All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Lotterywest Films
Perth Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

Laura Poitras’s multilayered documentary about the artist and activist Nan Goldin’s campaign against the Sattler family – and their complicity in the opioid epidemic that’s currently claimed over 500,000 lives in the US – has three intertwining strands. As a work of political reportage, an artistic biography and a family history, at times it almost feels like three different films. However it’s an important archival work that deserves to be seen by everyone interested in Goldin or the opioid crisis – which it must be emphasised is far from over, notwithstanding the effectiveness of her campaign. It also raises interesting questions about the genre of ‘artist documentaries’ and the complex interrelations between the artistic, the personal and the political.

 

The Sattlers are (or were) the owners of Purdue Pharma and owe their family fortune to the manufacture and distribution of OxyContin, a 'controlled-release' painkiller which the company aggressively marketed despite its addictive properties and potentially deadly effects. They’ve also donated millions to leading art museums and institutions, and until recently the family name adorned countless collections and walls. Goldin on the other hand is a leading figure in contemporary art who also happens to be a recovered OxyContin addict. In 2017 she set up an organisation called Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) and began staging mass protests inside those same museums and institutions in order to pressure them to divest themselves of Sattler money and all connection with the Sattler name. 

 

This strand of the film features gripping footage – much of it shot by Goldin herself on her smart phone – of those protests in action, beginning with the scattering of hundreds of empty Oxycontin bottles followed by a mass ‘die-in’ in front of the Ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur which is housed in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The film then documents the campaign’s success through meetings and other tactics such as Goldin’s threat to cancel a proposed retrospective of her work at the National Portrait Gallery in London, as well as further protests at the Guggenheim and elsewhere. One by one institutions like the Met, the Guggenheim, the National Portrait Gallery, the Louvre and the Tate all cut their ties with the Sattlers and sandblast their name from the walls. Meanwhile Goldin and her organisation pursue Purdue Pharma and the Sattlers in the courts, leading to the bankruptcy of the company. The family themselves escape criminal liability, but in some of the most powerful footage of the film they’re compelled to attend an online meeting with survivors of the epidemic – including the parents of those who’ve died – and to listen to their testimony about how the drug has destroyed their lives, and their blistering face-to-face condemnation of the Sattlers for their responsibility.

 

The second, more biographical and ‘artistic’ layer of the film covers Goldin’s life and work, from her childhood in suburban Massachusetts in the 1950s to her years in downtown Boston and later New York City in the 70s and 80s as a photographer documenting herself and her friends in the drag-queen and queer community, including the years when that community was decimated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This strand is broken up into chronological sections and consists of archival footage and ‘slideshows’ by (or in the style of) Goldin herself, including some of her most iconic images and image-sequences, and accompanied by voiceovers (mostly by Goldin) and a soundtrack (also chosen by Goldin) featuring music from the successive eras being covered (bands like The Velvet Underground, Television and Blondie feature heavily).

 

Goldin’s photography was itself deeply influenced by cinema – in particular the early films of Andy Warhol, John Waters and Larry Clarke – and largely consists of snapshots of friends and lovers (as well as Goldin herself) in unstaged and unguarded moments of action or repose. The images dispense with traditional or ‘artistic’ lighting or framing, and their subjects offer themselves to be seen – and often look back at the viewer – in an open, honest, sometimes confronting and always powerful way, no matter what they’re doing or wearing, and however intimate or revealing. Goldin insists that she always asked her friends’ permission before showing their photographs publicly, and this in turn enhances the consensual way they show themselves in the photos. The sense of equality and shared experience between her ‘outsider’ subjects and Goldin herself as a fellow ‘insider-outsider’ is palpable, and differentiates her work from someone like Diane Arbus, who also focussed on marginalised communities, but arguably did so in a more objectifying and voyeuristic way.

 

Despite the apparently spontaneous nature of Goldin’s photos, recognisable themes emerge: sexual freedom and gender-playfulness, certainly, but also pain and abuse. It’s as if there’s a level of trauma that’s been inflicted on Goldin and her subjects because of their refusal to conform to sexual and gender norms and stereotypes, and which resurfaces in their relationships with each other and themselves. This sense of shared trauma gives the photos their sense of subjectivity and compassion, and pierces the viewer in a way that evokes what Roland Barthes called the ‘punctum’ of photographs, in addition to their literal subject matter or ‘studium’. This is especially apparent in Goldin’s 1986 slideshow sequence The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – perhaps most indelibly in the self-portrait of her own battered face after a sexually addictive relationship had come to a violent end.

