Activists hold a banner “Down with Sackler” in front of the Pyramids of the Louvre museum in Paris on July 1, 2019.
Stephane De Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images
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Activists hold a banner “Down with Sackler” in front of the Pyramids of the Louvre museum in Paris on July 1, 2019.
Stephane De Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images
On February 9, 2019, artist Nan Goldin led a protest at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in which activists dropped fake OxyContin prescriptions — all led by Richard Sackler, Director executive of Purdue Pharmaceuticals – into the atmosphere of the museum’s sprawling atrium. Several activists are located on the ground floor of the museum, pretending to be dead.
“It was a really beautiful act,” Goldin said. “We consider it a blizzard of prescriptions, and that we are the ones to be buried.”
Activists protest that the Guggenheim museum, along with many other museums, has received money from The Sackler familywhich the company has produced and actively markets OxyContin, an opioid and prescription pain reliever.
Goldin became addicted to OxyContin after it was prescribed while she was recovering from surgery. She’s not alone; OxyContin fueled the opioid crisis in the United States, causing approximately one million dead since 1999.
Goldin wanted to draw attention to the Sacklers’ influence in the art world – including the fact that the family’s name hangs on various wings of several world-famous museums. She founded the organization, PAIN. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), staged the “die-ins” at the Louvre in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Filmmaker Laura Poitras recalls being “stunned” when she first heard of Goldin’s objections: “It wasn’t really until Nan and PAIN started doing these actions that it ended. crystallized and it became inexplicable and the name attached to the kind of death Poitras said.
Poitras and Goldin’s Oscar-nominated documentary, All beauty and bloodshed, which documents Goldin’s work as a photographer, as well as her work as an activist. In the years since Goldin founded PAIN, the group The protests were a major factor in causing organizations such as the Met, Guggenheim and Louvre to remove Sackler’s name. The Sackler name, as of this interview, remains on two of the nine galleries at the Met.
“If Nan hadn’t stood up, I’m sure Sackler’s name would still be in the museum,” Poitras said. “What Nan has done throughout her work is really talking about things that are deeply personal in a way that fates them so that we can talk and we can also talk about real responsibility.” belonging – which in this case is the responsibility of Purdue Pharma and the vandals.”
Goldin says the movement has been truly collaborative. “Just before the Met’s delisting in November 2021, we wrote a letter — Laura, me, and one other — to the board talking about the need for delisting and the 77 greatest artists. was alive to sign that letter. It’s unbelievable,” she said.
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About whether Goldin’s active work in the museum influenced her career as an artist
Yellow: Maybe. But really I don’t even think about it. It didn’t really happen to me. I had to do that. So I did it. … I think there are probably museums where I have been in exhibitions. I know there is currently a museum that won’t take me on a retrospective trip, I believe, because of my political views. So there are things it affects badly, and then there’s also a lot of praise for me in the art world.
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About PAIN prescription drops at Guggenheim
Yellow: We put out prescriptions – fake prescriptions – with quotes from Richard Sackler, about five different prescriptions, saying things like, “We have to punish the abusers. They’re the culprits,” and “We’re going to create a blizzard of regulations that will bury competition.” …
Even though I’m an artist, I can’t believe I designed these actions. They were very, very cooperative with the group. One person will have an idea and then it will move on to the next person. And that’s how we create these actions.
Influenced by AIDS activist group ACT UP
goldin: They are my models. i was present while ACTION UP. I went to some of their actions and a few of their meetings. Unfortunately, I wasn’t fully involved, but I’m also doing my job and it’s mostly about people living and dying of AIDS. And the people in ACT UP supported my work. … The stigma is unbelievable for people with AIDS. And so active work is very important. I learned everything about acting and role-playing, and sometimes some of the older members of ACT UP who are still alive come to the meeting.
About Goldin’s groundbreaking photography
Poitra: She documents her life, the people she is deeply attached to, and has a kind of relationship that you can really see and feel in the pictures. … I think the way she redefined, told the story visually both in the frame, just the feeling mise en scène, light, character feeling. You want to know people, you want to be there. And then there are the slideshows, the way she combines the images with the music and her editing, it’s all very cinematic. The interesting thing about Nan’s work is that different people are involved with it differently depending on what they bring to it. People come to me and say, “Nan helped me out.” They’ve seen her pictures and it’s okay for them to say they’re weird.
About Goldin’s motives in her photography
Yellow: I think the wrong things are kept secret. So the fact that I gave my work, it was not accepted in the first place because it was too personal. I come to the days of vertical black and white photographs of light. And then there was a time in the 80s when people used appropriated images. So my work doesn’t really fit anywhere. How people react to work is very important to me. I show that I’m beaten up and in different countries, women have come to me and said, “I can’t show up. I can’t talk about that until I see these pictures.” And that’s what the job is really about. That’s really my motivation for performing the work.
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Nan Goldin and Laura Poitras attend the Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2022.
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Nan Goldin and Laura Poitras attend the Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2022.
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Yellow: [I did it] so that I don’t come back to you. It’s that simple. … It was very important to me to document what really happened. … That’s been the driving force all my life, my job, is to create records that no one can edit or deny – and the same goes for this work. … I believe it is for myself. And also, I think after [being] You’ve been battered, hurt a lot, and you’re afraid that you’ll be blamed to some extent.
When taking pictures of drag queen
Yellow: Basically, I moved in with the queens because I worshiped them. I find them to be some of the most incredible people in the world, they live without regard for the opinion of the rest of the world, including the gay and lesbian communities. . People discriminate against them, and I find them so beautiful, so touching, and so powerful in their lives. And that was actually the first job I did. I took pictures of them because I wanted to put them on the cover of the magazine fashion magazine. They are my supermodels and I want them to be the supermodels of the world. And I take pictures every day and take them to a pharmacy and bring back snapshots and collect heaps of snapshots, sometimes they tear them up if they don’t like them. … It’s their right. And in general, I’ve tried to uphold that right to everyone I photograph for over 50 years, not always, but I try, the right to get their work out.
About why she stopped taking portraits of people
Yellow: I lost interest. I think I’m starting over now. My community no longer exists. I don’t have the same community. I have grown old. I mainly photograph the sky and animals.
I have a fascination with the sky, with the clouds. They speak of beauty, but they are also imbued with a kind of loneliness. And it’s about getting older and trying to understand mortality. I think they are symbolic of my struggle with death. I have realized that I am mortal. And when I was young, I was immortal. …
Accepting being an old woman in this society… is very different and can be considered difficult. I mean, you lose your credibility and you become invisible, which I quite like. Now I’ve been thinking about making a piece about age.
Audio interview produced and edited by: Lauren Krenzel and Thea Chaloner
Audio interview suitable for NPR.org by: Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey
