Golden Goldin

                                                                                                                                (tate.org.uk)

Within the oeuvre of Nan Goldin, there is an unwavering commitment to the act of seeing, to the raw, unmediated experience of life in its most visceral form. Goldin’s photography is not a window to the world but a mirror, reflecting the intimate spaces of existence that often go unnoticed.

Goldin’s seminal work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the lives of her friends and herself in the vibrant, turbulent New York City scene of the 1970s and ’80s. This slideshow of snapshots transcends the personal, becoming a cultural artifact that captures the zeitgeist of a particular era with piercing intimacy.

Her images are unflinching in their candor, capturing moments of love, sexuality, joy, and suffering with a directness that borders on the voyeuristic. Goldin’s lens does not shy away from the pain of existence; it seeks it out, illuminates and challenges the viewer to confront it head-on. Despite these tendencies, her work is electrified by a current of empathy, of shared human experience.

Goldin’s photography has always been about connection — the connection between subject and photographer, between photograph and viewer, between the individual narrative and the collective history. Her images are fragments of stories, personal sequences that could be spliced into the genetic makeup of our collective humanity. They are imbued with the specificity of place and time, yet they resonate with a timeless quality that speaks to the ongoing struggles and joys of human life.

In her exploration of subcultures, marginalized communities and the variegated landscapes of human emotion and experience, Goldin has forged a visual language that is as bold as it is subtle, as profound as it is accessible. Her work is an ongoing interrogation of the self and the other, continuously questioning the boundaries between public and private, between the staged and the spontaneous.

Goldin transforms the photograph into a performative act, a dynamic event that engages with the discourses of postmodernism, challenging the notions of the photograph as a historical document, as a piece of evidence, as the cold, hard truth. 

Goldin’s art is a testament to the power of the image, to the ability of the photograph to bear witness, to tell a story, to evoke an emotion, to provoke a reaction. It is a reminder that art can be both deeply personal and profoundly political, and that the act of seeing should aspire to continual understanding, compassion and change. Through her lens, Goldin invites us to see not just her world but to reflect on our own, to see ourselves and each other with the same honesty, the same bravery and the same love with which she sees her subjects.

Homage to Kiki Smith

                                                                                                                   (tate.org.uk)

One artist who dominates my artistic imagination is Kiki Smith. Her name in many ways embodies the themes of her art: a mixture of the quotidian and the quirky. 

 

Kiki Smith’s figures stand in silent communion, a pantheon of the ordinary and ethereal; they are whispering totems to the corporeal truths and mythic flights that bind us. In the spillage of organs, the arch of a spine, the stretch of papery wings, there is a storytelling so primal it harkens to the cellular narratives written in our bones. These creations hold the gaze, not with the force of confrontation, but with the gravity of understanding, as if each piece is a stanza in a poem about the vast experience of being.

There is something of the alchemist in Smith, but in reverse. A desire to turn the beautiful into the baser materials that gave rise to it. The glass, the paper, the beeswax, and the bronze become vessels for the exploration of what it means to inhabit the flesh, to engage with the rhythms of the natural world, and to confront the intangible through the profoundly tangible.

Kiki Smith’s work doesn’t shock; it just reminds you of where you come from. Her art seeps into you the way twilight seeps into the corners of the day, transforming what we thought we knew into something more nuanced, more layered. In the same way that twilight insists on the complexity of the day’s narrative, Smith’s art insists on the complexity of its subjects - the narratives of women, the stories of the body, and the tales of the natural world that we are, and have always been, a part of.

This insistence compels us to register and acknowledge the curve of a limb, the gesture of a hand, the configuration of internal organs rendered in luminescent colors. Within this constellation of form and substance, we find a quiet rebellion against the passing over of details, the glossing over of the difficult, the complex, the uncomfortable. Smith’s oeuvre is a reminder to pause and pay homage to the beauty and brutality of life and death, a cycle as present in the fall of a leaf as in the fall of a civilization.

In her embrace of the ephemeral, there is an anchoring permanence, much like the paradox of memory that is constantly shifting, always malleable, yet somehow foundational to everything we understand about ourselves. Her work is a physical manifestation of memory, not as a static repository, but as a living, breathing, evolving entity. It is here, in the nexus of what we remember and what we try to forget, that Smith’s art whispers its most profound truths, teaching us that to engage with art is to engage with the continuum of what has been and what will be.

Looking Back on Chicago

                                                                                                               (brooklynmuseum.org)

Judy Chicago was a name that attracted me long before I gravitated to her art. Early in her career in the 1960s, she took the minimalist style that was popular at the time and pushed its boundaries in new directions. Though minimalism was dominated by male artists at the time, Chicago was quietly forging her own path and style. Her early works featured geometric shapes and solid colors that echoed the minimalist aesthetic but contained subtle references to the female form. While her contemporaries were focused on abstraction, Chicago was beginning to pave the way for feminist art by introducing themes of gender and identity into her work. 

In the 1970s, Chicago stepped up her artistic ambitions and founded the first feminist art program in the United States at the California Institute of the Arts. There, she helped train a new generation of feminist artists. If her early work in the 1960s was a whisper, her work during the 1970s was an uproar that could not be ignored. Her most famous work, The Dinner Party, caused a sensation when it was unveiled in 1979. The installation featured a large banquet table arranged in a triangle shape with 39 place settings honoring influential women throughout history. Each place setting was uniquely designed and contained intricate ceramic plates, embroidered runners, and symbolic gold vulva sculptures. The Dinner Party brought feminist art into the mainstream on a massive scale and has become an iconic symbol of the feminist movement, akin to da Vinci's The Last Supper in terms of cultural impact and recognition.

The thing about Judy's work is that it commands attention but also aims to educate and spark conversation. Her installations are literally like fireworks shows in that they make a big splash and then fade away. They are meant to be experienced and debated over. The Dinner Party, in particular, toured the country and internationally, exposing many to the achievements of influential women throughout history. It did not just decorate a museum space but actively engaged viewers and challenged preconceptions. Judy Chicago blazed new trails for feminist art and ensured it could no longer be ignored on the main stages of the art world.

I have to be honest - sometimes, in my embarrassingly detailed dreams of being an artist, I fashion myself after Judy Chicago. I think about what it would be like to be commissioned for massive installation pieces that showcase the accomplishments of influential Korean women throughout history. I envision pieces that tour the country and introduce young Koreans, especially young women, to new role models in their own history. 

In reality, however, there are still areas of Korean society that are not fully ready to openly discuss issues of gender and identity. Perhaps one day, as the country continues to progress on women's and LGBTQ rights, a Korean artist will be able to create works as bold and impactful as The Dinner Party that both educate and spark meaningful conversations. For now, I am content to appreciate Judy Chicago's trailblazing from afar and hope to someday make my own small contributions through art.