Artist Nan Goldin on addiction and taking on the Sackler dynasty: ‘I wanted to tell my truth’ - The Guardian

In September 2016, I met with Nan Goldin in C Wing of Reading Gaol.

“If that’s what a group of 12 people can do,” says Goldin, referring to the friends and assistants who form the core of her small, but dramatically effective, organisation, Pain (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), “then anything is possible.”.

Goldin’s transformation from artist to activist is brilliantly traced in a new documentary feature film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice film festival.

Poitras describes Goldin as “a no-bullshit person” and says she admires the artist’s almost reckless approach.

I just wish more people would use their power in that way.”.

Incredibly, she had somehow managed to produce work during her lost years, including the Artangel commission, and had even carried out a few public engagements.

Today, Goldin is speaking to me over Zoom from her apartment in Brooklyn, where she has lived for the past eight years or so, surrounded by photographs by friends such as the late Peter Hujar – “the stillness and depth of his work is unsurpassed” – and some unsettling taxidermy specimens including a fierce-looking coyote that stands sentinel at her door.

“The bulk of the Sacklers’ fortune has been accumulated only in recent decades, yet the source of their wealth is to most people as obscure as that of the robber barons,” he wrote, before citing Purdue Pharma as the source of their billions.

Then came the statistics: between 1999 and 2017, 200,000 deaths had occurred from overdoses of OxyContin and other prescription opioids; at the time of writing, around 145 people were dying every day from opioid overdoses; four out of five Americans who had been prescribed prescription painkillers were now using street heroin.

“The sheer scale of what was happening seemed almost unbelievable,” says Goldin, “but Patrick’s article gave me a sense of purpose and showed me how to go forward.”?

“I was so happy about that,” says Goldin, “because it looked like they were never going to do the right thing.”?

And the boards are still full of those people.

The fact that there is pretty much no state or federal help for museums means they are dependent on these people.

“It’s funny, because people have said to me, ‘How could you do that.

I suppose the fear was that I could have been erased somehow and it’s probably true that I was not invited into exhibition in those years.

Throughout Poitras’s film, the Sacklers remain an invisible presence until a riveting scene in which Goldin and her fellow activists are gathered around a screen to watch a remote federal court proceeding in which board members Theresa and David Sackler listen impassively to the testimonies of those who have lost loved ones to OxyContin.

Under court rules, they could not respond and had to sit silently while roughly two dozen people gave emotional statements.

At one point, a recording of an emergency ambulance call is played and the camera captures the silence in the room as Goldin and her friends listen to a panicked father’s frantic phone conversation with the emergency service, while his distraught wife screams in the background.

“I want to point out to the Sacklers,” the father says, in conclusion, “that, by the time this two-hour hearing is over, you can add 16 more people to your death list.”.

“Richard Sackler refused to come on screen and I don’t know how he got away with that,” says Goldin, angrily.

Poitras describes All the Beauty and the Bloodshed as, on one level, “a window into the brutality of American capitalism”.

“Oh my God, totally,” says Goldin.

“And there is no accountability for rich people.

As its title suggests, though, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is not just a film about one woman’s fight against a powerful global corporation, it also traces Goldin’s singular life as a transgressive artist as well as her troubled youth in suburban Boston and the wildly dissolute downtown scene she gravitated towards on her arrival in New York.

Its gestation is traced early on in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, as Goldin recalls the wild times over her archive footage of the friends and fellow travellers she has helped immortalise in her work: the underground actress Cookie Mueller; photographer David Armstrong; artist, writer and Aids activist David Wojnarowicz, as well as the transsexuals, outsiders and scenesters of another scuzzy, less corporate era in downtown Manhattan.

There is a moving section on the many friends she lost during the Aids crisis in the 1980s and an acknowledgment of the huge influence the Act Up activism campaign of that time had on the tactics employed by Pain.

But it’s also important to say that, when I do the work, it’s not coming from that instinct.

It’s something that comes much later, perhaps as a result of doing the kind of work I do.”.

“My father was much more deeply affected.” says Goldin.

And they had children because that’s what people did back in those years.

Mind you,” she adds, chuckling, “most people aren’t meant to be parents.” Does she think one ever really escapes one’s childhood.

I think so,” she says, nodding but looking a little uncertain.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, then, is a Laura Poitras film, but it is also quintessentially a Nan Goldin film: brutally honest, deeply poetic.

It is freighted by great loss: lost friends, lost family, the lost years of drug addiction, and by Goldin’s encroaching sense of her own mortality.

“I think that people who make stories out of their lives tend to repeat the stories over and over again,” she says, towards the end of our conversation

Recently, when Goldin attended the opening of the current retrospective of her work, pointedly titled This Will Not End Well at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, she was taken by surprise by the sheer number of images in the various slideshows

Does she remember the people and places in the photographs because of the photographs

I don’t think so

I mean, with the Ballad…, it’s full of people who died

And it’s the same with the queens and trans people I photographed back then

Most of the people around me are younger, because I don’t have a lot of people to get old with