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| self-portrait |
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| Nan and her sister Barbara in the 50's |
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| David Armstrong |
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| John Waters and Cookie Mueller |
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| Cookie Mueller |
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| Cookie and Nan after getting punched |
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| Cookie bartending |
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| Nan at the bar |
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| Nan bartending |
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| self-portrait |
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| Sharon Niesp |
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| Cookie's marriage to Vittorio Scarpati |
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| Trixie on the cot |
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| Misty and Jimmy |
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| Nan and Brian in Bed |
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| scratches on back after sex |
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| Nan and Brian |
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| Nan one month after being battered |
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| self-portait |
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| Ivy in a Chair |
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| Goldin leading a protest against the Sacklers |
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| self-portrait |
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| Director Laura Poitras |
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| Poitras with Nan Goldin |
ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED A USA (117 mi) 2022 d: Laura Poitras
My work has always come from empathy and love. —Nan Goldin, Nan Goldin – 'My Work Comes from Empathy and Love' YouTube (5:48)
Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of inextinguishable regrets. —James Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899
From the controversial director of Citizenfour (2014), one of the founding editors of the online newspaper, The Intercept, one of the co-founders of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and a champion of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, Poitras was once placed on a surveillance watch list by the U.S. State Department and classified as a terror suspect for her critical examination of American military troops in her 2006 documentary MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY, which dealt with the occupation of Iraq from the perspective of the local population. This is a rare instance when the documentary filmmaker’s vision blends so completely with the subject, in this case Nan Goldin, one of the world’s most famous art photographers turned activist, where their worlds intersect in what is partially an intimate portrait of an era-defining artist and partly an impassioned exposé on the Sackler pharmaceutical family and their culpability in fueling the Opioid epidemic. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, it was awarded the 1st Place Golden Lion, beating out some hefty competition in a unanimous jury decision from writers, directors, and actors, a unique occurrence for a documentary film, but not unprecedented. Goldin’s blunt narration is, quite frankly, stunning in its astute observations in telling her own story, becoming a painful and traumatic family history, an inspiring artist biography, and a rousing portrait of activism, where her dysfunctional family life is like something out of Tennessee Williams and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), where the playwright became traumatized after discovering his sister Rose was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and subjected by her family to a lobotomy in 1943 in order to silence her after accusing her father of rape. You’d think this kind of thing only happens in movies, but it’s so much more devastating in real life. Goldin’s older sister Barbara was also silenced for exhibiting signs of being a lesbian, shamed by their parents about her sexuality, happening during a time when homosexuality was considered a mental illness, so she was institutionalized multiple times to psychiatric hospitals for little more than being rebellious (Nan, by contrast, was sent to foster homes). Her parents often fought and argued about her, “There was a lot of bickering going on, and I wished they’d get divorced most of my childhood,” where the title, ‘All the beauty and the bloodshed,’ is grandly poetic and ambiguous, a reference to the beauty of her art and the ensuing bloodshed driven by pharmaceutical greed, yet it is a direct quote taken from a psychiatrist’s written evaluation of Barbara during her time at an institution, who from an early age rebelled against the repressive constrictions of middle class life, turning silent at one point, refusing to speak for months, eventually taking her own life at the age of 18 when Nan was just 10. This film is dedicated to her memory. According to Goldin, her sister’s silencing and suicide, was “about conformity and denial. My sister was a victim of all that, but she knew how to fight back. Her rebellion was the starting point for my own. She showed me the way.”
This was in 1965, when teenage suicide was a taboo subject. I was very close to my sister and aware of some of the forces that led her to choose suicide. I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction. Because of the times, the early sixties, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behavior, beyond control. By the time she was eighteen, she saw that her only way to get out was to lie down on the tracks of the commuter train outside of Washington, D.C. It was an act of immense will.
