The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-1996) is an enduring analogue photographic record of artist Nan Goldin’s coterie of lovers, friends and peers.1 Its relevance to subsequent generations is strong and reinforced by the recent Oscar-nominated documentary on Goldin’s life, work and activism, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022). ‘For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody – it’s a caress,’ said Goldin of her process in 1996.2 The intimacy of her pictures, this caress, evokes in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency a sense of inner conflict eclipsing surface calm. As Goldin and her cast of eclectic characters work their way through parties, drugs, drag, violence, lovers, genders, bed linen and 1980s fashion, a viewer becomes privy to her disquieting ability to bear witness and measure with barometric precision the tenor of her times: a seemingly sexually liberated era in pre-gentrified post-punk New York before HIV/AIDS swooped in and decimated much of this world. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was, therefore, Goldin’s way of keeping alive a memory of those she loved and later lost.

Presented as a visually disarming slide show, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency exposes multiple codes of sexuality and gender that today have an enhanced ease of recognition and nuance. Goldin’s ritual documentation presents an ordinary reality made extraordinary simply by being photographed. Narrative forces propel Goldin’s photogenic world with dramatic pathos amplified by the accompanying soundtrack of iconic pop songs by bands from The Velvet Underground to Siouxsie and the Banshees. The use of music invites viewers to create their own reveries. Like the characters comprising The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, these dreams appear and dissolve with the glowing and fading of Goldin’s slides.

Trixie on the Cot, New York City (1979) is one among many of the slides making up The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. It is somewhat unusual because it was a picture taken of the titular character on the set of Liberty’s Booty (1980), a now rarely seen avant-garde film by Goldin’s friend Vivienne Dick, a leading practitioner of the ‘No Wave’ film scene. Goldin was there as witness, but also as performer appearing on film. Presumably, Goldin captures amateur performer Trixie between takes, within an ostensibly constructed mise en scène. Despite the film set’s no-budget lack of excess, the image reads more as a film still than a documentary-like slice of life. Art historian Catherine Lampert describes her aesthetic of ‘rich lantern colours and cinematic enveloping powers’ as being enhanced not just ‘by the projector’s beam’ but ‘also conditioned by Goldin’s reconstitution of time’.3

How time functions in Goldin’s work has become an obsessive ongoing pastime for multidisciplinary Australian artist Matthew Sleeth. In 2021, Sleeth produced The First Cut Is the Deepest, a recreation of Trixie on the Cot as an ambitious performance installation at KRONENBERG MAIS WRIGHT in Warrang/Sydney. By reversing photography’s process of creation, Sleeth sets out to ‘return’ the two-dimensional image to three dimensions. A curiosity with the freezing of time in photography impelled Sleeth to restage the image with time restored through the performative remediation of Goldin’s iconic image. Casting young actor Brontë Sparrow as an uncanny Trixie look-alike, Sleeth meticulously restaged the set, props and costumes of the original source material for a durational three-week performance occurring within the exhibition opening and the gallery’s regular hours. Audiences could bear witness to a speculative idea of the moments that may have transpired before and after the photograph was made, set to a Spotify playlist of songs originally used by Goldin in the slide show for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. In Goldin’s world the songs are extra-diegetic anthems for a sequence of stills. It is what Trixie and her gallery audience is listening to in real time in Sleeth’s gallery restaging. 

Zooming out, the sense of an era having passed and a reconsideration of what came before or after the time represented in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, is central to Sleeth’s conceptual framing. Not just in a sociopolitical sense of history, but in relation to his own personal experience. Having been visually radicalised at a young age by the discovery of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency through its iteration as the bestselling 1986 photobook, Sleeth’s Goldin fandom was assured and enduring, then as much as now:

Though the mid-1980s Melbourne where Sleeth grew up offered an artistic subculture at the tail end of punk through Nick Cave and Rowland S. Howard, as chronicled by photographer Peter Milne, its possibilities and scope seemed limiting. For Sleeth:

It was much more about other worlds and what New York in the 1980s was like. I was excited that it existed and that it wasn’t just all going to be Melbourne suburbs forever.5

Even though Sleeth’s first love as an artist was photography, his work has found expression in multiple forms and mediums. The First Cut Is the Deepest reflects this fantasy of first love and its melancholic disappointments, overgrown by the creeping vines of nostalgia. Placing a live stream of the Trixie installation on the gallery’s mezzanine returned the work to its lens-based origins, riffing on the surveillance and voyeurism embedded in photography, and particularly rife in our current social-media age. Writing on Goldin, art critic Hilton Als reminds us that her work was groundbreaking because of its gendered voyeurism:

As a voyeur negotiating complicity and exchange with her subjects via the camera, Goldin created a world where reality and fantasy could coalesce through time-bottling Cibachromes.

Following the exhibition at KRONENBERG MAIS WRIGHT, Sleeth further stretched the remediation of the project by turning the live stream footage into a two-channel video that runs for approximately 11 minutes – the duration of the first five songs in the accompanying playlist. Hitting play on the Vimeo and Spotify links simultaneously, the songs transform Trixie’s otherwise banal actions of ennui (sitting, staring, reading, smoking, drinking) into an emotional tour de force that climaxes with James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome’s ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ (1966). As Brown’s soulful voice opines that ‘it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl’, my thoughts drifted to the recently deceased Australian singer Renée Geyer, whose gutsy 1974 version of this song coincided with the second-wave feminism of that decade. 

Though Cat Stevens’s 1967 song ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’ (most famously covered by Rod Stewart as a chart-topping hit a decade later) is not part of the playlist, Sleeth nods to it as a tribute to first love and its emotional wounds. His song referencing recalls how these things have played out in the dominant heterosexist pop culture spawning such sentiments and the broken queer utopias offered as alternatives by the likes of Nan Goldin’s legacy. That Sleeth finds comfort in restaging his straight fandom fantasy of photography through a queer lens shows how the complex subjective entanglements of our first cuts, make more sense, or not, second time around.

Matthew Sleeth’s The First Cut Is the Deepest (2021) was staged at KRONENBERG MAIS WRIGHT in Warrang/Sydney, 8–29 May 2021.