The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

For thirty-five years Nan Goldin has obsessively recorded her life experiences, and her slide installation The Ballad of Sexual Dependency represents the zenith of this endeavor. A hybrid of photography, film, and installation art, the work projects hundreds of Goldin’s photographs in a unique sequence, accompanied by a specified soundtrack. Images representing couples, gender roles, dependency, and alienation are paired with evocative songs such as Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made of This.” It is appropriate that images of her subjects’ fantasies and sorrows should be realized as short-lived projections. The slide projector was adopted as an artistic vehicle in the 1960s and 1970s for public performance-based work, and The Ballad codifies more performative presentations by the artist in the clubs and cinemas of 1980s New York’s artistic demimonde. Goldin’s pictures, like images of family vacations or holidays, embrace photography’s potential for immediacy, emotion, and anecdote. Unlike such snapshots, however, they capture Goldin, her friends, and her family in moments of intimacy—lovemaking, violence, addiction, hospitalization—and depict the rollercoaster of human emotions that accompanies these moments. In this way, The Ballad offers a more exposed, and potentially more honest, version of the traditional domestic slideshow.