Goldin got herself kicked out of several schools and left home at the age of 14, often spending her time getting high on drugs, enrolling in what she describes as a “hippie school,” which she claims saved her life, as an instructor introduced her to a camera in 1969 when she was sixteen years old. Still struggling from her sister’s death, Goldin used the camera as a form of self-expression, with photography becoming a visual journal, cherishing her relationships with a community of friends she photographed. It was at that school where Goldin met David Armstrong, a gay fellow student who eventually became a photographer as well and was Goldin’s closest male friend for decades. She eventually moved to Boston and fell in with a group of drag queens, becoming totally immersed in their underworld, and began to photograph them, including queer and trans people, subjects that were largely excluded from the art world, where her goal was to memorialize them on the cover of Vogue magazine, taking comfort in their bohemian outsiderism, where she began to feel like their marginalized world was normal, and everyone else felt like outsiders to them. Unlike other Poitras films where she usually interjects herself, Goldin is the star of this one, with the director taking a back seat, and while Poitras had the ultimate final cut, they decribed the work as a collaboration, yet Goldin’s exposed vulnerability is the key to this picture, brutally honest, deeply poetic, baring her soul for viewing audiences, elevating it to a different level, as many may already be familiar with the openly autobiographical nature of her art, but far fewer know anything about her personal life story, as it’s clear her sister’s death had a profound effect on her life, while seeking comfort in her friends became the defining legacy of her art. “Photography is like a flash of euphoria,” she says at one point. “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody—it’s a caress, I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.” The film is structured in seven chapters, each of which begins with a photographic sequence or archival footage of a period in Goldin’s life, providing an astonishing picture of just how much tragedy and personal trauma informs her work, offering fascinating insights into her creative process. Both she and David graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, while also taking several classes at the New England School of Photography, gravitating towards the work of Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus, and Larry Clark, who photographed teenagers having sex and shooting up in Tulsa during the 60’s, LARRY CLARK TULSA 1971. Over the summer, she and David, and his lover, rented a house in Provincetown on the northern tip of the Cape, perhaps the most gay-friendly town in America, where she met writer and actress Cookie Mueller, who appeared in early John Waters films, hanging out in the dunes with her girlfriend Sharon Niesp, joining a separatist lesbian community in partying and living their lives as if they had all the time in the world. In her 1991 book on Cookie Mueller, Goldin writes:
She was a cross between Tobacco Road and a Hollywood B-Girl, the most fabulous woman I’d ever seen. . . . That summer I kept meeting her at the bars, at parties and at barbecues with her family—her girlfriend Sharon, her son Max, and her dog Beauty. Part of how we got close was through me photographing her—the photos were intimate and then we were.
Afterwards, Goldin moved to New York and rented a loft in the Bowery, a dense skid row neighborhood filled with drifters that mostly catered to the derelict and down-and-out population of men, like Beat writer William S. Burroughs who lived in a partially converted YMCA, enticed by low rents in dilapidated three-story buildings, with the neighborhood filled with artist communes attracted by the large open spaces in what had once been flop houses, along with a scattering of cheap secondhand stores, which she made extensive use of, claiming rich women dropped off their clothes there, often finding barely worn designer outfits. Goldin worked as a go-go dancer in New Jersey, where you didn’t have to perform topless, as you did in New York City, taking the bus back and forth, as this was one of the few ways women could independently earn money. Caught up in the exploitive existence of the sex industry, she was eventually rescued by Maggie Smith, co-owner of the lesbian bar Tin Pan Alley in Times Square, where she worked as a bartender, claiming her life changed significanty after that, embraced by a community of women who looked out for each other. Goldin went everywhere with her camera, documenting the New York No wave underground scene of the city's vibrant, gay subculture of the late 1970’s, where she was drawn especially to the hard-drug subculture, living on Quaaludes (now banned), where watching the Clash playing around the corner might describe her life at that time, where her roomates were “rebels running from America, living out the life they needed to live.” Carrying her portfolio from gallery to gallery, none expressed any interest until she met curator Marvin Heiferman, who was startled by what he was seeing. “Then this person shows up in a blue