The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Nan Goldin · colour slides on 35 mm transparency film, projected in sequence to a recorded soundtrack of popular and operatic music, first shown in downtown New York clubs and bars about 1979 to 1981 and revised from showing to showing · the book, Aperture, New York, 1986, a printed sequence of the pictures with the photographer’s own introduction · Goldin’s own circle in New York, with Boston, Provincetown, Berlin, London and elsewhere · the unit scored is the slideshow and the book, 1979 to 1986, as one work; the later versions of the show, the prints made from the slides and the later bodies of work are context
Mode
Diaristic colour photography from inside a circle, made a work by sequence and sound
Mythos
The ballad of love and its wounding, Eros and its violence, closing on mortality; the frame taken from Brecht and Weill and built in the order of the sequence
Phase
About seven years of a shared life, 1979 to 1986, shown as a changing slideshow and fixed in a book
Presentation
Projected 35 mm colour slides in sequence to a recorded soundtrack; a printed book of the selection
Register
Tenderness and harm in one breath: lyric at night, dreadful in the morning, the love song set against the bruise
Scale
Some hundreds of frames, faces at arm’s length; one circle in one decade
Governing Proposition
Through the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s Nan Goldin photographed the people she lived with: couples in bed, friends in bars under the flash, men and women and drag queens in rooms on the Bowery and the Lower East Side, and herself. She showed the colour slides in the clubs where many of them were taken, in sequence and to music, to the people in them, and changed the sequence from showing to showing; in 1986 a selection was fixed as a book. The wager of the work is that intimacy and dependency are one bond, that the need which makes people tender is the need which makes them violent, and that a diary of one circle, set in order and sung over, can show it as a ballad shows a fate.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Nan Goldin, born in Washington, D.C., in 1953, photographed her own circle through the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, in New York above all, and in Boston, Provincetown, Berlin, London and elsewhere. She worked in colour, on 35 mm transparency film, and showed the slides projected in sequence to a recorded soundtrack of popular and operatic songs, first in the downtown clubs and bars of New York, about 1979 to 1981. The show was revised from showing to showing: slides came in and went out, and the order was rebuilt. In 1986 Aperture, in New York, published a selection of the pictures as a book in a fixed sequence, with Goldin’s own introduction. The book calls itself “the diary I let people read”.
The unit scored is the slideshow and the book, 1979 to 1986, as one work. The slideshow is the primary form, and carries The Living Form; the book carries the fixed sequence and much of what survives. Where they part, each is weighed for what it holds. The later versions of the show, the prints made from the slides as editions, in Cibachrome and other colour processes, and Goldin’s later bodies of work, the pictures of the AIDS years and of the 1990s and after, are context, and are not scored.
The title is taken from Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), from its song Die Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit, the ballad of a man who cannot get free of his desire. It builds the frame. A ballad is the song that tells a fate, and the sequence is laid out as one: couples, then the men, then the women, then sex, then the bruise, then the long reckoning, closing on mortality. The love songs of the soundtrack run against the bruises of the pictures, so that the old form is heard while the particular nights are seen.
Movement II
In the picture of Goldin and Brian in bed, made in New York in 1983, the light from the window divides the two figures: he is in the light, looking away, and she is in the shadow, looking at him. The framing is exact. The colour is the work’s own, the red and gold of lamplight, the hard flash that makes a face burn against black, and it is controlled where it looks careless. The blur, the grain, the cut-off limbs and the uneven exposure are the vernacular the work chose, and they carry its claim that these pictures were taken in the life, not staged for the camera.
The making is better than its reputation for roughness, and the sequencing to music is a craft of its own, built over years of showing. What holds The Made at 8.0 is range and consistency. Across some hundreds of frames many are ordinary snapshots that serve the sequence rather than stand alone, and the hand is not tested as a large-format or painted image tests it. The pictures of couples in bed reach a stillness close to devotion, the lyric half of the work’s elevation; most frames are ordinary nights, and their height is intimacy more than transport.
The law of the whole is the camera inside the circle. A party picture of friends laughing in a bar under the flash and the photographer’s own beaten face are taken by the same member of the same company, in the same light and colour and at the same nearness, and the music is the circle’s own music. The law runs from the bed to the hospital and from New York to Berlin, across tenderness and violence, comedy and grief. Its limit is the form’s looseness: a sequence revised many times and a book selected from it leave the bounds of the whole unfixed, and some frames obey the law only by having been taken there.
