SHOTS THROUGH THE HEART

By Richard Lacayo

Ten years ago, if you got around much in the clubs and artists' spaces of downtown Manhattan, you might have found yourself at one of Nan Goldin's slide shows. Tattooed loveboys, innocents abroad, women on the verge of a nervous breakdown--in her slides they drank and smoked and coupled, or just deployed themselves gravely across the staging grounds of East Village life. Goldin had been taking pictures of herself and her friends since the early 1970s, first around Boston, where she was a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, then in the lofts and hangouts of New York City's Lower East Side. When she joined her slides to a sound track of French torch songs, gloom pop and Kurt Weill--music where the balance between real and false pathos was always shifting--the whole thing took on a desolate wit. Here were some buzz-cut kids cocked for trouble. There was a woman sorting herself out in a washroom mirror. Here was another rumpled bed, with another rumpled boyfriend. Hey! A home movie for the dispossessed.

One of Goldin's pictures, of a woman's thigh with a purplish mark, was called Heart-Shaped Bruise. That might well have been the name for the retrospective of her work that runs through Jan. 5 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Romantic melancholy is Goldin's true north, the mood she always returns to. Her friends laugh and party. They show off their tattoos and tutus. But they also brood and question the dead air with their eyes. They die from AIDS. In her self-portraits Goldin shows the injuries of a serious beating at the hands of a boyfriend--bruises are the regalia of romance here--and follows herself through drug and alcohol rehab. If these are party people, the party has loose ends, but they sometimes unravel in interesting ways.

Only sometimes. In 1986 many of the best pictures from her ever changing slide show were collected in a much talked about book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. And what Goldin has learned since then about the inexplicable pleasures of life is evident in a wonderful recent shot of her mother laughing. But when her own life's work faces you in bulk, at least in the 275-picture bulk hauled up by the Whitney, the slack starts to show. Goldin is a diarist, with a diarist's instincts for the ways into her own saga but also the same weakness for the dull stretches.

In her favor is the fact that she's also a tour guide. As photographers have been since the 19th century, she's a host in places below most people's equator, not just Lower Manhattan but the drag bars and sex clubs of Bangkok and Manila. All the same, some of Goldin's frontiers are well on their way to being settled. Thanks to Calvin Klein's skanky ad campaigns and the Broadway musical Rent, the same cast of dog-eared guys and Avenue B girls are everywhere. And drag? Never heard of it. Only kidding. RuPaul. Wong Foo. Switch on Good Morning America and there's Lady Chablis, the transvestite from John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. In a cooking segment, no less.

As it turns out, the domestication of funk, which might have made Goldin quaint, works for her in a way. It reminds us of her indisputable virtue: funk, undomesticated. Whatever the pleasures of Rent, which are shrewd and abundant, it offers the Lower East Side in captivity, fetchingly confined within Broadway conventions. And those Klein ads--is that grime in the models' bangs or only hair gel caking? When Goldin descends below the taboo line, she's not just down there on a visit. She lives there, or she has. She reminds us of what the real world at night looks like, full of bright light but also sour light and scenes that wouldn't sell much cologne. Friends on the toilet is one of her subthemes. So are blunt sex and bad housekeeping.

So if intimacy were everything, Goldin's pictures would have everything. But it doesn't always pay to expect that when you open a door onto private moments, feeling or knowledge automatically steps through. Touring her show can be like spending too much time flipping through somebody else's photo album: Who are all those people just hanging around in front of the camera? After half a dozen uneventful shots of another of Goldin's lovers you sense what's missing when you come across her 1982 picture called Brian in the Cabana, Puerto Juarez, Mexico. He's reclining on one arm in a shadowy hut, looking at some sunstruck foliage through the slats of an open, louvered glass window. In most of her pictures Goldin's friends don't get out much in daylight. With a pensive expression, Brian regards the natural world in a manageable portion about the size you might get through a TV screen.

There are too few shots like that. What's worse is that in some places this show seems to ask us to sympathize with Goldin's subjects instead of consider what she made of them. The real catastrophes of recent years--AIDS, drug deaths, brutal dealings between men and women--have produced a sentimental climate in some parts of the art world. That's the mood in Ross Bleckner's oil-paint gloamings and in the mournful photo assemblages of Mike and Douglas Starn. And it's in the scarlet wallpaper of Goldin's empty hotel rooms and her graveyard bouquets. Is this where all the hard questions end up, in a chapel where our voices are hushed and where grumbling about the pictures is impolite?

Ask that question before images of the battered and dying and you risk seeming indifferent to grief. But not to ask it opens the way to aesthetic blackmail, allowing the fact of suffering to cancel your doubts about the pictures that convey it. Or try to. Goldin has felt the blows of the past decade or so as hard as anybody. You wish sometimes that her work were as acute as her pain.