polka-dot dress with a whole lot of crinolines and wacky hair and a box under her arm,” Heiferman recalled. “She shows me this box of pictures, and they’re really weird and curiously made, with a very strange color sense about them, and they were of everything from people smoking cigarettes to fucking. There were probably twenty to twenty-five pictures. And I had never seen anything like that, in terms of their density and their connection with the people in them.” So he asked her to bring him some more, eventually bringing a wooden crate filled with photographs a few months later, which became part of the Times Square Show in 1980, the beginnings of what would eventually become The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, derived from Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit, a song from Brecht’s Weimar era The Threepenny Opera, the 1985 slideshow and 1986 book that’s generally considered Goldin’s masterpiece, bearing some resemblance to Andy Warhol’s underground portraits of Factory stars in Chelsea Girls (1966). Initially it was an interactive slide show accompanied by live music depicting men and women from the Beat Generation to Andy Warhol, evoking a visually opulent, harshly intimate body of work portraying the existential angst of loneliness and friendship, permeating with a sense of desperation unique to that period of time, where the people we see are her subterranean friends from the East Village, her lovers, and the family she had made for herself, all captured in unguarded moments, openly portraying their sexuality. “It was photography as the sublimation of sex,” she reveals. Hoping to destigmatize marginalized subjects like sex work, battered women, queerness, and addiction, the first slideshows were constructed in the context of parties in someone’s apartment, and then underground movie theaters and performance spaces, establishing a very trusting relationship, where editing and reediting were a big part of the ever-evolving story, dependent upon the audience reaction, who were the subjects of the photographs, which influenced the changing editorial content. Today, nine museums and foundations own a version, and each copy is different. “This is not a bleak world,” Goldin writes in the preface of the book released in 1986 (despite her father’s attempts to prevent publication, as it exposes family history), “but one in which there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection.” It has undergone 21 different printings since then, (Why “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” Endures in ...), where the photographs contain a chilling power, much like the haunting still photos of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), though Goldin acknowledges a distinct difference, “I mean, I would love to make something like La Jetée, but it’s a lot more complex in the way that it uses the still.”
While tending bar, she met an ex-Marine, Brian Burchill, immediately asking him to score some heroin in Harlem, which he did, becoming fatally attracted while mired in a relationship where drugs literally consumed them in a vicious Sid and Nancy cycle of self-destruction (Sid and Nancy: Love Conquers All, Even Punk), dropping out of the world, where there was nothing to stop their descent into an endless cycle of abject drug addiction. It was their way of coping with the ugliness of the world around them, where all their closest friends were dying of AIDS. Immersed in a continual dissatisfaction with each other, consumed by heroin and lust, yet neither one able to leave, it all came to a head in Berlin when Brian became enraged by the publication of photos of him and viciously attacked her, specifically targeting her eyes, breaking the orbital bone, almost blinding her, while also burning her journals, destroying everything in sight, a sad comment on the toxic aspects of masculinity and abuse, sending her to the hospital where they were able to save her eyes, but it left her physically afraid of men for a long time afterwards. Rather than hiding from the pain, she chose to confront it with a self-portrait revealing the gruesome extent of the damage, Nan one month after being battered, a harrowing image of violence against women, sending a powerful message to other women that they can also survive. But when she returned to the Bowery, so many of her friends were dead, bearing witness to a passing American innocence, watching her community as it became decimated by AIDS, ending up in a rehabilitation clinic, turning her life around. While we also get glimpses of experimental video footage from Vivienne Dick and Bette Gordon, these unvarnished, snapshot-style portrayals of couples in the throes of love and death, as well as searingly poignant documentation revealing the intimate details of her own life, established Goldin as a major photographer, as each of her perfectly framed photographs is like a personal essay, where the humanistic qualities have earned a broad audience and wide critical praise, while her influence has trickled in from the margins to the mainstream. Because of this, her importance has risen substantially, opening a pathway to social activism. Decades later she became addicted to OxyContin after it was prescribed while