Movement III
In 1984 Goldin photographed herself a month after a beating: her own face, lipstick on, the eye blackened and its white blood-red. In the sequence the picture comes after the man and the bed, so that the viewer has already seen the tenderness the harm comes out of. This is the work’s sharpest disclosure and its hinge: here the photographer stops being the witness of dependency and becomes its subject, and the earlier pictures of the couple are read again. Take the self-portrait away and the work loses its turn; take the bed away and the portrait loses its cause.
What the work brings into the open can be stated and holds: that intimacy and dependency are one bond, that the need which makes people tender is the need which makes them violent, and that the struggle between autonomy and dependence runs through love of every kind, straight and queer, married and chosen. The heart-shaped bruise of 1980 is the title’s emblem in one frame. The disclosure lies in the relation the sequence draws, the same couples in tenderness and in harm, not in the shock of the subject. The Unconcealment stands at 8.6, held from the top because much of the force is a mood, the hot colour of night and the hangover of morning, and because the condition shown is one circle’s.
The archetype is built in the order and the sound, and evoked in the frame. The sequence tells the oldest story of love poetry, union and wounding, Eros and its violence, ending in death; but each picture remains, by design, a snapshot of a named friend on a dated night, and the deeper pattern is assembled rather than seen in any one image. The Archetypal Deep stands at 8.0, and it alone of the five gated axes falls short of the Epochal Gate.
Movement IV
Behind the work stand the documentary photograph of the margins, in Diane Arbus, Weegee and Lisette Model; the diary of a circle from within, in Larry Clark’s Tulsa, Warhol’s Factory and Ed van der Elsken; and the amateur colour snapshot. The departure is threefold. The photographer is a member, not a visitor, and is herself among the subjects at her worst. The colour is saturated and flash-lit at a time when serious photography still meant black and white. And the slideshow with a soundtrack, shown in clubs to the people in it, is the work’s form, not a way of showing prints.
The stake was real. The art world of the late 1970s took the colour slide for an amateur’s medium and the club for no gallery; the battered self-portrait cost Goldin her own privacy; and the subjects’ consent lay in the friendship. The Swerve stands at 8.6 and not higher because the turn gathers several already begun: Clark had made the insider’s diary, in black and white and in a printed book, and Warhol the circle as subject. Diane Arbus’s Identical Twins, a single image a decade older, stands at 8.0, ahead on The Inevitable and The Imperishable and behind on most else.
The form is the knowledge. Projected in sequence, the pictures pass and cannot be held, and that passing is the work’s knowledge of time and loss; the music lets the viewer hear what the subjects told themselves while seeing what happened to them; and the order makes every picture of tenderness a premonition of harm. As a book the work becomes an album leafed back and forth, still strong and a different knowledge; as framed prints it becomes a group of fine colour photographs. The Living Form stands at 8.5, held there by the two forms and by a sequence changed many times; the same looseness holds The Inevitable at 7.8, where the frame of the whole is necessary and an accumulation could be a quarter shorter.
Movement V
In the years after the book many of the people in the pictures died, and the slideshow’s last sections, which close on mortality, took on a weight their makers had not intended. The same frame of a couple reads as love, then as need, then as elegy. The questions the work has held for about four decades are real and have changed: voyeurism and consent within a circle of friends, whether the pictures glamorise the drugs they show, its place in the history of colour photography. Goldin’s later life and campaigns, and a recent documentary on her life and work, have drawn fresh attention to it. Much of the return is to the life rather than to depths in the single frame, and The Bottomless Well stands at 8.2.
The reach is wide and named. The diaristic colour photography of the next generation, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ryan McGinley, Corinne Day and Jack Pierson, works in the space the Ballad opened; the look passed into the fashion photography of the 1990s called heroin chic, which Goldin herself disowned. Pressure on Tradition stands at 8.6, held there by a turn shared with Clark and others and by a reach that is partly a borrowed look. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, a series of the same years with the photographer as her own subject, stands level at 8.2, ahead on form, law and reach, behind on elevation and archetype. Robert Frank’s The Americans, at 8.7, and Walker Evans’s American Photographs, at 8.6, the books of the tradition the Ballad turned from, stand above it.
