5 pages reaserch essay

Ian Leask

“THE CARAVAGGIO WITHIN”

Nan Goldin’s Gina

This article offers a reading of Nan Goldin’s 1991 photo “Gina at Bruce’s dinner party, NYC”, giving particular attention to the presence within it of a reproduction of Caravaggio’s 1597 “Bacchus”. It considers some similarities and differences between the two images and, drawing on Kierkegaard’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s photography has effaced the deliberate “exhibitionism” of her approach: for Burbridge, Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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, 131–143, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2017.1289115 © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

at Bruce’s 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 Caravaggio’s 1597 Bacchus. I want to consider what this “Caravaggio within” might mean, and how it might exemplify Goldin’s 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 Jarman’s eponymous 1986 movie (see also Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio), but also, for example, Champagne (2015, esp. 55‒84), who — in part — locates Caravaggio’s homoeroticism in the context of a Counter-Reformation stress on sensuality and the erotic; Bersani and Dutoit (Caravaggio’s Secrets), who stress the concealment and evasion that accompanies the erotic invitation in Caravaggio; Hamill (2000, esp 63‒96), who locates Caravaggio as part of a wider, carnal, resistance to Renaissance norms and “civilizing” processes; Aebisher (2013, esp. 20‒65), who concentrates on Jarman’s 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 70‒73).

Secondly, there is the direct influence of Caravaggio on Goldin’s 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 Caravaggio’s 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 Goldin’s 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-à-vis Greek recollection (or anamnesis); and fourth, further consideration of Gina in terms of Goldin’s wider oeuvre, with

132 PHOTOGRAPH I ES

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 Goldin’s 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 Jürgen Teller, Corrine Day, Wolfgang Tillmans and Ryan McGinley, for example, seems unthinkable without Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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. “I’m not some sort of documentarian of other people’s worlds”, Goldin has said (85); more famously, she has insisted that “I’m 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 another’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s formal and historical awareness becomes central for approaching Gina, my main concern.

NAN GOLD IN ’S G INA 133

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 Gina’s face is the centre-piece; but the composition serves to take the viewer’s 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 Gina’s 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 Goldin’s Gina and Caravaggio’s 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 viewer’s 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,

Fig. 1. NanGoldin,Gina at Bruce’s 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. GuggenheimMuseum,NewYork Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee andwith

funds contributed by the International Director’s 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

134 PHOTOGRAPH I ES

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 Goldin’s 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 Caravaggio’s 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 Goldin’s reference point demands further attention.

Bacchus in context

Caravaggio’s 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 painter’s “grittiness”, some particular details of the Bacchus picture are worth highlighting.

First, we need to register the decidedly queer aspect of Caravaggio’s painting: as Puglisi has noted, “[t]he figure’s 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 Ovid’s 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, Caravaggio’s 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 Goldin’s 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 1593–1594; 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 Caravaggio’s “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 Caravaggio’s god now has dirty fingernails, a pale chest and a farmer’s 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

NAN GOLD IN ’S G INA 135

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 Goldin’s 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, Caravaggio’s own iconoclasm). Far from constituting the opposite or contrary of Goldin’s Gina, then, Caravaggio’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Søren 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

136 PHOTOGRAPH I ES

position only serves to underline our distance from it: describing the attempt to recreate a previous experience (at the Königstädter 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 repetition’s 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 148‒9). 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 thought’s 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 Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, should take such important bearings from Kierkegaard, the “thinker-comet” who “bring[s] to philosophy new means of expression” (Deleuze 7–8). 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 Caravaggio’s 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

NAN GOLD IN ’S G INA 137

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 Caravaggio’s 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 repetition’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Balboni’s home in New York were used to show slides of Goldin’s “family” to her “family” (Gina included), long before her work was well known.15 Depictions of Goldin’s circle were thus — quite literally — posited on the same plane as Caravaggio’s androgynous model; the looking-glass of a Goldin slide- show allowed Bacchus to burst directly into Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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-à-vis an important part of Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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

138 PHOTOGRAPH I ES

is in his “internal” depiction. The contrast between the “two Brians” increases the photograph’s 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.) Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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

NAN GOLD IN ’S G INA 139

enough — the recollection of Caravaggio’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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 Goldin’s 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”; Goldin’s work, Ruddy argues, is able “to transform and question the grammar of representation and hence its effects on remembered history” (353). Ruddy’s 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 Kaplan’s 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 Bruce’s 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 (32–5) and Kaplan. 2 See, for example, Dyer (164–7) on the role of the bed in Goldin’s 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

140 PHOTOGRAPH I ES

exhibition is rarely judged an outright failure because that would suggest a moral criticism of the photographer’s life, as well as of their motivations” (Cotton 141):

4 Throughout, I employ “queer” (and its cognates) in order to draw on the term’s 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 latter’s 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 … They’re about creating a history by recording a history” (Goldin, The Ballad 19. See also Kaplan 11–13). As Burbridge has pointed out, however, we may be well advised to treat with caution some of Goldin’s 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. 207–209); 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 Goldin’s later work becomes increasingly formulaic is beyond the scope of this essay. (See, though, Kotz). More recently, Burbridge seems to find Goldin’s 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, McClure’s 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 Goldin’s 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, 207–244).

