The Ache of Rebellion:
Nan Goldin’s Chosen Family

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Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well (installation view) (2022). Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2022. Exhibition Architecture designed in collaboration with Hala Wardé. Image courtesy of the artist and Moderna Museet. Photo: Åsa Lundén.

At the beginning of Laura Poitras’ Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), a disruption unfolds. Nan Goldin, along with fellow activists from the advocacy group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN), prepare for a protest—their first—at the Sackler Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Flush with anticipatory energy, the group gathers outside the museum before converging in the cavernous gallery that houses the epochal Temple of Dendur, an appropriately momentous setting for their unauthorized action. This gallery was one of seven in the museum that, at the time of this demonstration (2018), bore the name of the Sackler family, notorious heirs to the unscrupulous empire of OxyContin. As unearthed in a 2017 New Yorker article (the revelatory contents of which partially inspired Goldin to found PAIN the same year),¹ the origins of the opioid epidemic can be directly traced to the sinister marketing campaign put forth by the family’s company, Purdue Pharma, which falsely claimed that the drug was safe; the Sacklers subsequently raked in billions of dollars from sales of the highly-addictive opiate.² Much of the Sacklers’ drug money has been philanthropically funneled into the coffers of various cultural institutions, including The Met—hence the fierce presence of Goldin and her companions on this brisk day in March 2018.³

After the group cautiously assembles around the shimmering reflecting pool at the foot of the temple, they begin to abruptly disrupt the gallery’s quotidian decorum: Chants echo, banners unfurl, and dozens of prescription bottles emblazoned with the Sackler name launch into the air. The protesters’ bodies then slump to the ground in a coordinated die-in, their inert forms mirroring the overturned pill bottles that now float along the surface of the pool. For a moment, the scene of this raucous intervention, which occurs at a monument primarily dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis, reads as an offering, or perhaps a sacrifice. As an act of dissent in a museological setting, it both acknowledges the Temple of Dendur’s archeological underpinnings as a traditional site for performing offerings and, more crucially, eulogizes the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been forsaken at the altar of Big Pharma. And although not a performance per se, PAIN’s collective action activates the gallery in a manner achieved by only the best performances: It interrupts and transforms the space, reframing its formal contours as a dynamic stage for collective interference.

On the surface, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed traces a detailed narrative arc of Goldin’s anti-Sackler activism, with Poitras, a lauded filmmaker and documentarian, largely functioning as an unseen auteur, quietly bearing witness to the artist’s unflinching, memoir-esque narration. The meat of the film, however, ultimately documents an interwoven tale of several families: the Sacklers, defined by their perverse privilege and incessant greed; Goldin’s biological family, marred by intergenerational trauma and the aftermath of her older sister’s teenage suicide; and the artist’s “chosen family,” the trusted network of friends, artists, and activists that has occupied the center of her artistic practice for the past several decades. The trajectories of these familial entanglements, which Poitras centers in the film, suggest that the wounds wrought by household traumas eventually hemorrhage outwards, spilling into the cistern of society as a whole, irrevocably shaping it. Goldin’s work and activism posit the power of one’s chosen family as an antidote, using a model of collective care to staunch the bleed.

A family is often thought of as a microcosm of the surrounding world, enacting, on an intimate scale, the mores of society at large. The idyllic mirage of the nuclear family has been so culturally enduring for precisely this reason: The mythology of the perfect family unit reflects kindly on the larger American project of heteronormative conformity. However, it goes without saying that a family, like society, evades monolithic characterizations. If we could trace both the brutality and the tenderness of our collective social body back to its hypothetical origin points, we would most likely find ourselves tangled in the threads of private family dynamics.

