Photography and the exposure of community: Sharing Nan Goldin and Jean-Luc Nancy

Angelaki - Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 7-30

  Kaplan, Louis ^a  

^a SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646112887     PISSN: 0969725X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09697250120087914     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (New York: Aperture, 1986).
2. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Conner, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991). The book was originally published as La communauté desoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986).
3. The term compearance (com-parution) is used by Nancy to express our shared relation to finitude. It is a means to critique any theory of the social founded in the sovereignty of the individual. As Nancy states, "We would need to be able to say that finitude co-appears or compears (com-paraît) and can only compear: in this formulation we would need to hear that finite being always presents itself 'together,' hence severally; for finitude always presents itself to being-in-common." Nancy, The Inoperative Community 28.
4. Goldin, Ballad 6.
5. Goldin made these remarks in "On Acceptance: A Conversation" with David Armstrong and Walter Keller in Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, and Hans Werner Holzwarth, I'll Be Your Mirror (New York: Scalo, 1996) 448.
6. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Inside/Out" in Public Information: Desire, Disaster, Document (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1994).
7. John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships (San Francisco: Harper, 1992). Despite the dramatic title, Gray's instrumentalist book (as its subtitle indicates) is a lot more optimistic in its view of communication than Goldin's bleaker Ballad.
8. Nan Goldin in "On Acceptance: A Conversation," I'll Be Your Mirror 452.
9. Or, as D. Diane Thomas puts it, "Community in a post-humanist world, as Nancy says, is an exposition of finitude and not a bond/age." See D. Diane Thomas, "Laughter, or, Chortling into the Storm" in the online journal PRE/TEXT (1997), .
10. See "My Number One Medium All My Life: Nan Goldin Talking with J. Hoberman," I'll Be Your Mirror 196.
11. Marcel Duchamp, Salt-Seller, eds. Michel de Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames, 1972) 32.
12. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Notes to the Index: Part 1" in her The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1985) 205.
13. To cite Duchamp in his talk entitled "Apropos of 'Readymades'" at the Museum of Modern Art on 19 October 1961, "This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste in fact a complete anesthesia." In Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.), The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames, 1975) 141.
14. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill, 1978).
15. Goldin, "On Acceptance: A Conversation," I'll Be Your Mirror 452.
16. October 1 (spring 1976).
17. For a discussion of this haptic dimension in the work of Cameron, see Carol Mavor, "To Make Mary: Julia Margaret Cameron's Photographs of Altered Madonnas" in her Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995) 43-70.
18. This is the argument that guides Susan Sontag's classic account of Arbus in "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" in her On Photography (New York: Anchor, 1989). Interestingly enough, Nan Goldin has always shown great admiration for Arbus' achievement. For example, see her review of Arbus' posthumous book on the mentally insane, Untitled.
19. The review begins in a space that is far removed from the interruption of myth. "Diane Arbus is one of our legends." In Nan Goldin, "Art of Darkness," Artforum (Nov. 1995): 14.
20. Max Kozloff, "The Family of Nan" in his Lone Visions, Crowded Frames: Essays on Photography (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1994) 104.
21. The exhibition was further disseminated through the publication of The Family of Man (New York: Maco, 1955). For the best formulation of Steichen's universal humanism, see his "Photography: Witness and Recorder of Humanity" in Wisconsin Magazine of History 31 (spring 1958): 159-67. To cite Steichen directly from the last page of this essay, "This is irrefutable proof that photography is a universal language; that it speaks to all people; that they are hungry for that kind of language."
22. See Roland Barthes, "The Great Family of Man" in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill, 1972) 100-02;
23. Allan Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs," Art Journal 41.1 (spring 1981): 15-25;
24. Frederic Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (1979): 130-48.
25. Nan Goldin, Ballad 6.
26. Mark Holborn, "Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency," Aperture 103 (summer 1986): 42.
27. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London and New York: Verso, 2000).
28. On Laclau's concept of hegemony, see also Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1985).
