized reception; and however prescient the
critique of a (possibly self-serving) mythology that has come to surround and fuse
into a problematic unity the artist and her oeuvre; it is this accomplishment that we
should continue to recall (so to speak).18 And it is in the context of this effort that we
might locate Gina.
Discussing Goldins work at large, Sarah Ruddy has delineated the problematic of
queer memory, how its position at once happening, (not) having happened, and
denied necessitates an act in order to signify; Goldins work, Ruddy argues, is able
to transform and question the grammar of representation and hence its effects on
remembered history (353). Ruddys suggestions have a particular relevance, it seems
to me, regarding the kind of recollection at work in Gina. In referencing the past, the
picture reveals itself as traversed by powers and currents that stretch back centuries; it
simultaneously indicates the gaps and slips inherent in the same reference and shows
itself as irreducible to the confines of any (nostalgic) master discourse. Moreover, qua
artwork, the picture serves not just as a reflection, but also as the creation of what
Goldin herself has called new possibilities and transcendence;19 in doing so, it
manifests a transformative (perhaps even Dionysian) power, possibly even a photo-
praxis (to borrow Louis Kaplans term [18]), and helps to establish that, as Goldin
puts it, all possibilities of gender and sexuality are legitimate in life, and that all
possibilities of gender are as valid as any other.20 Present yet allusive; almost grimly
real yet profoundly enigmatic: Gina at Bruces dinner party, NYC provides us with a
powerful example of both queer and queered representation.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1 For exceptions, see Danto (325) and Kaplan.
2 See, for example, Dyer (1647) on the role of the bed in Goldins work.
3 There is an in-built protection of intimate photography from serious and especially
negative art criticism. By developing a body of work over time, the photographer
links his or her life with the continued taking of photographs. A new book or
NAN GOLDINS GINA 141

exhibition is rarely judged an outright failure because that would suggest a moral
criticism of the photographers life, as well as of their motivations (Cotton 141):
4 Throughout, I employ queer (and its cognates) in order to draw on the terms
suggestive power and constructive ambiguity: deliberately non-normative, queer
seems to question and destabilize the essentialism that can lurk even in a descriptor
such as LGBT.
5 The influence is such that her pictures from the beginning of the new millennium of
her friends Clemens and Jens most famously, one in which the former is
squeezing the latters nipples have become known as The Caravaggio Boys.
6 Goldin is explicit in acknowledging a snapshot aesthetic in her work. As she has
put it: Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared
times Theyre about creating a history by recording a history (Goldin, The
Ballad 19. See also Kaplan 1113). As Burbridge has pointed out, however, we
may be well advised to treat with caution some of Goldins own pronouncements
about her work.
7 Famously, Susan Sontag suggested that Arbus viewpoint was based on distance,
on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other
(34). Goldin herself has been accused of a kind of concealed voyeurism (see, for
example Kotz, esp. 207209); but her emotional involvement (and lack of
detachment) seems undeniable. For a reading of the exhibitionism that this
supposed voyeurism may also entail, see Burbridge.
8 In my family of friends, there is a desire for the intimacy of the blood family, but
also a desire for something more open-ended (Goldin, The Ballad 6).
9 However important it might be, the question of whether Goldins later work
becomes increasingly formulaic is beyond the scope of this essay. (See, though,
Kotz). More recently, Burbridge seems to find Goldins work to be a principal
source of the over sharing of images in a spectacularized digital age.
10 Armstrong also featured Gina as subject in his 1990 photograph Gina at her Loft,
New York City.
11 See, as well as Burbridge, McClures comment: even if we are to believe in this
idea of a continuous, reflexive, practice of photography, where composition
happens by accident, there is, nevertheless, a formal intelligence in Goldins
work that powerfully confronts the conditions, or the limits, of photography as a
medium of representation (109).
12 See also Gilbert on the anachronistic problems involved in a straightforwardly gay
reading of Caravaggio (191, 207244).
13 Hibberd compares the slightly earlier (and more obviously god-like) Bacchus of
Annibale Carracci: Caravaggios closet Bacchus is a different breed, he suggests
(43).
14 We should notice an ambiguity in Kierkegaards treatment, overall. In The Concept
of Irony, for example, Kierkegaard differentiates Socratic and Platonic recollection
(367). In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, recollection is depicted as a
Platonic imposition upon the existentialist Socrates (Kierkegaard, The Concept of
Irony 206n). But in the Philosophical Fragments, recollection is depicted as definitively
Socratic (Kierkegaard 38).
15 See Guida Costas note: Goldin and her friends, including Gina, used to meet at
Bruces house for dinner, and the photographer would show slides of everyone
present (62).
142 PHOTOGRAPHIES

16 I borrow this notion from Stoichita. For wider treatment of the meta-picture in
art history, see, too, Carrier (197200) or Verstegen (51326).
17 Kaplan (14) points out that the beauty spot on Ivys right cheek mirrors the mark
on Marilyns left.
18 See McClure on the Boston School as a whole: what might be lost to us in the
three decades since these photographs first printing, is the shock of who appears
here. We might forget the kind of historic vulnerability that these photographers,
and subjects, lived through (or died in). Instead, we must notice that this gay, or
drug-addled, or abused, or poor, or chimerical, or self-invented, or debauched, or
otherwise queer milieu of friends and lovers found themselves subject to the
brutality of AIDS (which killed Mark Morrisroe at the age of 30); to overdoses;
and, less specific to them, to a capitalist landscape that could not incorporate them:
The bohemian, the dropouts, the resistant, and the particularly fragile (112).
19 This book is about new possibilities and transcendence. The people in these
pictures are truly revolutionary; they are the real winners in the battle of the
sexes because they have stepped out of the ring. (Goldin, The Other Side 8).
20 Goldin, interviewed by Eade (16). Whatever the problems of self-mythology,
already noted, it would seem unnecessary not to say fallacious to treat all of
Goldins statements as untrustworthy. As I have tried to argue here, Goldin and
her Boston School colleagues did help to create a queer place; the statement cited
here seems a reasonable summary of a genuine credo.

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Ian Leask is a lecturer in philosophy in the School of Theology, Philosophy, and Music,
Dublin City University.

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