I find myself going to view Nan Goldin’s legendary series of photographs, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, with trepidation. Lying at the heart of these works is a renowned image, Nan after being battered, 1984. Taken by her friend, Suzanne Fletcher, it shows a youthful Goldin with big 1980s hair, dangling silver earrings, a necklace of pale beads. She gazes into the camera, her left eye swollen and bloodshot, her right eye framed by a half-healed bruise.

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In this week’s ABR Podcast, film critic Anne Rutherford reviews Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, last year’s winner of the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival. The film traces a campaign led by artist Nan Goldin to draw attention to America’s prescription painkiller epidemic via highly staged events, including a spectacular ‘die-in’ at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2019. Here is Anne Rutherford, Adjunct Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at Western Sydney University and the author of What Makes a Film Tick.

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In February 2019, artist Nan Goldin and the activist group she founded staged a ‘die-in’ at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The group demanded that the Museum refuse further funding from the super-wealthy art-patron Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical arm, Purdue, produced and aggressively marketed the highly addictive prescription painkiller OxyContin. ... (read more)