Goldin has often spoken of her own family experience as the inception point for her work in photography. In the 1996 introduction to her book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (first published in 1986)—which culls images from her ever-evolving, landmark photographic slideshow of the same name (1981–2022)—Goldin discloses that in 1965, when she was 11, her older sister Barbara committed suicide at the age of 18.⁴ As she recounts in Poitras’ film, the two had a particularly close bond, with Barbara functioning as the nurturing older sister who offered a panacea for the maternal care largely withheld by their mother. Despite her sporadic adoption of conventional motherly behaviors, Barbara spurned conformity: She didn’t adhere to stringent heterosexual expectations, nor did she fully mime what Goldin refers to as the oppressive “limitations of gender distinction”⁵ that American heteronormative culture forces upon children. As a result, her parents declared her mentally ill and had her forcibly institutionalized, subjecting her to a horrific array of dehumanizing treatments. “By the time she was eighteen,” Goldin writes, “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.”⁶ Exacerbating this excruciating tragedy, Barbara’s psychiatrist declared that Goldin would likely meet the same fate. “I lived in fear that I would die at eighteen. I knew it was necessary for me to leave home, so at fourteen I ran away.”⁷

Nan Goldin holding hands with her sister Barbara (c. 1950s). Image courtesy of NEON.

Goldin has since reflected that when she picked up the camera for the first time at the serendipitous age of 18 and intuitively turned her lens toward her friends (her newfound surrogate family), the gesture was partly an attempt to recapture the tangible memory of her late sister. “I don’t ever want to be susceptible to anyone else’s version of my history,” Goldin muses in The Ballad. “I don’t ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again.”⁸ Much has been written about Goldin’s empathic eye and her searing ability to apprehend, in ways both dark and tender, the beauty and the humanity of her subjects, many of whom share the ache of rebellion that Goldin once observed in her sister. The authentic, deeply intimate relationships that Goldin shares with her subjects—a relationship that critic Peter Schjeldahl aptly referred to as “symbiotic”⁹—lends her the ability to transcend the sense of voyeuristic removal that often severs a photographer from her subject. (Literary theorist Ann Banfield suggests that a photograph can have the effect of “conjuring away” the presence of the photographer, leaving a voided space of absence, contingency, and elimination akin to death.¹⁰) Goldin’s camera doesn’t function as an apparatus of mediation as much as it does a corporeal instrument integral to her raw, lived experience—an object as vital and life-affirming as an eye or bodily appendage. “The camera,” she writes in The Ballad, “is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.”¹¹ Indeed, her most renowned photographs recount moments—variously dramatic, mundane, and always at the margins—of living, dying, suffering, grieving, healing, and the multitude of experiences that exist in between.

Goldin’s presentation of her photographs has always underscored the images’ vitality. Beginning in 1979, the artist organized her negatives into slideshows, which she presented to audiences that included the friends and lovers depicted therein. These presentations proceeded vociferously: Viewers rollicked and clamored in reaction to recognizing themselves, and Goldin would often remove images disapproved of by their subjects. As such, these happenings proved inherently mercurial, as the contents of the slideshows continually morphed and shifted over time.¹² Perhaps most importantly, Goldin’s collaborative actions eschew the preciousness of any individual image and in turn dispel the notion of the artist as a singular genius, revealing instead a deep vein of generosity that lends itself to mutual vulnerability—and perhaps mutual healing.

The mutability of these effervescent, provocative, and at times harrowing photographs of the artist’s chosen family both reject and redefine the vernacular notion of family pictures (and the attendant traumas often enclosed within). In his profoundly poetic book Ghost Image (1982), the late French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert frequently speaks of family photographs as fundamentally static images that “remain in their little cardboard coffins where we forget them; like crosses planted in the ground.”¹³ These dormant forms, he posits, represent mummified instances wherein the body remains immutable and inextricably tethered to the family unit. Perhaps most crucially, Guibert asserts that “this history exists parallel to that of memory,”¹⁴ suggesting that the seemingly stable family photograph depicts an idealized construction, an often-fabricated narrative of conviviality and unity. In Poitras’ film, Goldin also speaks of this disjunction between visceral and narrativized memory, the former of which embeds itself in the body, calcifying into physical and metaphysical scars that remain “dirty” and unsafe.¹⁵

