‘Memory Lost’ summons the pain of addiction and withdrawal
If you have 24 minutes, run to the Fraenkel Gallery for photographer Nan Goldin’s slide show “Memory Lost.” It’s a very concentrated 24 minutes of the human condition.
At a recent celebration of the New York photographer at Fraenkel Gallery, Goldin said that her intention with the slide show was to “replicate the feeling of withdrawal from drugs.” Having seen the show four times now, I can tell you I have felt both totally engaged and strangely disassociated after my viewing experiences, emotionally moved and also unsettled.
Goldin, 69, is an internationally celebrated photographer and a recovering addict. She became dependent on opioids following surgery on her wrist in 2014. In 2017, she founded Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, known as P.A.I.N., and began staging highly theatrical demonstrations against Purdue Pharma, the drug maker owned by the Sackler family, at museums that bore their name as patrons.
Recent years have seen major victories in the campaign to remove the Sackler name from cultural institutions — many of which have Goldin’s work in their collections — and to hold the company financially and legally responsible. The 2022 Oscar-nominated documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” by Laura Poitras tells this story while looking at the full scope of Goldin’s career.
The back exhibition space at Fraenkel has been transformed into a media room with bench seating. It’s a comfortable place to settle in for the still photos and video footage set to a soundtrack mixing music, archival recordings and new interviews. With a haunting original score by musician Mica Levi and images assembled from Goldin’s work, it’s easy for longtime fans to get drawn into her familiar aesthetic and the rhythms of the slideshow itself.
A description that’s always felt most appropriate for Goldin’s oeuvre is captivating. It’s hard to avert my eyes from even her grittiest depictions of New York’s Bowery scene in the 1970s and ’80s, which make up her famed slideshow “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.”
It’s not just her subjects’ alternative beauty and underground glamor I return to, it’s the relationships she captures that speak the most powerfully. In other photos it’s the evidence of human existence she lingers on in a scene (a crowded vanity mirror, an unmade motel bed, the way
trash overflows from a container) that become fascinating. There is an intimacy to Goldin’s gaze that is revealing but doesn’t feel exploitive, and it’s this sensitivity that allows her to go to the depths that “Memory Lost” takes her.
The slide show starts with images from early in Goldin’s career set to an upbeat Eartha Kitt song. As it progresses, the slides and soundtrack both get darker, including gorgeously nightmarish images of animals and nature that are blurred and overexposed.
Interwoven with Levi’s score and additional music by CJ Calderwood and Soundwalk Collective are recordings of Goldin’s voice, messages on answering machine tapes from the 1980s and new interviews speaking to the daily struggles of drug dependency.
The outtake photos from earlier series sometimes include familiar subjects and settings, but several images that are out of focus unsettle expectations and bring you into the blurry world of addiction.
Visions of dark skies, deserted beaches and distorted views of crowds are among the images in the slide show that are also displayed as photographs in the front room at Fraenkel. (The second room contains images of Goldin’s most recent work from 2020-2021 showing writer Thora Siemsen.)
Yet even in their horror and confusion, Goldin’s images can be beautiful. Two horses majestically backlit in an arena ring seem almost to be embracing. A blurred facade of a building becomes a vibrant slash of stone. A child in a skeleton Halloween costume is both frightening and yet touchingly innocent. Even through the remove of addiction, Goldin’s work is imbued with humanity.
“The most important takeaway from the show is what the psychiatrist/philosopher says at the end about why people use drugs: to feel normal,” Goldin said. “My work is a lot about destigmatizing drug use, and my political work now is about keeping drug users alive. I hope people cry or at least feel suffocated while watching it.”
Although I personally did neither, I did leave Fraenkel Gallery with a new perspective on the epidemic of addiction playing out daily just steps from the gallery.