recovering from wrist surgery, taking far more than the recommended dosage, where an overdose laced with fentanyl, which she miraculously survived, shocked her into seeking treatment, which led to her recovery. But in 2017, she read an astounding exposé of the Sacklers in a New Yorker magazine article written by investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, The Family That Built an Empire of Pain, where she learned the maker of the drug, Purdue Pharma, was owned by the billionaire Sackler family, whose ad campaign turned Valium into a household drug, the top-selling pharmaceutical in the U.S. from 1969 to 1982, and famous for their philanthropy, a name she was familiar with as their name is engraved on the walls of the most illustrious art museums in the world, the Met, the Guggenheim, the Tate, the British Museum, the National Gallery and Serpentines Galleries in London, and the Louvre. That same year Goldin co-founded the group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), hoping to reverse the damage done, claiming 400,000 American lives were lost from the opioid epidemic, targeting the pharmaceutical companies that profited from it, infuriated by the aggressively manipulative way they promoted the drug, initially claiming it was non-addictive, thereby standardizing or normalizing the drug, making it appear safe, insuring it would make its way to as many doctor’s prescriptions as possible, fully aware of the drug’s highly addictive qualities.
Joined by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, essayist Darryl Pinckney, and P.A.I.N. member Megan Kapler, they provide additional narration as the film explores not only Goldin’s life and artistic career, but also transitions to footage of museum protests led by Goldin, hoping to draw attention to the worldwide crisis by describing the Sackler family as murderers, as they have not only been complicit in promoting addiction but completely unrepentent in their role of causing such a massive outbreak of deaths. Hoping to shame museums into cutting ties with the Sacklers, P.A.I.N. designed a series of elaborately choreographed protests, inspired by the fearless activism of New York artist David Wojnarowicz, who died from AIDS, and the Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) campaign of the 80’s, an international, grassroots political group working to end the AIDS pandemic, adding a theatrical element by playing dead in a sea of empty pill bottles, with fake money strewn around, framing each protest as if it was a photograph, chanting “Sacklers lie, thousands die.” The initial promotion and marketing of OxyContin was an organized effort throughout 1996–2001 to dismiss the risk of opioid addiction, with Purdue Pharmaceuticals increasing their earnings to $35 billion dollars by 2017, pushing their product much like the best drug dealers. Hosting over forty promotional conferences, they coupled a convincing “Partners Against Pain” campaign with an incentivized bonus system, as Purdue trained its salesforce to convey the message that the risk of addiction was less than one percent, ultimately influencing the prescribing habits of the medical professionals that attended these conferences. They fed on the stigma of addiction by blaming the drug users. As president of Purdue Pharma, Richard Sackler wrote, “We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals,” using their reputations as philanthropists to wash away the sins of their corporate hypocrisy. At the OxyContin launch party, according to court records, Richard Sackler boasted, “The launch of OcyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white.” Their strategy was aggressively marketed to doctors, many of whom were taken on lavish junkets, given misleading information, and paid to give talks on the drug, while patients were wrongly told the pills were a reliable long-term solution to chronic pain, and in some cases offered coupons for a month’s free sample. From 1999–2020, more than 564,000 people died from an overdose involving any opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids according to the Center for Disease Control, Understanding the Opioid Overdose Epidemic, as overdoses have surged since 2010, more than quintupling, much of it due to synthetic opioids, especially fentanyl, creating an opioid epidemic that is devastating to its victims and their families, and has a compounding ripple effect throughout communities, affecting quality of life, economic opportunity, and rural prosperity. No corner of America has gone untouched by the opioid crisis, but the impact of this issue on small towns and rural places has been particularly significant. An overdose of fentanyl killed Prince in 2016, with medical documents revealing that he had first become dependent on opioid prescriptions, as the epidemic continues to this day, with the number of overdose deaths continuing to rise, National Drug Involved Overdose Deaths 1999-2021 1.23.23 jl2.pptx. Earlier this year, in one of the first major steps taken to combat this crisis, the FDA released an over-the-counter nasal spray (Naloxone) that instantly counters the effects of an opioid overdose and will hopefully save lives, FDA Approves First Over-the-Counter Naloxone Nasal Spray.