 

However the key section in this strand of the film documents the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 80s on Goldin and her community, not only in terms of illness and death (as she says in the film, ‘I watched almost everyone I knew die’), but also in terms of the indifference and contempt (not to mention fear and hatred) that HIV-positive artists and other communities experienced on the part of the government – as well as the rest of so-called civil society, from pharmaceutical companies to churches and families – during the Reagan era and the rise of neoconservatism that provided the ideological ballast for Reagan’s cynically titled ‘morning in America’ re-election campaign in 1984, while effectively consigning hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths. It’s here that this second, artist-biographical strand of the film links up with the first, more overtly ‘political’ strand about OxyContin, and the parallel narratives of the two epidemics – opioids and HIV/AIDS – become a single story of artistic and political resistance to social stigmatisation, which according to Goldin herself is the guiding thread in her work as an artist and activist. 

 

Her photos during this period focus not so much on the physical manifestations of the disease itself as on the lives and relationships of long-term friends who were HIV-positive. As such they are filled with beauty and tenderness; and she sharply distinguished them from the work of photographers who went into hospitals to take pictures of dying people they didn’t know. 

 

A key episode in this narrative is the exhibition Witnesses Against Our Vanishings, which Goldin curated at the Artists Space in New York in 1989 in response to HIV/AIDS; and in particular the HIV-positive artist David Wojnarowicz’s refusal to modify his text for that exhibition ‘Fat cannibals in black skirts’ (referring to sexual abuse by high ranking members of the Catholic clergy), despite pressure from the management of the venue to censor it. This led to Goldin’s ‘Days Without Art’ protest-actions, which involved covering statues in museums with black cloth –clearly foreshadowing the ‘die-in’ protests she later organised against the Sattler family with P.A.I.N. 

 

The third and most deeply personal layer in the film – which also provides a crucial link between the other two strands – is the story of Goldin’s older sister Barbara, whose sexuality and independent personality led to her being sent away from the family home to a psychiatric institution as a teenager, and who killed herself at the age of 18 by lying down on the commuter train tracks outside Washington when Goldin was only 11. The film presents this as the defining trauma of Goldin’s life and work as an artist and an activist; towards the end of the film, we see images from Goldin’s 2006 exhibition Chasing Ghosts, juxtaposing family snapshots with contemporary photographs and video footage of empty landscapes and railway tracks, recalling the photos of empty rooms she started taking after her friend the actor and writer Cookie Müller died of AIDS in 1989. These images of absence recall the closing shots of deserted locations where the protagonist-lovers have met throughout the film at the end of Antonioni’s L’eclisse, and evoke the aura of memory, transience, nostalgia and loss that haunts all of Goldin’s work, and which is arguably intrinsic to the medium of photography and film.

 

Poitras is a political reporter as well as being a filmmaker and artist in her own right – she founded the online news service The Intercept and is well known for her role in receiving and publishing national security documents leaked by Edward Snowden, as well as for her films about Snowden and Julian Assange; and she also created an immersive and interactive solo exhibition of documentary material at the Whitney Museum in 2016 entitled Astro Noise; so it’s fair to assume that she’s responsible for the overall form of the film, even if Goldin provided most of the visual and aural substance. My sense is that Poitras’s aesthetic is more formal and controlled than Goldin’s radically uncontainable energy and wildness, and there’s a certain tension between these two artistic forces in the film. This tension is most evident in the second, artist-biographical strand, where the difference between Poitras’s aesthetic and Goldin’s inevitably becomes most apparent. Overall, Poitras’s film is also more conventional than Goldin in terms of its psychology and politics. In short: Poitras relies on a familiar progressive and character-based narrative about overcoming personal trauma and slaying the corporate dragon, whereas Goldin’s work is far more ambiguous and disturbing– which arguably accounts for its political subversiveness, as well as its enduring sadness and beauty.

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.