29. For another explication of these issues in the context of "the identity in question," see Ernesto Laclau, "Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity," October 61 (summer 1992): 83-90.
30. Laclau, "Structure, History, and the Political," Contingency, Hegemony, Universality 189.
31. Butler, "Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism," Contingency, Hegemony, Universality 32.
32. With this turn of phrase, I allude to Butler's most important work on the performance of gender and the problematizing of identity. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990);
33. Nan Goldin, The Other Side (Zurich: Scalo, 1993). The Other Side will be discussed extensively in sect. V.
34. For this critique of Laclau, see Nathan Widder, "What's Lacking in the Lack. A Comment on the Virtual," Angelaki 5.1 (fall 2000): 117-38. In his analysis of Laclau, Widder writes: "For the possibility of treating these dispersed elements not as particularities but instead as singularities which break with the logic of universal and particular, has been foreclosed This foreclosure is necessary for the theory of hegemony to operate" (123).
35. Jean-Luc Nancy, "Of Being Singular Plural" in his Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000) 29.
36. Elizabeth Sussman, "In/Of Her Time: Nan Goldin's Photographs," I'll Be Your Mirror 44. See fn. 13.
37. See Raymond Carney, American Dreaming (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985) 3.
38. Holborn, "Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency" 42.
39. For a discussion of this specific idea, see sect. 348 in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, trans. John Macquazzie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962) 399.
40. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993).
41. Nancy, The Experience of Freedom 56-57.
42. Christopher Wood, "Postmodernism and the Art of Identity," Concepts of Modern Art: From Fauvism to Postmodernism, ed. Nikos Stangos (New York: Thames, 1994) 285.
43. Nan Goldin, The Other Side 5.
44. Goldin, The Other Side 5. While Goldin attributes this quotation to Oscar Wilde and while it certainly sounds like one of his sayings, I can find no direct evidence. (I have found a similar saying in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr's Mother Night (New York: Harper, 1966): "You must be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.")
45. Unfortunately, Elisabeth Bronfen also does not see the contradiction between asserting and affirming a "third sex" while claiming that the inhabitants of the other side act "in defiance of all categorization." See her essay on Araki, Arbus, and Goldin, "Wounds of Wonder" in Nobuyoshi Araki, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, ed. Christiane Meyer-Stoll (Munich: Sammlung Goetz, 1997) 42-43.
46. Goldin, The Other Side 5.
47. See the videotape interview of Nan Goldin, In My Life, directed by Paul Tschinkel for the series ART/new york (no. 47), produced by Inner-Tube Video in 1997. As she states, "To me they're totally normal and some of the most beautiful people I've met."
48. "Interview with Nan Goldin," Life Sentences: Writers, Artists and AIDS, ed. Thomas Avena (San Francisco: Mercury, 1994) 149.
49. "Interview with Nan Goldin," Life Sentences 149.
50. Nicholas and Bebe Nixon, People with AIDS (Boston: Godine, 1991).
51. The classic critique is to be found in Simon Watney, "Photography and AIDS" in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (Seattle: Bay, 1990) 173-92.
52. See Avital Ronell, Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998).
53. Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 12. To quote Lingis: Community forms when one exposes oneself to the naked one, the destitute one, the outcast, the dying one. One enters into community not by affirming oneself and one's forces but by exposing oneself and one's forces to expenditure at a loss, to sacrifice. Community forms in a movement by which one exposes oneself to the other, to forces and powers outside oneself, to death and to the others who die.
54. If Nancy quotes the French outsider poet Arthur Rimbaud and his famous dictum here, then it is also important to remember that one of David Wojnarowicz's earliest photo-projects was "Arthur Rimbaud in New York" (1978-79), where he overlays gay subcultural pursuits in 1870s Paris and 1970s New York. Putting on the mask of Rimbaud, Wojnarowicz had himself photographed going through the paces of a variety of everyday life activities from riding in the subway car to eating in the local diner. This project is analyzed in Mysoon Rizk, "Constructing Histories: David Wojnarowicz's Arthur Rimbaud in New York" in The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, ed. Deborah Bright (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) 178-94.
55. Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 41.
56. Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS 23.
57. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill, 1981).
58. Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS 30. The quotation is taken from Roland Barthes's Preface to Renaud Camus, Tricks, trans. Richard Howard (New York: St. Martin's, 1981).
59. Goldin, quoted in the video interview In My Life.