At 47 years from the first showings and 40 from the book, the work survives whole in the book, which has been reprinted, and in Goldin’s later versions of the show; its presence in the history of photography is continuous, and the fabric of the slideshow, slides that fade and wear and a sequence with no single fixed state, is charged. It holds the self, the couple and the chosen family, sex and gender, violence, addiction, the city and mortality in one sequence, and little of labour, the state, history, the sacred or the natural order. The Epochal Gate is closed to it by The Archetypal Deep at 8.0. It stands at 8.2, in Tier IV.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is hard on a slideshow of some hundreds of frames, and the work’s own history answers it: the sequence changed from showing to showing, slides came in and went out, and the work remained itself. Most single frames are not required. What is required is the architecture: couples, then the men, then the women, then sex, then the bruise, then the long reckoning, so that the pictures of tenderness are read again in the light of the pictures of harm. Some frames bear the load past substitute: without the battered self-portrait of 1984 the photographer never becomes the subject of what she witnesses. The book is tighter than the show, but the method is accumulation, and an accumulation is easily imagined a quarter shorter. Necessity sits in the whole, not the parts.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What it brings into the open can be stated, and holds: that intimacy and dependency are one bond, that the need which makes people tender is the need which makes them violent, and that the struggle between autonomy and dependence runs through love of every kind, straight and queer, married and chosen. It discloses a social condition too, a life lived among friends as family at the edges of drag, drugs and sex work, shown from inside and without the condescension of the documentary visitor. Its sharpest disclosure is the self-portrait with the blackened eye, placed after the man and the bed. Held below the top because much of the force is a mood, the hot colour of the night and the hangover of the morning, and the condition is held to one circle.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is real and of two kinds. The lyric: Goldin’s colour, red light on skin, the gold of a lamp in a dark room, the flash that makes a face burn against black, and pictures of couples in bed that reach a stillness close to devotion. The dreadful: the battered self-portrait, the heart-shaped bruise, the faces in hospital and on the morning after. In the slideshow the music lifts these moments into song, and the projected light gives them a scale and a glow no print matches; the sequence rises again and again rather than once. What holds the axis is height. Most frames are snapshots of ordinary nights, their elevation intimacy more than transport, and the pull of the whole is cumulative, closer to the ballad than to grandeur.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The title builds the frame: a ballad, the song that tells a fate, and Brecht’s ballad of the man who cannot get free of his desire. The sequence is built on the oldest pattern of love poetry, the couple, its union and its wounding, Eros and its violence, and it closes on mortality, so that the nights of one circle tell the general story. The archetype is load-bearing in the arrangement: the order of couples, sexes and harms is the ballad’s form, and the love songs set against the bruises make the old form audible. Held below the gate because the myth is carried by the title, the music and the arrangement more than by the pictures: each image stays, by design, a snapshot of a named friend on a dated night. Myth built in the sequence, evoked in the frame.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance: the documentary photograph of the margins, in Arbus, Weegee and Lisette Model; the diary of a circle from within, in Larry Clark’s Tulsa, Warhol’s Factory and Ed van der Elsken; and the snapshot of amateur colour. The departure is threefold: the photographer as member, not visitor, and herself among the subjects at her worst; colour, saturated and flash-lit, when serious photography still meant black and white; and the slideshow to music, shown in clubs to the subjects themselves, as the work’s form. The stake was real: the art world took the colour slide for an amateur’s medium and the club for no gallery, and the battered portrait cost Goldin her own privacy. Held below the top because Clark had made the insider’s diary and Warhol the circle as subject.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely, in the slideshow. Projected in sequence, the pictures pass and cannot be held, which is the work’s knowledge of time and loss; the music sets the love song against the bruise, so that the viewer hears what the subjects told themselves while seeing what happened; and the sequence makes each picture of tenderness a premonition of harm. The diary form is the claim of truth: these were taken in the life, not staged. As a book the work loses the music and the passing and becomes an album leafed back and forth, still strong, a different knowledge; as framed prints it becomes a group of fine colour photographs. Held at 8.5 because it is famous chiefly through the second form, and the sequence has been changed many times.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise: about four decades. The work has sustained real and changing questions: voyeurism and consent within a circle of friends; whether the pictures glamorise the drugs they show; its place in the history of colour photography; and above all the reading after the AIDS years, when many of the subjects died and the slideshow’s last sections took on a weight their makers did not intend. Return yields: the same frame of a couple reads as love, then as need, then as elegy. Goldin’s later life and campaigns have drawn fresh attention to it. What holds the axis is that much of the return is to the life and its history rather than to depths within the single picture; the frames, read once, are read, and the work’s well is the sequence and its afterlife.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American and international art photography of the late 1970s and the 1980s. