All The Beauty and the Bloodshed is a documentary that will send you staggering into the night. The worlds that it traverses are wide-ranging in place and time, but they come together in the portrait of a woman.
The film is in part documentation of Nan Goldin’s activism and the advocacy group she founded in 2017, P.A.I.N. or Prescription Addiction Intervention Now. Her target is the Sackler Family, who made billions from OxyContin through aggressive marketing tactics which concealed the drug’s pathological strength. It is not uncommon for people to be prescribed this opioid after a surgery and fall victim to a deadly addiction. At the time the movie was made, 400,000 Americans had died in this way.
Goldin’s interest in this issue is political as well as personal. Following a surgery in 2014, Goldin was prescribed OxyContin and coped with the onset of an opioid addiction that resulted in an overdose. The documentary features candid scenes of New York’s creative downtown class in 70s and 80s. No stranger to casual drug use, Goldin’s comparative experiences with other substances is a testament to OxyContin’s novel destructiveness. In an interview for Art Forum, she says it took two days of her prescription for her addiction to set in.
As an artist, her outrage for the opioid epidemic is compounded by the Sackler’s looming philanthropic presence in the art world. Their names have graced the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim, Louvre, National Portrait Gallery, The Tate, and the Harvard Art Museums, among others. This is written in the past tense because – as a direct result of Goldin’s activism – these museums have removed the family’s name from their edifices and refused all of their forthcoming contributions.
Despite these successes, Goldin and her team of activists were disappointed in their quest for a moral reckoning. In 2019, a class action lawsuit against Purdue Pharma devolved into a bankruptcy case. The Sacklers had been siphoning money from their corporate coffers for ten years before filing for a bankruptcy that effectively absolved them from criminal charges. This is due to the needling distinction between the corporate entity and the Sacklers qua Sacklers.
What gives us some semblance of moral satisfaction is that as part of the bankruptcy settlement, David, Richard, and Theresa Sackler were obligated to sit through two hours of testimony and come face-to-face with some of the people they harmed, including Nan herself. The proceedings were held remotely and this offered remarkable access to the faces of participants. A close-up look shows that as parents wept for their dead children, the Sacklers did not emote.
This saga, however, constitutes only a fraction of the documentary. The odyssey that is Nan Goldin’s life is an ongoing psychic whiplash between two, three or more worlds. The airy atriums of world-renowned art museums and the evil of billion-dollar villains are as much a part of her life as dingy lofts, Time Square bars, New Jersey strip clubs, street-side blowjobs, foster homes, and suburban ennui.
The movie is principally a tribute to Goldin’s older sister, whose teen suicide was exacerbated by emotional neglect, unnecessary psychiatric intervention, and homophobia. Barbara Goldin, Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz, and other friends who had died unfairly and prematurely are among Nan’s spiritual guides. Her political mantra is “the wrong things are kept silent” – a phrase which reverberates from the AIDS crisis, whose enduring slogan is “SILENCE = DEATH.” Goldin’s interest in queerness is evident through her photography, but the documentary makes it explicit that her artistic subjects are a part of her life and moral fiber, as well as her art.
Goldin is also affected by a primordial silence from childhood, one that can be abstracted to the suffocating conformity and cultural malaise of the 1950s. She describes herself as a gawkish girl who became mute for six months when – at the age 13 – her parents gave her up for adoption. In ensuing years, Goldin remained cripplingly shy and spoke very little.
Goldin’s first organized rebellion against “silence” was expressed through her art, the intimate sexual candor of which would come to represent a watershed in the history of art and photography. At the time, however, she did not have such pretensions. When Goldin first approached the camera, it was in lieu of language. She felt that photography justified her presence among people. Her slideshows, which represent the core of her artistic practice, are a kind of communion among friends. They were her way of telling them – without words – how much she treasured them.
Through her recent activism, Goldin reappropriates her power as an artist for a different medium of articulation, one whose very neglect was germane to her artistic development. She speaks and yells. She sits before judges and talks to journalists. The halls of museums no longer hang just her pictures, but they also echo with the sounds of her protest.
The glory of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is its positive appraisal for the artist, a vocation that is often and unfairly maligned. In American society, the cultural sphere is relegated to a kind of pettiness. Federal, state, and municipal support for cultural institutions are so meager that it necessitates grotesque philanthropic vanities like those of the Sacklers. Of course, one can argue that this unseemly patronage of art is nothing new. If not the Sacklers, then the Medicis. But when art is relegated only to the domain of a rich person’s discretionary spending, it is hard to see it as anything other than useless and superfluous.
However, we see in the documentary that the cultural sphere was the most responsive in meeting activist demands. An extrajudicial justice was meted out when museum after museum shunned the Sackler family’s money and name. This fall from grace took years of work, but it feels swift compared to the entangled proceedings of the American judicial system that has yet – and will likely never – criminalize the Sacklers for the role they played in the deaths of hundreds and thousands of people.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed reminds us that democracy has many faces. Political action is not only the province of law, specialists, and furtive courts, but a greater arena which circumscribes all of a nation’s citizenry. Protests in public spaces are meaningful. The goings-on of the cultural sphere are significant. Change can certainly happen under the catalysis of an artist. And the will of that artist, reduced to its component parts, is quite simple.
Nan Goldin’s will was that of the mediator, of a person who can traverse disparate worlds and integrate them. This is a person who demands intelligibility between these worlds and who, in the process, coaxes reflection and argumentation. More fundamentally, this is the desire to articulate oneself in synchronicity with one’s heart and mind – through photography, speech, or otherwise.
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