- Venue
- Barbican Arts Centre
- Location
Dressed as a clown and watching slides of couples having sex sounds as if it would be a great way to spend Halloween. But as I spent time in fancy dress with the intimate and graphic couples in Nan Goldin’s ‘Heartbeat’ (2000-2001) installation, I found myself drawn into a contemplative melancholia that undercut both the obvious reaction to the loving and unerring devotion on show between the couples portrayed, and the comedic pretensions inherent within a clown costume. Maybe there really is nothing as tragic as a sad clown.
Nan Goldin’s ‘Heartbeat’ is a multimedia installation that forms part of the ‘Seduction’ exhibition at the Barbican gallery in London. Within a dark, intimate room with seating, a projected slideshow of 4 separate European couples making love has an accompanying score composed by John Tavener and sung by Bjork. The images are organized in their composition as short stories, or hymns between the lovers, which first record them in their natural settings but then move into a graphic love bout and finally into the post-coital intimacy between them. The soundtrack is a mournful light dirge of minimalist electronics and acoustics over which Bjork layers her ephemeral and recognisable upper register lament. The photos themselves are bathed in a golden hue which combines with the predominance of interiors on show to release an almost baroque nature to their appearance. Though it is the participants that are always the central focus of the work. Often they face us head on as if proclaiming their devotion to one another to us, the audience. We are shown that these are ‘treasured moments’.
Then why did it leave me emotionally morose? It confused me. I was watching couples languishing in comfortable silences, in the throes of physical ecstasy, in the total acceptance of one another and yet it unsettled me. I felt I needed distance from the piece to understand my reaction fully. Discussing the piece with fellow students was interesting but essentially unfruitful as to further garnering any reasons for my reaction. It seemed I was atypical in my response. The people I talked to found the piece genuinely warm to the point of a physical turn on. It made them want to touch somebody, to sit a little closer to the person next to them, to reach out for the intimacy they saw in the projections. My confusion continued.
I began to retreat into my own subjections to help explain my despondent state. Within the reasons that I found, there were parallels to my own work during this course. My practice has concerned my personal relationships; first with my girlfriend, then, during and after we split, a girl on the course. And the confusions which arose through these connections. What Goldin presents is a blissful representation of relationships, a nirvana of two as one in beautiful union. Even with a child at one point, the notion of the ‘happy family’ is achieved. My problem was that I know relationships are not that one-dimensional. What was missing was the tension. That dynamic that I felt in my own life with my girlfriend at the point in time I saw the work was not represented. It felt false, fabricated. It forced me to look at me and my own relationship and the problems we had that were not resolved. I may even have been jealous of the apparent ease of physicality with each other that the projected golden fleshed caricatures possessed. It is what I wanted, it is that first flush of pure love, yet I knew no one ever clings onto it for long. In turn, it was the absence of friction which forced me to insert it myself, culled from my own personal relationship.
My work in the ‘mapping’ project involved cataloguing the holidays I had gone on with my girlfriend through the juxtaposition of the photos taken and recalled ‘diary-format’ texts. Though I did not realise when I started, it slowly became apparent that what I had been doing was subconsciously preparing to break away from my girlfriend through categorising our time together like a relic collected under glass in a museum. Nan Goldin’s piece, by forcing me into the intense personal dialogue of its participants through both the unabashed romanticism and the absence of conflict, made me seriously question my own motivations in my work.
I have and am continuing to source my own life as subject matter for my work, both infusing each other. Nan Goldin in ‘Heartbeat’ did not use herself as the material, but the highly personal nature of the work and her use of the camera as almost active chronicler, if indeed not participator in the intimacies show a link between our themes. My work since visiting the exhibition has concerned my burgeoning relationship with a friend on my course. On the bus back from the First Year Fine Art London trip we did collaborative illustrations between us which crudely show our sexual tension which had been exacerbated by the intensely erotic nature of the ‘Seduction’ exhibition at the Barbican Gallery. To reify the validity of the unspoken motivations behind these, I am going to try and cast them in clear resin, making use of the workshops that have become available to me recently.
This perverse route of personal and artistic enquiry was furthered by an evening out where I falsely proposed to her on several occasions in different bars. This role-play was documented by photographs, collected material and through a dictaphone. Add to this concoction a panic-attack ridden boyfriend, nights in the same bed and alcohol, and I am beginning to wonder how much longer my constitution can carry on this circus of confusion. Where ‘Heartbeat’ presented blind sighted snapshot celebrations of intimacy, though still with the resonance to make me consider my own life and practice, I find my own interests at present are drawn to the more playfully darker shades of personal affairs. Although I am unsure how long the clown masquerade can continue.