13 Hibberd compares the slightly earlier (and more obviously god-like) Bacchus of Annibale Carracci: “Caravaggio’s closet Bacchus is a different breed”, he suggests (43).

14 We should notice an ambiguity in Kierkegaard’s treatment, overall. In The Concept of Irony, for example, Kierkegaard differentiates Socratic and Platonic recollection (36–7). 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 Costa’s note: “Goldin and her friends, including Gina, used to meet at Bruce’s house for dinner, and the photographer would show slides of everyone present” (62).

NAN GOLD IN ’S G INA 141

16 I borrow this notion from Stoichita. For wider treatment of the “meta-picture” in art history, see, too, Carrier (197–200) or Verstegen (513–26).

17 Kaplan (14) points out that the beauty spot on Ivy’s right cheek mirrors the mark on Marilyn’s 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 Goldin’s 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.

Works cited

Aebisher, P. Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Bersani, L, and U Dutoit. Caravaggio’s Secrets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Bersani, L., and U Dutoit. Caravaggio. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Bright, S. Art Photography Now. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. Burbridge, B. Paradise Lost: Exhibitionism and the Work of Nan Goldin. Either/And [Online].

2015. <http://eitherand.org/exhibitionism/paradise-lost-exhibitionism-and-work- nan-goldin/>

Carrier, D. “On the Depiction of Figurative Representational Pictures within Pictures.” Leonardo 12 (1979): 197–200.

Champagne, J. “Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama. Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Costa, G. Nan Goldin. London: Phaidon, 2001. Cotton, C. The Photograph as Contemporary Art. 3rded. London: Thames & Hudson, 2014. Danto, A. “Nan Goldin’s World.” The Nation Dec. 2 (1996): 32–5. Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press, 1994. Dyer, G. The Ongoing Moment. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005. Eade, M. “Nobody Symbolizes Anything.” Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review 4/3 (1997): 16. Frontain, R.J. “Caravaggio.” The Queer Encyclopedia of Visual Arts. Ed. Claude J. Summers.

Hudson, NJ: Cleiss Press, 2004. 70–3. Gilbert, C. Caravaggio and the Two Cardinals. Pennsylvania: Penn. State University Press,

1995.

142 PHOTOGRAPH I ES

Goldin, N. The Other Side. New York: Scalo, 1993. Goldin, N. Couples and Loneliness (With Taka Kawachi). Kyoto: Korinsha Press, 1998. Goldin, N. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. New York: Aperture, 2004. Hammil, G. Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe and Bacon. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2000. Hibberd, H. Caravaggio. London: Thames & Hudson, 1983. Jarman, Derek. Derek Jarman’s ‘Caravaggio’: The Complete Film Script and Commentaries.

London: Thames & Hudson, 1986. Kaplan, L. “Photography and the Exposure of Community: Sharing Nan Goldin and

Jean-Luc Nancy.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6 3 (2001): 7–30. Kierkegaard, S. Fear and Trembling & Repetition. Trans. & Ed. H. & E. Hong. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1983. Kierkegaard, S. Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy. Trans. & Ed. H & E

Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Kierkegaard, S. The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. Trans. & Ed. H & E

Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Kotz, L. “Aesthetics of “Intimacy”’.” The Passionate Camera. Photography and Bodies of Desire.

Ed. Deborah Bright. London: Routledge, 1998. 204–15. McClure, M. “Prima Facie: The Photograph, the Unphotographed, and the Boston

School.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 15 (2014): 103–20. Moir, A. Caravaggio. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1989. Posner, D. “Caravaggio’s Homoerotic Early Works.” Art Quarterly 34 (1971): 301–24. Puglisi, C. Caravaggio. London: Phaidon, 1998. Qualls, L. “Performance/Photography.” Performing Arts Journal 17 (1995): 26–34. Rice, S. “Crosscurrents: Models, Migrations, and Modernisms.” Role Models. Feminine

Identity in Contemporary American Photography. Ed. Susan Fisher Sterling et al. Washington: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2008. 23-33, at 23.

Ruddy, S. “‘A Radiant Eye Yearns from Me”: Figuring Documentary in the Photography of Nan Goldin.” Feminist Studies 35.2 (2009): 347–80.

Schneede, U. “Foreword”. Emotions and Relations. Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Cologne: Taschen, 1998. 8.

Sontag, S. On Photography. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Stoichata, V. The Self-Aware Image. an Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting. Trans. Anne-

Marie Glasheen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Verstegen, I. “Between Presence and Perspective: The Portrait-In-A-Picture in Early

Modern Painting.” Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte 71.4 (2008): 513–26.

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

NAN GOLD IN ’S G INA 143

Copyright of Photographies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.