Nan after being battered, 1984, Nan Goldin
Agata Mlynczak
‘Is it true the ribs can tell
The kick of a beast from a
Lover’s fist? The bruised
Bones recorded well
The sudden shock, the
Hard impact. Then swollen lids,
Sorry eyes, spoke not
Of lost romance, but hurt.’
—Maya Angelou from ‘And Still I Rise,’ 1986
For Hayles (2006) the memory of trauma can be thought of as a total non-linguistic bodily experience—instead of words it operates with a code of images that comprise the victim’s ever-present, spectral body of pain. With this in mind in this essay I explore representations of sexuality and trauma, and their co-existence in contemporary art photography. What my analysis indicates is that the topic of female sexuality as a battle and the feminine body as a battlefield are not given enough space in artistic storytelling. Thus I find Sophie Calle’s disembodied approach to psychological trauma and the spectral embodiment of Nan Goldin’s physical trauma important to look at in detail. I will go in depth with two projects: ‘Exquisite Pain’ by Sophie Calle and ‘Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ by Nan Goldin—also with reference to Helen Chadwick’s work from 1989. They are candid photographic, narrative self-portraits of artists undergoing two different experiences of love betrayal. My focus is on their personalized visual codes depicting trauma within the body and identity. Comparing their visual notes on the specific traumatizing factors like: loss, attachment, abuse and sexuality, I will look at their treatment of the photographic documentary style in a diary-form and the differences between tendencies towards intervention and preservation. The analysis of the relationships between identity and trauma will follow a structure of consecutive arguments in sections: Sexuality and Identity, Trauma and Diaries, Expanded Identity and Environment, Approach to Truth, Abject and The Space of Trauma, Intervention and Preservation, Conclusion. And finally, I will conclude that the approach of both artists reflects that crystalizing the truth of their experience from memory and from mementos—diary photography—was of great importance in order for the diaries to have an artistic impact on their audience and also for the self de-traumatization of female identity post-trauma, through the medium of art, to work. All this for a creative, artistic realization of what is not love.
SEXUALITY, IDENTITY
In the photographic art project ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ by Nan Goldin the abusive is mixed together with the gratifying. The sexual dependency seems to mean the kind of addictive, sexual, dead-end companionship with the same person that also inflicts life-threatening harm and pain. Nan’s experience of a sexual bond is framed as a thing that perpetuated and normalized the unacceptable repetitive physical assault. The book was constructed out of 15 years’ worth of diary work. The tears are unavoidable and never seem to be the reason for putting the camera away. The picture of Nan ‘battered’ by her lover for the last time splits the book in half. The motto of the book—the author’s drive and mission—is stated in two sentences: ‘I don’t ever want to be susceptible to anyone else’s version of my history. I don’t ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again’ (Goldin: 2013). This unforgiving approach to ‘truth’ is supposed to ensure the legitimacy for her own new research into definitions of love, hate and intimacy that comprise the community of dependent people. We are witnesses to the evidence of those definitions’ factual existence. The Ballad is her external memory and attempt to ultimately comprehend the community that challenged the norms, gave her security yet, still sustained her self-destructive, co-dependent idea of romance.
Sophie Calle fabricates the narrative in her art pieces: she mixes facts with fiction or juxtaposes them making and remaking herself into a character that keeps getting redefined in her own artistic storytelling spread across the gathered super-opus of nearly her entire artistic achievement. Douleur Exquise (Exquisite Pain, 1984-2003) is a journal of pictures and text that is structured like the Georgian calendar—split into two eras. One that counts down to the year 0 and then the other that counts up from it as if it was the beginning of a new era. Calle’s character marks the date of the painful break-up of her romantic relationship as the point of no return (McFadden, 2014: 231).
Originally the work was presented as an installation in two parts: numbered photos from the trip counting down to the break-up and secondly, embroidered linen pieces with the artist’s personal story told from different angles and alternating with other people’s recollections of pain. Using the diary form—as if in an afterthought—she creates a controlled representation of the three moths leading up to the heartbreak and then months of the aftermath day by day—a recovery supplemented by a collection of ninety-nine stories of grief. Both works are self-prescribed medication for relapse into a cul-de-sac love.