The fight against oppression runs like a red flag through the various aspects of Goldin’s life, suppression of sexuality and its stigmatization, suppression through domestic violence, as well as suppression of patients who are administered the highly addictive OxyContin as a painkiller in the hospital before inevitably plunging into a fatal addiction, consumed by a driving need for more. Goldin’s life has been shaped by the unnecessary cruelty of people who considered themselves the bastions of morality, resulting in a crusade to get the Sackler name to become synonymous with tainted money, or blood money, the equivalent of war crimes, demanding the art museums stop accepting their monetary grants and have their name removed from the galleries. Three Purdue Pharma executives pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal criminal charges that they misled regulators, doctors, and patients about OxyContin’s risk of addiction and its potential to be abused. The company settled for a record $600 million dollars, but no members of the Sackler family were charged or even mentioned (In Guilty Plea, OxyContin Maker to Pay $600 Million). In 2018, P.A.I.N. dropped a flurry of fake prescriptions for OxyContin into the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum resembling confetti at a ticker-tape parade, "ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED' - Laura Poitras Official clip [Venice] YouTube (2:08), while leading a few dozen activists in throwing empty medicine bottles into the reflecting pool surrounding the Temple of Dendur, an enormous Egyptian structure that dominates the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also staging noisy protests in the Louvre and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Since Goldin is an internationally acclaimed artist, her name carries weight, as her work appears in the permanent collections of many of the world’s foremost art institutions, so she threatened to remove them unless they refused to accept Sackler money. It was a trickle effect at first, but slowly the legal process revealed the company’s hidden secrets, which were finally out in the open, as galleries reluctantly began to take notice of the damage being done to their own reputations by their association with Sackler money, and one by one they began removing the Sackler name. Purdue filed for bankruptcy in 2019 amid thousands of lawsuits and will cease to exist in 2024, but not before siphoning off $10 billion dollars to Sackler offshore accounts. But the Sackler family will not face prosecution, granted immunity from liability, as Sen. Marsha Blackburn and her Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, at the behest of lobbyists for the pharmaceutical companies, helped get laws written that keeps them from being held responsible, infuriating Poitras, (why have the Sackler family members behind OxyContin ...), wondering why true accountability is so hard to come by. We see Theresa and David Sackler (Richard Sackler refused to appear onscreen) in bankruptcy court sitting stone-faced through a Zoom call where they are legally compelled to listen to the testimony of people who lost loved ones to opioids, listening impassively, as under court rules they could not respond, and had to sit silently while roughly two dozen people offer heartbreaking testimony ('You Murdered My Daughter': Relatives of OxyContin ...), resulting in a $6 billion dollar settlement to help remediate the crisis, as distributions will largely be used to fund opioid treatment and prevention programs in various states, while CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens agreed to pay about $13.8 billion to resolve thousands of U.S. state and local lawsuits accusing the pharmacy chains of mishandling opioid drugs (CVS, Walmart, Walgreens agree to pay $13.8 bln to settle ...). Goldin’s call to arms has not only drawn attention to heinous atrocities but also opened viewer’s eyes into the deeply humanistic world of her art, with Poitras constructing a daring and empowering feminist manifesto that skillfully connects personal tragedy, political awareness, and artistic expression.
Note
It’s ironic that Goldin is seen chain-smoking throughout the entire film, as the deaths attributable to tobacco products far surpasses the deaths from OxyContin. According to the Center for Disease Control (Tobacco-Related Mortality), more than 480,000 deaths annually occur in America, while worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (Tobacco), more than 8 million people per year die from tobacco use.
