Nan Goldin
Introduction
Ballad Triptych, 1977-86/95
Twenty-seven mounted Cibachrome prints
"We all tell stories which are versions of history -memorized, encapsulated, repeatable, and safe…. Stories can be rewritten, memory can't. If each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to the experience of memory, a story without end."
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1986, p. 6
Nan Goldin first gained the art world's attention in the early 1980s with her autobiographical slide show entitled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Ballad Triptych is a unique compilation of images borrowed from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which reached a definitive state and was published in book form in 1986. Created in the mid-1990s, this grid - like the earlier slide show - explores the nature of intimacy, sexual addiction, and what the artist has termed "the struggle between autonomy and dependency." She acknowledges that her work is indebted to the "snapshot" aesthetic. "It's the form of photography," she explains, "that is most defined by love. People take them out of love, and they take them to remember - people, places, and times. They're about creating a history by recording a history" ("On Acceptance: A Conversation: Nan Goldin Talking with David Armstrong and Walter Keller," Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror. New York: 1996, p. 450).
The unusual format - twenty-seven photographs, three high and nine across, beautifully printed in vibrant colors - is only a small part of the formal power of this piece. Goldin's sequencing of the photographs is carefully designed with juxtapositions and congruencies honed from years of producing slide shows in New York City clubs. Together, the images possess narrative qualities that allow them to be "read" in any number of ways: as three independent pieces (thematically focused on females, males, and couples); or as a unified whole composed of twenty-seven lives, which together
Jan Howard
Exhibition images