TRAUMA and DIARIES
For Hooks (2000: 8) ‘Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse,’ and Hooks sacrificed a big part of her career to make women aware of the dangers of normalization of the co-existence of love and assault. She made a point about the kind of affection that silences the sensitivity towards a partner’s violent dominance in the simultaneous presence of their care. Finally, she has been an advocate of the view that this type of affection is not love. She was not the first one: Maya Angelou has written about it countless times such as the exerpt from ‘And Still I Rise’ above from the 1980s.
A similar distinction was made by the artists who manifest their hard-earned defiance of the ideal of a self-sacrificing, generous, mother-woman. Thus, they represent female sexuality as a culprit—an enemy that will make women fall prey to an abusive man. In this context, sexuality is a factor that desensitizes woman’s instinct for self-care. To describe sex Nan Goldin uses words like: consuming, battleground, gratification, and a conflict-intensifying exorcism; while Sophie Calle operates taking advantage of the absence of her body or any body at all. The space and her gaze upon it become the actual, ascetic, protagonist dehumanized by grief. At the end of the healing stories though the body remains a battlefield—in ‘Ballad’—and an absence—in ‘Exquisite Pain’, sexuality is not reclaimed, however it is exorcised from the toxic lover who becomes redefined by impending consequences of abuse denormalization.
Before that can happen the trauma has to be recognized. As ‘Grisellda Pollock suggests five defining features of trauma; perpetual presentness, permanent absence, irrepresentibility, belatedness and transmissibility’ (Pollock, 2013: 2). While Bracha (1999) brings attention to art’s capacity to heal, challenging Lacan’s concept of female psychology and claims that art labours between aesthetics and ethics by deepening and widening of the viewer’s threshold of fragility. This concept could be applied to the publishing of personal journals. If they seem authentic, diaries receive legitimacy needed for people to endorse any hitherto unfamiliar lifestyle. Their disarming honesty contributes to the expansion of viewers’ sensitivity and the creation of bonds involving understanding, compassion and empathy. Thus it can be argued that diaries have the healing power Ettinger is talking about— a potential to broaden cultural norms, undo taboos, deconstruct traumas and deepen society’s capacity for inclusive care.
Nan Goldin and Sophie Calle both use the diary format to make their intimate pain public. They both depict their bodies of trauma using images that no longer portray objects figuratively but the states of mind. They attempt to reconstruct the ‘irrepresentable’—permanent memory that is a non-verbal record escaping a literary description. In the case of Calle, the language of memory controls her and the overall situation, so she sets out to reclaim the control by organizing the sequence of photographic notes into a controlled, self-reflective series. This way she constructs the build up to the break-up. Yet thereafter, she limits herself to the repetitive jabs of the red telephone’s doom-laden presence indicative of her loss of identity as a picture-maker—her creative powerlessness in the face of the overwhelming image of trauma.
EXPANDING IDENTITY AND ENVIRONMENT
The identity in the end of both projects is shown as psychologically expanded by the inclusion of the community. Calle comes into a communion with acquaintances and strangers by exchanging painful stories and this inflicts a development in her approach to the story. The character of ‘Sophie Calle’ becomes expanded by the brutal and perhaps continually traumatizing confrontations with unknown suffering. Exposed to this process the artist points to her slow growth out of the despair by gradual brightening of color on the pages containing her post-traumatic story. This identity change stands in sharp contrast to exclusively first-person thoughts and experiences narrated in the first half of the book. There, Sophie Calle seems to be looking at herself from an informed distance.