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of possibility. It made the flash-lit colour snapshot of one’s own circle a serious form, and made the slideshow with music a way photography could be shown as a work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the diaristic colour photography of the next generation, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ryan McGinley, Corinne Day and Jack Pierson, works in the space it opened, and the look passed into the fashion photography of the 1990s called heroin chic, which Goldin herself disowned. The reach is wide and specific. Held at 8.6 because the turn was shared with Clark and others, and some of the reach is a look borrowed rather than a method continued.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 47 years from the first showings and 40 from the book, in the row of 35 to 47 years, whose usual figure is given. Form: whole in the book, which fixes a sequence and has been reprinted; the slideshow stands in Goldin’s later versions, shown again in museums. Presence: continuous in the history of photography, and widened lately by a documentary on Goldin’s life and work. Fabric: charged. Colour slides fade and are worn by projection, and a work that changed at every showing has no single fixed state, so what survives of the show is a version, not the first. The book offsets this. Wide presence, with the slideshow’s own fabric and fixity charged.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of the colour snapshot, of available and flash light, and of sequencing to sound. The making is better than its reputation for roughness. The colour is controlled and personal, the red and gold of lamplight and the hard flash against dark; the framing of the best pictures is exact, as in the picture of Goldin and Brian in bed, where the window light divides the two figures, him in the light looking away, her in the shadow looking at him; and sequencing to music is a craft of its own, built over years. The roughness, blur, grain, cut-off limbs and uneven exposure, is the vernacular the work chose and bears its claim of truth. What holds the axis is range: many frames are ordinary snapshots that serve the sequence rather than stand alone.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a party picture, friends laughing in a bar under flash, and the battered self-portrait. They obey one law: the camera inside the circle, the picture taken by one of its members, in the same light and colour and at the same nearness. The law holds from the bed to the hospital and from New York to Berlin, and extends to the music, which is the circle’s own. The range is wide, from tenderness to violence and from comedy to grief, and the law governs all of it. What holds it below the upper band is a looseness inherent in the form: a sequence revised many times and a book selected from it, so that the bounds of the whole are not fixed, and some frames obey the law only as snapshots do, by being taken there.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The orders held: consciousness and the self, in the self-portraits; the couple and the chosen family; sex and gender, across straight and queer, men, women and drag; violence; addiction and the body; the city, its rooms and bars; and mortality, which closes the sequence. They are integrated in one structure, the sequence, and set against one another rather than listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: labour, though some of the subjects’ work is shown; the state and history, present only as the conditions of a life at the margins; the sacred; and the natural order. The breadth is wide for a photographic work and narrow for a world. The figure describes the form: one circle in one decade, held deeply.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment, The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Living Form at 8.5. Intimacy and dependency shown as one bond, by a sequence that sets the same couples in tenderness and in harm; a departure into colour, flash, self-exposure and the slideshow to music, made from inside the circle at real cost; a reach named in the diaristic colour photography that followed and in the fashion it fed; a book in print and a show still shown; and a form in which the pictures pass, to love songs, and cannot be held.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the self, the couple, sex and gender, violence, addiction, the city and mortality held in one sequence; labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order absent or thin; one circle in one decade. Next above it, The Inevitable at 7.8: the architecture of the sequence required, the frames an accumulation revised from showing to showing. Then The Sublime at 7.9: a lyric and a dreadful elevation that recur, at the height of intimacy more than transport.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment, The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 falls short by five tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5; and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 98.3, an average of 8.19 that displays 8.2, in the band of Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work, well in its kind and in its best known pictures, less well in its full running order: the slideshow’s sequence is not held slide by slide nor its soundtrack in full, and where a judgment turns on these it is held more loosely. The work scored is the slideshow and the book, 1979 to 1986, as one work: colour slides on 35 mm transparency film projected in sequence to a recorded soundtrack, first shown in downtown New York clubs and bars about 1979 to 1981 and revised from showing to showing, and the book published by Aperture, New York, in 1986, with the photographer’s introduction, which fixes a selection in a printed sequence. The later versions of the slideshow, the prints made from the slides as editions and Goldin’s later bodies of work are context and are not scored. The words quoted are the book’s description of itself, “the diary I let people read”; the title is from Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1928). The pictures are described rather than given by title, since the exact form of their titles could not be checked. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the show’s exhibitions in museums by name and year, its running time and slide count in any version, the number of plates in the book, the songs of the soundtrack, which museums hold the slideshow, and how the original transparencies have been copied or the show remade.