In her more recent work Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls (2004), a three-channel video interspersed with still photographs, Goldin intentionally dredges up these memories, delving into the precarious psychological territory of her sister’s institutionalization and subsequent suicide, as well as her own hospitalization for opioid addiction following a near-fatal overdose in 2017 (an experience that acted as another catalyst for her creation of P.A.I.N.).¹⁶ In the piece, Goldin repudiates the notion of a sanitized remembrance by pairing material recovered from her sister’s extensive medical records with various family photographs from childhood, juxtaposing murky truths with chaste, staged representations. (The title of Poitras’ film stems from this material—medical records note that, in response to a Rorschach test, Goldin’s sister poetically observed that the inky pattern contained “all the beauty and the bloodshed.”)¹⁷ Elsewhere in Sisters, Saints, and Sibyls, Goldin compares her sister’s fate to that of Saint Barbara, a third-century Christian martyr who rebelled against—and was eventually beheaded by—her domineering father. These twin martyrdoms speak to the perilous nature of a traditional family’s patriarchal architecture, particularly for the disempowered who remain fettered to its structure.

The concept of a chosen family disavows the hierarchical power dynamics of a heteronormative one. In The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin explicitly asserts as much, writing: “This is the history of a re-created family, without the traditional roles.… We are not bonded by blood or place, but by a similar morality,” an assessment Goldin reiterates in Poitras’ film with regard to PAIN.¹⁸ She also poignantly asserts that her sister would have survived had she been allowed to cultivate her own chosen family—a notion of kinship that speaks to the urgency of mutual care as a form of protection in an increasingly hostile heteronormative society. This sentiment registers with particular gravity today. Directly modeled after ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the ’80s-era activist group that combated the AIDS epidemic through coordinated public provocations, PAIN is predicated on the notion of mutual care and the rejection of silent acquiescence to the status quo. Indeed, Goldin bears intimate scars from the AIDS crisis, which mercilessly obliterated a generation of radical artists and thinkers, many of whom she depicts in The Ballad. The anguished loss of her initial chosen family to a brutal public health crisis has undoubtedly fortified her crusade against those responsible for perpetuating addiction, another stigmatized disease. Thus, PAIN’s improbable success in forcing many of our most prominent cultural institutions to reject Sackler funding and scrub their names from gallery walls only reiterates the formative, redemptive potential of their steadfast communal bond—and the curative power of chosen family bonds in general.

Later in the film, Goldin and her fellow activists descend on the Guggenheim, formerly home to the Sackler Center for Arts Education. In a cogent and aesthetically commanding act of dissent, the group occupies each level of the museum’s coiled rotunda; blood-red banners unfurl and a lethal blizzard of prescription slips flutters in the air.¹⁹ This time, casual museum-goers amplify the group’s chants. The beauty of these fervent, well-orchestrated actions is that they have proven to be more strikingly effective in achieving their aims than the justice system itself. The Sacklers have completely evaded criminal liability for their behavior, declaring corporate bankruptcy—after siphoning $10.4 billion out of the company—to shield themselves from personal civic litigation.²⁰ In a climactic crescendo, Poitras’ film includes footage of one of the bankruptcy hearings (a virtual session from March 2022), during which Theresa, Richard, and David Sackler were obligated to behold victims’ impact statements—including a fiery statement by Goldin, who grasps a fellow activist’s hand as she intently speaks truth to power.²¹ Here, as the Sacklers bear involuntary witness to the intimate brutality of their greed, we finally perceive their faces, and their veil of corporate obscurity momentarily crumbles.

The film ends where it began, in front of The Met’s commanding Temple of Dendur, with the surrounding galleries now, four years later, void of the Sackler name. The PAIN members congregate in quiet celebration; Goldin partakes in the festivities while, naturally, taking photographs, appearing partially stunned by their collective ascendence over a goliath.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 32.

Image courtesy of The New York Times and Redux. Photo: George Etheredge.

Nan Goldin, Self portrait with scratched back after sex, London (1978). Image courtesy of the artist.

Nan Goldin in the bathroom with roommate, Boston (c. 1970s). Image courtesy of NEON.

Protest at the Louvre, Paris, France. Image courtesy of PAIN.

Jessica Simmons-Reid (MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; BA, Brown University) is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree. She’s interested in the interstitial space between the language of abstraction and the abstraction of language, as well as the intermingling of poetry and politics. She has contributed essays and reviews to Carla and Artforum, among others.

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