Ten years ago, if you got around much in the clubs and artists' spaces of downtown Manhattan, you might have found yourself at one of Nan Goldin's slide shows. Tattooed loveboys, innocents abroad, women on the verge of a nervous breakdown--in her slides they drank and smoked and coupled, or just deployed themselves gravely across the staging grounds of East Village life. Goldin had been taking pictures of herself and her friends since the early 1970s, first around Boston, where she was a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, then in the lofts and hangouts of New York City's Lower East Side. When she joined her slides to a sound track of French torch songs, gloom pop and Kurt Weill--music where the balance between real and false pathos was always shifting--the whole thing took on a desolate wit. Here were some buzz-cut kids cocked for trouble. There was a woman sorting herself out in a washroom mirror. Here was another rumpled bed, with another rumpled boyfriend. Hey! A home movie for the dispossessed.
One of Goldin's pictures, of a woman's thigh with a purplish mark, was called Heart-Shaped Bruise. That might well have been the name for the retrospective of her work that runs through Jan. 5 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Romantic melancholy is Goldin's true north, the mood she always returns to. Her friends laugh and party. They show off their tattoos and tutus. But they also brood and question the dead air with their eyes. They die from AIDS. In her self-portraits Goldin shows the injuries of a serious beating at the hands of a boyfriend--bruises are the regalia of romance here--and follows herself through drug and alcohol rehab. If these are party people, the party has loose ends, but they sometimes unravel in interesting ways.
Only sometimes. In 1986 many of the best pictures from her ever changing slide show were collected in a much talked about book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. And what Goldin has learned since then about the inexplicable pleasures of life is evident in a wonderful recent shot of her mother laughing. But when her own life's work faces you in bulk, at least in the 275-picture bulk hauled up by the Whitney, the slack starts to show. Goldin is a diarist, with a diarist's instincts for the ways into her own saga but also the same weakness for the dull stretches.
In her favor is the fact that she's also a tour guide. As photographers have been since the 19th century, she's a host in places below most people's equator, not just Lower Manhattan but the drag bars and sex clubs of Bangkok and Manila. All the same, some of Goldin's frontiers are well on their way to being settled. Thanks to Calvin Klein's skanky ad campaigns and the Broadway musical Rent, the same cast of dog-eared guys and Avenue B girls are everywhere. And drag? Never heard of it. Only kidding. RuPaul. Wong Foo. Switch on Good Morning America and there's Lady Chablis, the transvestite from John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. In a cooking segment, no less.