黑白对白
黑白对白插画画廊
uid: 26876
级别: 资深会员
精华: 8
发帖: 868
威望: 653 点
积分: 1521 分
推广值: 0 点
注册时间:2005-06-04
最后登陆:2009-06-16
|
The AI Interview: Nan Goldin 的访谈
by Robert Ayers
Self-Portrait at My Sister's Graveyard, Virginia, 2004
Nan Goldin
Sunset Like Hair, Sete, France, 2003
Nan Goldin
Self-Portrait at New Year's Eve, Malibu, 2006
Nan Goldin
Fairy Light in Cherry Blossoms, NY, 2004
Nan Goldin
Simon at Twilight, The Boston Gardens, 2005
Nan Goldin
Falling Buildings, Rome, 2004
Nan Goldin
Bridge Down to the Train Tracks, Silver Spring, MD, 2004
Nan Goldin
Nan and Brian in Bed, NYC, 1983
Nan Goldin
Gina at Bruce's Dinner Party, NYC, 1991
Nan Goldin
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, 1991
Nan Goldin
The Sky on the Twilight of Philippine's Death, Winterthur, 1997
Nan Goldin
Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, NYC, 1983
Nan Goldin
Joan Crawford on Fire, Thanksgiving, NJ, 2005 (a benefit print, in an edition of 100, available for $450)
Nan Goldin
Few artists’ lives have been as intimately interconnected with their art as Nan Goldin’s. Throughout her career, she has used photography as what she once famously called “the diary I let people read.” So we have witnessed the ups and downs of her life in greater detail than has often seemed comfortable.
With her current exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, however, she takes us closer to her own psychological edge than ever before. The show is called Chasing a Ghost, and it includes the unforgettable and frankly distressing three-screen slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints, & Sybils.
This piece premiered in Paris in 2004 and, after a brief prelude telling the story of Saint Barbara, it focuses in excruciating detail on Goldin’s sister Barbara’s suicide—and upon Goldin’s own hospitalization and stays in detox clinics. Goldin spoke to ArtInfo on the eve of her departure for Moscow, where she is showing at the city’s Museum of Modern Art as part of the Photobiennale.
Chasing a Ghost, the first installation by the artist to include moving pictures and a fully narrative score and voiceover, is on view at Matthew Marks' West 24th Street location through April 22.
Nan, people are talking about Sisters, Saints, & Sybils as a real development in your work—a step away from the slide shows and in the direction of cinema.
It has been promoted as if it’s the first time, but I’ve made a couple of movies with collaborators before. I made a movie with the BBC in 1995 called I’ll Be Your Mirror, and I shot my own video in that, and worked on the editing for a couple of weeks, and was very involved in the whole process. And I made another film about AIDS with someone who used to be a friend of mine in Paris.
So is it true to say that you’re moving in the direction of cinema, and that the slide shows are a sort of halfway house?
I do want to make movies. That’s been my desire since I was a child. I’m supposed to be making a longer-version movie of this same piece for Arte TV.
But here it’s in this three-screen version. It rather reminds me of the triptych format that you use in some of your photographs.
The idea came out of the architecture of the Salpêtrière in Paris, which is the oldest mental hospital for women and prostitutes in the city. That’s where it was developed and that was where it was shown in 2004, and that’s really the context of the piece.
It was an incredible piece because it was done on three huge screens, 50 meters across. It’s was a collaboration with Raymonde Couvre—she’s a scenographer—and the idea of using three screens came out of her suggestion of using the three arches in the middle of the chapel. But it also goes with the triptych of Saint Barbara, my sister Barbara and myself. There was constantly the idea of a triptych.
Tell me a bit about Saint Barbara. Because it comes at the very beginning, her story of confinement and martyrdom rather sets the tone for the whole of the rest of the piece, I thought.
The story of Saint Barbara is not very much fleshed out in this version of the film. But at the Salpêtrière Chapel, which is 35 meters high, we had Swiss alpine climbers go up and lower black felt over the windows, leaving three windows uncovered. This is part of the miracle of Saint Barbara—there were only two windows in the place where she was entombed by her father, but supposedly through her faith she created a third window for the holy ghost. So the Salpêtrière Chapel was blackened apart from these three windows. You could see this from all over Paris, because it’s a very high tower.
