About This Artwork

Nan Goldin
American, born 1953

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1979–2001

Multimedia installation
Running time: 43 min.
Edition 7/10; Multimedia installation with 720 color slides and programmed soundtrack; See attached list
Through prior bequest of Marguerita S. Ritman; restricted gift of Dorie Sternberg, the Photography Associates, Mary L. and Leigh B. Block Endowment, Robert and Joan Feitler, Anstiss and Ronald Krueck, Karen and Jim Frank, Martin and Danielle Zimmerman, 2006.158

Photography
Not on Display

Since the early 1970s, it has been Nan Goldin’s obsession to record an experience positioned decidedly on the margins of conventional society, and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency represents the zenith of this endeavor. A hybrid of photography and moving-image installation art, the work comprises over seven hundred of Goldin’s photographs, which are projected in thematic arrangements representing gender roles, love, dependency, and alienation, and paired with evocative songs such as the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” (1972), “I Put a Spell on You” (1956) by Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Dean Martin’s 1955 “Memories Are Made of This.”

Originally, the slide projector was created to be cheap, portable, and user friendly, since it was targeted to amateur photographers and families, and meant for use as a pedagogical tool in schools and industries. The adoption of this technology as an artistic vehicle, which emerged from the Conceptual and experimental film and video movements of the 1960s and 1970s, was centered in public, performance-based work. As the medium began to enjoy a growing presence in the art world, The Ballad took shape as a self-contained piece with a dedicated soundtrack, codifying earlier, more performative presentations of the work in the clubs and cinemas of New York’s artistic demimonde. Continuing to embrace the humble analog quality of the slide show format was an important aesthetic and artistic decision on the part of the artist, who now has at her disposal an array of more technologically advanced methods of multi-image display.

Goldin’s installation offers up a more exposed and potentially more honest version of the garden-variety domestic slide show ritual, capturing the very sort of subjects and events that are considered outside normative notions of identity, relationships, and community. Viewers see the artist, her friends, and family in experiences of the utmost intimacy—lovemaking, violence, addiction, hospitalization—and witness the rollercoaster of emotions that accompany them. Goldin’s basic strategy of making the private public, however, anticipated the effects of Facebook, MySpace, and other new media that have changed the shape of the average person’s experience in ways even she may not have expected.

The Ballad represents the first joint acquisition between the Art Institute’s departments of Contemporary Art and Photography, signaling its landmark status not only within Goldin’s oeuvre, but also as a slide installation that charted new territory in the history of film, video, new media, and photography.