In contrast, Goldin seems to include the entire community into her character from the start. I took Goldin’s initial claim about the queer notions of gender in her community as a key to understanding the inexplicable gendering of the groups of portraits. Controversially though, the artist puts exclusive focus on a destructive tension within a heterosexual relationship. This becomes apparent in the chapters that gather sets of portraits alternating between men and women: this binary division is followed by polarized identity expressions with the demonic inter-masculine bonds on group portraits confronted with the shyly tender single male portraits and juxtaposed as ‘the men’ with the attentive and sacrificing females. Both groups are equally dependent, yet, only one of them seems to act as the perpetrator. This homogeny points to the series being Nan Goldin’s own elaborate reconstruction of personal history using her friends as stand-ins for the scenes that were missing. This way, she presents herself as a manifold, spectral body with multiple expressions, engagements and looks: yet one desire and one pain. Thus the artist’s identity is dual—as an archetype in everyone’s mythology of sexual dependency and as one of the individual characters in the history of the fragile community.
APPROACH TO TRUTH
Nan Goldin seems to believe that her photographs are ‘true’ and that this is the sole and most important role of photography. Although the battered self-portrait of Goldin received a conflicted public response as a result of people’s distrust towards the photographic medium: people were questioning its authenticity. On the other hand, despite that she thought of it as a piece of a criminal evidence, the artist recalls many people that interpreted the picture to be an act of man’s love (in the ‘Afterword’). This is especially disappointing because term ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ seem to lay the foundations as to how she feels about her work—a crime-scene document, a love exorcism, a personal history.
Conversely, Sophie Calle was led to undergo a public conversation with a psychoanalyst investigating whether the story of ‘Exquisite Pain’ was real or fictional. She claimed that all was true and nothing was invented—that she is not able to invent. She also complained about the mistrust of the audience though she makes a distinction between ‘the truth’ and ‘what happened’. She says that presentation of a certain aspect of reality in an isolated manner does not make it the whole truth but it also does not mean that it did not happen.
ABJECT THE SPACE OF TRAUMA
If I bring in Helen Chadwick’s work from 1989, produced a series of light-boxes talking about trauma through photographic compositions of cut-out—almost sampled—sections of body. The series includes eleven works, which came out one by one over a period of time yet, were gathered under a collective title ‘Meat Lamps’. While being suggestive of femininity, they are a conceptual venture into sexuality, desire and the nature of the body and body representation. ‘Enfleshings I’ and II were followed by ‘Eroticism’ that consisted of two images of naked and vulnerable human brains installed in close relationship to each other. The neighboring sides of the organs are illuminated by a blue light—a suggestion of a gravity force filling up the negative space: the sticky brains are lying alone, bodiless and detached in what looks like satin sheets—a sight painful to watch. In my interpretation, Chadwick portrayed a relationship of two traumatizing fragilities. A dissected ‘body and mind’ entity in a state of an intimate interaction with its own reflection: two non-erotic meat-like pieces of flesh and their nevertheless charged negative space. In this case it could be said that she focused on sexuality as an extension of thought across a traumatizing space.
What comes out of it is that the proximity and the environment become the traumatizing factors. Similar to Calle’s work, where the lack of any proximity to the loved one turns into a haunting presence among the heavy nothingness of the empty rooms/material objects that is the loss and that is the trauma. The body of the artist becomes the abject art that the audience is not allowed to look at. The gaze is directed towards the image from inside the tormented psyche. The distancing and the absence are so pertinent that Calle becomes her voice transmitting a variety of other people’s traumas: she transforms herself into a pit-stop for them, a balloon soul tied to the ground, exposed to the winds. And, she shows us how the trauma erodes. Yet before this happens, it is the landscape of the lonely negative space around the eye (and the mind’s eye) of the artist that becomes the torturer. Conversely, Nan Goldin gives great attention to the closeness of the bodies of her old companions and their impact on one another’s fragility. Golden shows the stuffiness of collective living. The proximity of the loving flesh and the aching flesh is the trauma of that habitat visually painted by flash-illuminated skin in claustrophobic darknesses.