So it was a real public spectacle?
After it opened, it was such a big success. It was commissioned by the Festival d’Automne, which invites an international artist every year, and Sisters, Saints, & Sybils got twice as many visitors as anyone else’s work. Twice as many as Bill Viola, which surprised me. Twenty thousand people saw it during the six-week installation, and 400 people fainted during that time, which I was quite proud of.
Unfortunately, the church will never let the Festival d’Automne use the Salpêtrière space again because the priest was so offended by it. It upset me that they hadn’t let the priest know what it was going to be. But I couldn’t imagine being given access to one of the oldest mental hospitals in the world, especially one that was dedicated to women, and not doing something about mental illness there.
Yes, and it is uncompromisingly about mental illness. In the past, when you’ve dealt with personally upsetting subject matter, you’ve talked about photography as a “healing art.” But when you tackle material as difficult as this, does making the work actually make it less painful for you? Or does it make it worse?
In this case, it has not made it easier. People have said they really hoped it had been an exorcism, or that it had closed a chapter for me, or that it had given me the power to go on. In fact during the nine months we worked on the Salpêtrière project, the nine months we spent in the editing room, I was having a lot of difficulty. It became very emotional for me.
That really doesn’t surprise me, given the material you were editing.
Yes, we’d been shooting three or four times at the hospitals where my sister had been. They gave us unprecedented access—the first time in 150 years—to allow us to go into the locked ward of the hospital in Maryland where my sister had been for several years.
How did you manage that?
In return, I promised to do a benefit auction of artists who’ve used material dealing with mental illness to raise funds for the hospital. And I gave them one of my pieces, a large print.
We also got access to the first place she’d been in Cleveland, Ohio, which had been a sort of an orphanage. It had been very different when my sister was there, but I tried to shoot it so that it was like when my sister was there. Then there was a place that no longer exists that I don’t have many papers on. That was a real borstal—a really hard, tough place, where she’d had to slaughter chickens. Then the last place she’d been was the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington.
And as though these places weren’t bad enough, you filmed the place where she’d actually killed herself.
We went to the train tracks twice because I insisted that we try and go the very day she killed herself—which was April 12—so that we would have the same weather and flowers and all of that. And we went to her graveyard.
I have to say that I found the shot of the train passing very hard to take. Just the idea of her laying herself down on those tracks…
To me, it’s the courage of that, and the intensity of that, and the fact that it’s so rare for a woman to do it that way. Even now, but in the 1960s it was almost unheard of. Like zero. And people don’t get it, the severity of it. They don’t have a reaction to it, to all of what that means. It doesn’t just mean suicide. It’s such an extreme and violent self-annihilation. I’ve felt suicidal, but I’ve never myself felt ready to go that far. But I understand it.
So has that understanding helped you to see how you’re going to go forward with your work?
It hasn’t helped me. After the installation at the Salpêtrière, we continued to shoot for the Arte TV [version], but actually the whole project has so exhausted me and had such a profound emotional effect on me that it’s been very hard for me to go back into the material. So no, I didn’t really get exorcism from it.
Did you expect to get exorcism?
No. I didn’t know what to expect. People sometimes don’t understand how I could have been so close to somebody seven years older than me. But I feel more like my sister than ever, and I learned things that were really scary for me, and made me feel much closer to her.
NOTE: In memory of her sister, Nan Goldin has produced a special print, Joan Crawford on Fire, Thanksgiving, New Jersey (2005) Cibachrome, 11 x 14 inches, in an edition of 100. It benefits Kaufman Center/Barbara Holly Goldin Memorial Scholarship Fund and Giorno Poetry Systems. It is available from Matthew Marks at $450.
|
黑白对白插画画廊 http://chahua.com/u/26876
http://cg.chahua.org 中国插画画廊-插画师作品展示中心
★冲击2007★
|
|
[2 楼]
|
Posted:2006-04-04 01:18| |
| |
插画中国 -> 中画论坛 - 摄影、自拍、Cosplay爱好与交流 -> [转帖]私摄影鼻祖——南·戈尔丁