Poitras’s film talks about Goldin’s friendship with John Waters, but not Jim Jarmusch, who is clearly visible in several photographs. Also Poitras does not mention filmmaker Claire Denis, who dedicated her film VENDREDI SOIR (2002) to Goldin, or make any reference to Lisa Cholodenko’s HIGH ART (1997), which was loosely based on the enduring legacy of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, where the photographs by JoJo Whilden are based on Goldin’s.
Nan Goldin - Artforum International Nan Goldin from Artforum, January 2018
Leave the world a better place than when you entered it. —Arthur Sackler to his children
I SURVIVED THE OPIOID CRISIS. I narrowly escaped. I went from the darkness and ran full speed into The World. I was isolated, but I realized I wasn’t alone. When I got out of treatment I became absorbed in reports of addicts dropping dead from my drug, OxyContin.
I learned that the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries, were responsible for the epidemic. This family formulated, marketed, and distributed OxyContin. I decided to make the private public by calling them to task. My first action is to publish personal photographs from my own history.
My relationship to OxyContin began several years ago in Berlin. It was originally prescribed for surgery. Though I took it as directed I got addicted overnight. It was the cleanest drug I’d ever met. In the beginning, forty milligrams was too strong but as my habit grew there was never enough. At first, I could maintain. Then it got messier and messier. I worked the medical field in Berlin for scripts. When they shut me out I turned to FedEx. That worked until it didn’t. The drug, like all drugs, lost its effect, so I picked up the straw.
I returned to New York. My dealer never ran out of Oxy and delivered 24/7. He had massive prescriptions and made massive amounts of money. For every penny he spent on a script he made a dollar on the black market. I went from three pills a day, as prescribed, to eighteen. I got a private endowment and spent it all. Like all opiate addicts my crippling fear of withdrawal was my guiding force.
I didn’t get high, but I couldn’t get sick. My life revolved entirely around getting and using Oxy. Counting and recounting, crushing and snorting was my full-time job. I rarely left the house. It was as if I was Locked-In. All work, all friendships, all news took place on my bed. When I ran out of money for Oxy I copped dope. I ended up snorting fentanyl and I overdosed.
I wanted to get clean, but I waited a year to go into treatment because of my fear of withdrawal. Then in January I went into rehab for two and a half months. I was one of the fortunate ones who could afford an excellent hospital, which isn’t an option for most people. I’ve stayed clean for almost a year. Getting off drugs and staying off drugs are two different things, each painful in their own way. But going back is not an option. My endowment was cut off and I regret the money I wasted. I regret the time I lost, which is irretrievable. Now I find the world hard to navigate, but I have a sharpened clarity and a sense of purpose.
I believe I owe it to those affected by this epidemic to make the personal political. I read the brilliant articles by Patrick Radden Keefe and Margaret Talbot (in the New Yorker) and Christopher Glazek (in Esquire) and I interpreted them as a call to arms. I knew of no political movements on the ground like ACT UP. Most of my community was lost to AIDS. I can’t stand by and watch another generation disappear.
The Sacklers made their fortune promoting addiction. OxyContin is one of the most addictive painkillers in the history of pharmacology. They advertised and distributed their medication knowing all the dangers. The Sackler family and their private company, Purdue Pharma, built their empire with the lives of hundreds of thousands. The bodies are piling up. In 2015, in the US alone, more than thirty-three thousand people died from opioid overdoses, half of them from prescription opioids; 80 percent of those who use heroin or buy fentanyl on the black market began with an opioid prescription. These statistics are growing exponentially.
I’ve started a group, P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), to hold them accountable. To get their ear we will target their philanthropy. They have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world. We demand that the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma use their fortune to fund addiction treatment and education. There is no time to waste.
We want to leave the world a better place than when we entered it.
—Nan Goldin, New York, 2017
