All The Beau­ty and the Bloodshed

Nan Goldin leaves no moment uncap­tured. Hers is a world as intense as it is var­ied, as pos­ses­sive as it is for­giv­ing. It unrav­els and gains its tex­ture in dim­ly-lit homes and night­clubs, on messy motel beds, in spaces shaped by and for the peo­ple who exist in them. Peo­ple enveloped in the haze of sex and drugs, of inti­mate and vio­lent encoun­ters, of rela­tion­ships that give life and those that take it. Her sem­i­nal con­tri­bu­tions to the world of art and activism make for the per­fect doc­u­men­tary sub­ject for a film­mak­er of Lau­ra Poitras’ calibre.

“I sur­vived the opi­oid cri­sis. I nar­row­ly escaped.” Goldin nar­rates from her heart­break­ing essay pub­lished in Art­fo­rum mag­a­zine in 2018, before going on to reveal an ongo­ing and tire­less fight to expose the hubris that unleashed suf­fer­ing of bib­li­cal pro­por­tions. Many of the lives claimed by the opi­oid cri­sis had their start with the pre­scrip­tion painkiller Oxy­Con­tin. This lethal opi­oid was man­u­fac­tured and ruth­less­ly mar­ket­ed as a ​“mir­a­cle drug” by Pur­due Phar­ma, a com­pa­ny owned by the bil­lion­aire Sack­ler fam­i­ly known for their lav­ish dona­tions to the arts. Their fam­i­ly name has long stained the walls of count­less insti­tu­tions – from MoMA, the Met and The Guggen­heim, to the Lou­vre, the Tate Mod­ern, and the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery – their vast for­tune amassed by means of wash­ing their ​“blood mon­ey” clean through the pub­lic façade of cul­tur­al philanthropy.

Goldin’s own expe­ri­ence with addic­tion led her to spear­head the fight against sys­temic injus­tice, form­ing the advo­ca­cy group Pre­scrip­tion Addic­tion Inter­ven­tion Now (PAIN). Not only to shame the filthy rich bas­tards whose grotesque, mer­ce­nary greed played a huge part in man­u­fac­tur­ing the opi­oid cri­sis; not only to draw atten­tion to the art world’s com­plic­i­ty; but to tan­gi­bly address the effects of the cri­sis by tack­ling harm reduc­tion and the stig­ma sur­round­ing addiction.

Part life-span­ning artist por­trait and part chron­i­cle of Goldin’s efforts to bring down the Sack­lers, All the Beau­ty and the Blood­shed exca­vates the deeply-root­ed trau­ma and life force behind Goldin’s work. Her activism stems not just from her his­to­ry with addic­tion to Oxy­Con­tin, but a life coloured by men­tal ill­ness, drug abuse and the deaths of friends and fam­i­ly. Her vast body of work is inex­orably root­ed in the deep scar tis­sue made per­ma­nent by the sharp dag­gers of loss. In allow­ing these inter­con­nect­ed sec­tions to con­verge, Poitras lends a deeply propul­sive ener­gy to the con­nec­tions and polit­i­cal through­lines that are so dex­ter­ous­ly drawn between them.

The film details Goldin’s upbring­ing against the back­drop of 1960s sub­ur­bia – that hellscape bound by repres­sion, con­ven­tion and homo­gene­ity. When Goldin was only 11, her 18-year-old sis­ter Bar­bara (to whom the film is ded­i­cat­ed) saw that sui­cide was the only way to bat­tle the repres­sion of her sex­u­al­i­ty. ​“All the beau­ty and the blood­shed” is a quote direct­ly pulled from a men­tal health eval­u­a­tion writ­ten by a psy­chi­a­trist at one of the insti­tu­tions Bar­bara was sent to before tak­ing her life. Oth­er sig­nif­i­cant loss­es came through the AIDS epi­dem­ic which scythed through the queer sub­cul­tures of NYC and beyond.

It was dur­ing these years that Goldin estab­lished her­self as one of the most excep­tion­al artists of her gen­er­a­tion. Those were the years filled with vio­lence, cen­sor­ship and grief, the loss of Low­er East Side star­let Cook­ie Mueller and close friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor David Woj­narow­icz, the pro­found loss of inno­cence through vio­lence as embod­ied in the full-frontal view of Goldin’s mop of curls sur­round­ing her bruised face after being beat­en by an abu­sive ex. These aspects of Goldin’s life are one and the same – her ear­ly work, her prox­im­i­ty to the AIDS epi­dem­ic and the ACT UP protests that led to her activism work with PAIN, prompt a thor­ough under­stand­ing of what it means when activism works in tan­dem with art.

