All The Beauty and The Bloodshed explores the connection between the artist’s work and her life

Is art important? This is a very silly question. I know it’s silly because if you look at it for more than a moment it melts. Part of this is that we know very little about what art is: what is good art, what is bad art, what is great art. Our sense of aesthetic pleasure may be too dull to understand it, plagued by a haze of overstimulation and assumed subjectivity. artist Matter?

Documentary author Laura Poitras, best known for her films documenting government abuses and the individual actors caught in them, addresses this question in her latest film. All beauty and bloodshed. Poitras was first brought into the film by the producer who was pitched by the subject of the film, photographer Nan Goldin himself. Goldin’s original vision for the film was to document the work of Pain (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). This activist group, founded by Goldin, was dedicated to defaming the Sackler family and looking to cleanse the reputation of donations by the art world.

Instead, Poitras became interested in Goldin’s life and work as an artist.The film explores Goldin’s work as an artist and activist. MeCompletely tied to her life. The best example of this is her most famous work: ballad of sexual addictionThis photo series chronicles her life along with those of her friends and lovers, including photographer David Armstrong, actress and author Cookie Mueller, and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Her lens captures them as they fuck, dance, kiss, play and use drugs.In what Goldin described as the “central image” ballad, she takes a picture of herself after being beaten by her boyfriend. Her red curls turn dark brown in strong light, her skin is pale, and the bruises around her eyes are dull. She has only two stings of color. She has blood pooled in the whites of her eyes and lips painted blood red to match.

The drug use documented in her photographs became an addiction for her. She only recovered in 2014 when she was prescribed OxyContin after an injury to her hand. When Goldin found her cure, she learned how the Sackler family (heirs to the Purdue University pharmaceutical fortune) marketed OxyContin as a safe treatment for pain. Forced to act, she formed PAIN.

The film is structured around the holding of a meeting at Goldin’s apartment and the resulting actions. Members of PAIN can be seen crowding around Goldin in her apartment or sitting in the car with her, rhythmically applying stickers to the apothecary bottle props used in the demonstration (” I love working with materials I know: blue barium bottles”). It’s a familiar sight to anyone who has been politically active in any way. His simple face is occasionally torn apart by brooding jokes and logistical tactics.

One of those demonstrations will be at the Guggenheim. At that time there was an arts education center there named after Sackler. PAIN members toss paper prescriptions in the building’s atrium. This is a quote from Richard Sackler in his 1996 stating: Prescription blizzards get very deep, dense, and white…” And they take it literally: prescription blizzards rain down from above and flap to the floor. The music swells and the camera tilts toward the white slip at moments when you feel free.

There’s a dramatic sensibility here, the same one you see in Goldin’s photographs. PAIN member Megan Kapler recalls looking up at the Guggenheim and saying, “I was in awe of the visuals it created.” The same impulse that drives her painted lips in the photo also brings these demonstration renditions to life. Not only does it make the invisible visible, it also makes it so vivid that you can’t look away. The agonizing bonds of love and violence, money and power are forced upon us by Goldin’s aesthetic.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed finds a match between Goldin’s aesthetic and her ethics, while making it clear that it is the result of a life that she never allowed to separate the two. Her Art Her career was born out of photography, which turned her life into material. Her artwork hangs in a museum that kills her friends with her drugs and is run on money from her family who tried to kill her.

But these kinds of connections are also not unique. We are all troubled by them. Our work, our suffering, our sex, our love, our death. All of this is tied together by a system of economic and political imperatives that most of us are too scared to take a closer look at. Goldin’s choice to fight in her own realm, the art world, may be exceptional, but for her it’s a natural extension of how she approaches everything else.

“Photography was a way of walking through fear,” Goldin says at one point. The distance of her lens allowed her to document how she saw the world, allowing her to endure and change it, which also made her an artist. bottom.