INTERVENTION VS PRESERVATION
Calle is aware of her role as a present artist whose actions are her projects, while Goldin acts more as a documentarist who captures, categorizes, organizes and presents a memento, she is on a quest for taking charge of her own feelings. Despite the fact that she mostly works with documentary techniques, her artwork’s coming into being depends on her intervention. The results of her actions are unknown and undersigned—it is a journey of discovery. In case of ‘Exquisite Pain’—in a situation when something unexpectedly traumatic happens to her—she reacts with an attempt to take back control and keep reconstructing the tormenting memory of the events surrounding it until it becomes a public story, susceptible to manipulation, redesign; or in other words an exorcism from the private experience of pain. The project is about transforming one’s unbearable intimacy with pain. The confrontations with different pain-evoking stories seem to be enforced by the artist to control, lessen and overcome. The privacy of the traumatic experiences brought up in ‘Exquisite Pain’ seems redundant. Calle is not withholding painful stories due to the fact that their universal nature makes the knowledge of them helpful for people living with those pains. Thus here, I interpret making the personal public as the artist’s answer to confronting trauma.
CONCLUSION
The art of Nan Goldin is both in harmony and opposition to abject art. Coined by Julia Kristeva in 1980, this term covers the concept of elements which are cast-off from the public eye and, as the trend in art, it focused on revealing various hidden aspects of life defying the culturally-imposed notions of their repugnancy, dirtiness and inappropriateness. The post-traumatic memorial series of ‘Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ could be interpreted as an attempt to make space in the public consciousness for the types of passions that would be considered lazy, non-guilt-free and toxic. Their hidden, romantic, addictive and communion-like ambiguity though seems to be a secret power that unrevealed becomes a dangerous abject for the victims of a love trauma. A similar ambition for defying a binary perception of good and bad emotions is transmitted by Sophie Calle when she asks other people to expose their traumatic memories in their entire crushing bitter-sweetness. What follows, for Sophie Calle is actively overcoming the Lacanian conceptual marriages of femininity and psychosis, the feminine and art object, the feminine and loss, and the feminine and sacrifice. With a special attention to the loss and the self-sacrifice she transforms her own experience and puts it in perspective as not to get seduced by the melancholic despair. Nan Goldin is pin pointing the devastating results of the western model of a ‘good life’ and thus a good love. Without commenting on it directly the artist seems to set out to reveal the treachery of the glorious dream of ever-lasting, romantic, self-sacrificial, feminine love. She reveals her inattention by giving the audience ironic hints, for instance, the series opens and closes with ‘out-of-character’ diptychs of old couples and other images. The people on the first picture seem to be a reflection of the accompanying image—the inanimate ‘prefect’ bodies of the shopping display mannequins—while, on the last spread in the book this order is reversed and the second elderly couple sees their reflection in two graffitied corpses forever locked in a passionate kiss—as if torn by abusive dependency even in the afterlife. This occurs to me as Goldin’s ironic remark about the dangerous dream of ‘pure’ love. Thus ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ is part a cautionary tale and part a deconstruction of specific, mysterious, romantic impossibilities that have to occur in order to sweep away the traumatic traces leading to a potential relapse. Thus, after Bracha Ettinger’s ideas on the memory of trauma, Nan Goldin can be interpreted as setting out to expand both her own as well as the viewer’s blocked sensitivity and de-traumatise the nature of this memory. Thus the idea of toxic romantic love becomes deconstructed in order for a future model to come in.
Bibliography
Calle, S. (2005). Exquisite pain. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Ettinger, Bracha (1999) ‘Art as the Transport Station of Trauma’, pp. 91-116 in Art Working 1985–1999, Brussels: Palais des Beaux Arts and Ghent: Ludion.
Goldin, Nan (2013). Ballad of sexual dependency. New York: Artbook D A P.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2006) ‘Traumas of Code’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 1, https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/traumas_of_code_by_n._katherine_hayles
Hooks, Bell (2000) All About Love: New Visions, New York: Harper. p. 8.)
McFadden, Cybelle (2014) Gendered Frames Embodies Cameras: Varda, Ackerman, Cabrera, Calle, and Maïwenn, Lanham: Farleigh Dickinson UP.
Pollock, Grisellda (2013) After-Affects/After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Rethinking Art’s Histories), New York: Manchester University.
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