As with her sis­ter before her, Goldin would move from one fos­ter fam­i­ly to anoth­er, and in grow­ing accus­tomed to the feel­ing of alien­ation, became eter­nal­ly infat­u­at­ed with life on the fringes. In los­ing the mem­o­ry and tan­gi­ble sense of her sis­ter, Goldin vowed nev­er to lose the real mem­o­ry of any­one again – a desire that is a sub­ject in itself with­in her pho­tographs: to hold onto, pre­serve and restore a tac­tile sense of bear­ing wit­ness by com­mit­ting images to eter­ni­ty. It makes sense, then, that she would choose to col­lab­o­rate with Lau­ra Poitras, a film­mak­er with a bone-deep under­stand­ing of the urgency of bear­ing witness.

“This is not a bleak world,” Goldin writes in her pre­scient pref­ace to ​‘The Bal­lad of Sex­u­al Depen­den­cy’, the pho­to­graph­ic land­mark that dis­tilled the essence of ​’80s down­town life, ​“But one in which there is an aware­ness of pain, a qual­i­ty of intro­spec­tion.” Like all bal­lads, its ver­nac­u­lar is sim­ple and con­crete, its sequenc­ing mea­sured and metic­u­lous. Louche lovers, friends and strangers sprawled in bath­tubs, lying supine on sofas and across the backs of con­vert­ibles – peo­ple bond­ed not by blood, but by a sim­i­lar moral­i­ty, the need to live ful­ly and for the moment – seen in can­did light, cap­tured in and out of bed in pre- and post-coital moments, pos­ing, cel­e­brat­ing, immor­talised with fer­al imme­di­a­cy. The rich mélange of expe­ri­ence as depict­ed through her trade­mark slideshows has the pow­er to resist, rup­ture and make noise, to move against the tide of ​“good taste”.

Tread­ing new emo­tion­al ground with art­ful mea­sure in her piv­ot to artist por­trai­ture, Poitras soaks the film in the sen­su­al­i­ty, can­dour and affec­tion of Goldin’s pho­tog­ra­phy by punc­tu­at­ing the sev­en inter­con­nect­ed chap­ters (each relat­ing to a dif­fer­ent por­tion of Goldin’s life) with her col­lab­o­ra­tors’ slideshows flick­er­ing to their eclec­tic sound­tracks of opera, ​’60s pop and ​’70s rock. The effect is noth­ing short of beguil­ing. Sharp, intre­pid and com­pas­sion­ate in her direc­tion, Poitras casts the view­er under a hyp­not­ic spell that’s equal­ly charged by Goldin’s rec­ol­lec­tions on the per­son­al tragedies that have helped to moti­vate her fight against the Sacklers.

This is Goldin’s film as much as it is Poitras’. In the same way arti­fice would cor­rupt a Nan Goldin pho­to­graph, gloss and glam­or­i­sa­tion don’t belong in a Lau­ra Poitras doc­u­men­tary – her work sel­dom suc­cumbs to bleak­ness for dra­mat­ic effect. Bold struc­tur­al ambi­tion under­cuts the vis­cer­al, com­plex strug­gle between auton­o­my and depen­dence that’s baked into the core of Goldin’s work, with the sheer range of media and ver­sa­tile dis­cus­sion chan­nelling the bot­tom­less wells of rage and pain into a war against Goliath.

The pan­theon of art-led protest has gained a for­mi­da­ble ring­leader in Nan Goldin, who brings strik­ing aes­thet­ic direc­tion to PAIN’s deft­ly-staged actions. Hun­dreds of orange pre­scrip­tion bot­tles labelled ​‘Pre­scribed to you by the Sack­ler fam­i­ly’ are launched into gal­leries and sev­er­al mass ​‘die-in’s’ are staged on muse­um grounds. Goldin’s vast his­to­ry with addic­tion and loss allow her to tack­le this con­flict with a strong­ly per­son­al, life-span­ning per­spec­tive, to ensure that at least one domain over which the Sack­lers sought influ­ence is forced to reck­on with fund­ing cul­ture through taint­ed funds. Vic­to­ries are small yet tan­gi­ble, and come in the form of reject­ed dona­tions by arts insti­tu­tions and the removal of the Sack­ler name from the walls of many wings and galleries.

As an arte­fact of the invalu­able inter­sec­tion between artis­tic effort and prag­mat­ic resis­tance, All the Beau­ty and the Blood­shed is a tes­ta­ment to the dialec­tic of form and con­tent, of art­work and social real­i­ty as a cru­cial, active­ly-engaged site of polit­i­cal strug­gle, an apt bat­tle­ground in the fight against all-per­va­sive cap­i­tal­ist monoliths.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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