‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ Review: Nan Goldin’s Art and Activism

NYT MOVIES: ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ Review: Nan Goldin’s Art and Activism
By Manohla Dargis
Section: Movies
Source: New York Times
Published Date: November 22, 2022 at 02:00AM

A new documentary focuses on the photographer’s struggle with OxyContin and her protest against the art establishment that took money from its makers.

Among the thousands of items in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection is the 1980 Nan Goldin photograph titled “Heart-Shaped Bruise, NYC.” In it, a woman lies splayed across a messy bed wearing pulled-down stockings and a dress that’s been hitched up just below her rear, exposing some bared leg imprinted with a bruise shaped like a heart. The woman’s head is outside the frame, so it’s easy to focus on this bit of skin, to let your imagination run wild, fired up by the image’s unsettling power, its allure and its menace.

That unease is emblematic of Goldin’s photography, whose images of bruised bodies and bared souls include a self-portrait that she made in 1984 after being beaten by a lover. The image, “Nan One Month After Being Battered,” is in the collection of the Tate Galleries in London. In 2019, the Tate evaded unwanted attention from Goldin, who had begun staging protests of institutions that had taken money from members of the Sackler family whose company, Purdue Pharma, developed the opioid painkiller OxyContin. The Tate simply announced it would no longer accept their donations.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras’s intimate documentary about Goldin, her art and her activism, starts on March 10, 2018. That day, Goldin brought her fight against members of the Sackler family to the Met with a protest that turned its popular Temple of Dendur exhibition — an Egyptian temple installed in a gallery named the Sackler Wing — into a symbolic battlefield. It was a clash that pitted the artist against members of a family that is both extraordinarily wealthy and, as the journalist Patrick Radden Keefe wrote in a 2017 New Yorker article, is “one of America’s great philanthropic dynasties.” It also pitted Goldin against the art establishment that had helped make her an international art star.

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/movies/all-the-beauty-and-the-bloodshed-review-nan-goldin.html

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