The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents Nan Goldin: Stories Retold—a career-spanning exhibition charting the evocative and highly personal work of one of America´s most significant artists. On through February 10, 2008, Nan Goldin: Stories Retold marks the American museum debut of Goldin´s Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls (2004), recently acquired by the MFAH.
This exhibition also coincides with Goldin´s receiving photography´s highest honor, The Hasselblad Award, in Göteborg, Sweden.
Curated by Alison de Lima Greene, MFAH curator of Contemporary Art and Special Projects, Nan Goldin: Stories Retold frames Goldin´s career with two room-size installations: an updated and unique version of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980-2006/2007), Goldin´s magnum opus, and Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls (2004), which tells the story of three women, inspired by the life and suicide of the artist´s older sister, Barbara. Also featured in the exhibition will be an important series of unique grids created over the past seven years, Goldin´s monumental Tokyo Spring Fever grid (1994-95), and iconic individual images from across the artist´s career. Works in the exhibition will be drawn from the MFAH permanent collection, as well as from a private Houston collection.
Dr. Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director, comments, "This exhibition is a tremendous opportunity for the museum to honor Nan Goldin. We have been committed to her work for many years and we are especially pleased to have acquired Goldin´s profoundly moving Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls installation, marking a new departure in Goldin´s life´s work. Her subsequent series of grids, never seen in public before, will be a revelation to both her fans and audiences new to her work."
"Nan Goldin is one of the most influential artists of our time," adds Greene. "Out of a deeply personal impulse to chronicle her own life and world, she has made the camera an unblinking witness, always truthful, always sympathetic. The stories she tells, and retells, through her ever-growing archive of images have become an integral part of American art and myth. From her single slide projections to her multifaceted exploration of film and grids, Goldin weaves a narrative that captures the complex paths of time and memory."
Since the early 1970s, Nan Goldin has created a vast body of work evolved from the informality and directness of snapshots. Employing light, color, and intimate framing to imbue her images with the experiential character of performance and film, Goldin broke down traditional barriers between photography, installation, and contemporary art. Goldin´s radical Ballad of Sexual Dependency (initially realized between the years 1980-86) was first seen in New York´s downtown alternative art spaces as a home movie, with Goldin running the projector and many of its subjects in the audience. The soundtrack was the soundtrack of her subjects´ lives, and it too evolved as Goldin gave shape to the world around her. Made up of over 600 individual images, Ballad is one of the essential documents of the 1980s, focusing on passionate connections and disconnections between friends and lovers.
The version of Ballad presented in Nan Goldin: Stories Retold consists of 622 slides and is itself a retelling of the original Ballad. Created in 2007, it is Goldin´s first major reediting of this landmark project in over ten years. Goldin extends her narrative to embrace new images, while remaining true to her original storyline. Running time is approximately 45 minutes, and the slide show will be presented in the exhibition every hour on the hour.
The passion of Ballad is matched by Goldin´s brilliant Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls. Using the latest advances in film, video, and sound technology, Goldin weaves together three stories across three screens: the martyrdom of the early Christian Saint Barbara; the desperate life of her sister Barbara against the backdrop of the Goldin family´s middle-class home life in Maryland; and Goldin´s own painful exploration of her life, addiction, and recovery. Accompanied by Goldin´s plainspoken narration, Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls traces a complex family history that travels from innocence to chaos, betrayal and in the end, redemption. Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls was purchased jointly in spring 2007 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
The essentially linear narratives of Ballad and Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls are complemented in the exhibition by Goldin´s remarkable grid compositions that offer a different approach to storytelling. Goldin uses the grid format to link together images that range across time and space, creating scenarios that are full of incident and narrative fragments. This extended series offers viewers a chance to reconsider Goldin´s iconic images afresh. Among the grids of view will be the MFAH´s Tokyo Spring Fever and recent grid compositions of extraordinary intimacy as Goldin focuses on close friends and family across several generations. For example, Simon Goldin describes the passage of childhood and adolescence into adulthood of Goldin´s nephew. X-Rated Grid and PG Grid revisit images from Ballad, while the Positive and The Plague grids honor lives affected by the AIDS virus. Goldin´s unblinking chronicle of her own encounters with addiction and recovery are documented by some of her most uncompromising works, including Trouble in Mind and Relapse/Detox. Many of these photographs will be seen for the first time in Houston.
Goldin´s ultimate message is one of belief in community and survival. In 1989, confronted by the plague of AIDS that wiped out a generation of friends, Goldin stated: ""AIDS changed everything. The people I feel knew me the best, who understood me, the people who carried my history, the people I grew up with and I was planning to get old with are gone. Our history got cut off at an early age. There is a sense of loss of self also, because of the loss of community." She went on to add, however, "I have also witnessed this community take care of its own, nurse its sick, bury its dead, mourn its losses, and continue to fight for each others´ lives. We will not vanish."
-- www.mfah.org
Comment and add to the story without registration, but keep the comments meaningful please. Links are not accepted.
