Yesterday, i watched All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the documentary about photographer Nan Goldin, twice in one day. (It was really good. And it’s currently streaming on Crave in Canada and whatever HBO streams on elsewhere.)
The searing way Goldin speaks about her sister — her suicide and the way she was institutionalized as a child and adolescent — and the effect it and her parents’ denial had on her life and art, which is brought into a parallel relationship with Goldin’s recent activism and advocacy responding to the opioid crisis, illuminates and energizes the way Goldin’s art is presented: “I mean that’s the problem,” Goldin says in a voice over, “you know you grow up being told that didn’t happen, you didn’t see that, you didn’t hear that. And what do you do? How do you believe yourself? How do you trust yourself? How do you continue to trust yourself? And then how do you show the world that you did experience that, that you did hear that? And so that’s the reason that I take pictures.”
The documentary also presents a clear-sighted critique of the way money has made art as an institution complicit in great harms committed in the world. In the documentary, the critique focuses on the Sackler family (they of the Purdue Pharma company), but it’s a critique that dovetails with Josiah Neufeld’s article in The Walrus last month, “How the Giller Prize Became Associated with Genocide”, wherein Neufeld reports on the fallout from the protests at the 2023 Scotiabank-Giller gala: “The writers I spoke to for this piece, however, told me that a literary organization more afraid of losing corporate sponsors than of losing authors has failed to understand something fundamental about what it means to write [. . . .] It’s precisely because writers earn so little from their art that they can’t afford to squander the cultural capital they do have. That capital — the kind created by honest, piercing, revelatory art — is a currency corporations like Scotiabank can never amass on their own.”
Relatedly, Neufeld’s book, The Temple at the End of the Universe, is similarly clear-sighted and unsettling in the best kind of way. I had the thought, as i was finishing it, that having spent my time trying to be good, be obedient, but increasingly good and obedient are insufficient to meet the moment. Perhaps it was always so (and i can be an exceptionally slow learner) — and i haven’t figured out how to bring that thought into the world, but still, it’s there.
To end, i don’t often remember to share my most recent poetry column in The Winnipeg Free Press.
melanie brannagan frederiksen 