MoMA sounds like Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency”
On view until February 12, 2017, at MoMA, there is Goldin’s latest version of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” .
Composed of almost 700 snapshot-like portraits, presented in its original 35mm format, along with photographs from the Museum’s collection that also appear as images in the slide show.
The Ballad is a visual personal diary of Nan Goldin’s relationships with lovers and friends and of her own experiences around Boston, New York, Berlin and elsewhere in the late 1970s, 1980s.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2016 Nan Goldin
“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read,” Goldin wrote. “The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.”
Sections of portraits that depict people experience ecstasy and pain through sex and drug use, domestic violence, ravages of AIDS, nightclub moments.
Music is a main point of the exhibit. As MoMA announced: “Titled after a song in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, Goldin’s Ballad is itself a kind of downtown opera”.
Moreover, The Ballad has an evocative music soundtrack – from Maria Callas to The Velvet Underground – and it developed through multiple improvised live performances that will periodically accompany the exhibition during the course of the Museum’s presentation.
Enjoy art!
MOMA, NEW YORK
11 June – 12 February, 2017
Credits cover image: Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City, 1983. The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2016 Nan Goldin
