You know that self-conscious feeling you can get when you walk into a gallery or museum, where the obligation to look at the art translates into your being able to do anything but? Where suddenly you’re hyper-aware of the expression on your face, your posture, what you’re doing with your hands? I didn’t feel that at Nan Goldin’s latest exhibition at Gagosian, titled You never did anything wrong. And, strangely, I was aware of the fact that I wasn’t feeling self-aware.
The exhibition’s title references one of two moving-image works that anchor the show. Shot on Super 8 and 16mm film, You never did anything wrong, Part 1 (2024) splices together footage of a total solar eclipse with animals on a farm in Upstate New York. The other film, and the heart of the exhibition, is Stendhal Syndrome (2024), which pairs decades’ worth of photographs of Goldin’s friends, family, and lovers, with intimate portraits of masterpieces from famous museums — the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Galleria Borghese in Rome, among others. The couplings meld the worldly characters of the artist’s own life with their museum counterparts, creating chimeras that retell six Ovid myths, narrated by Goldin against a stirring soundtrack by Soundwalk Collective. Photographs from both films are grouped into grids on the gallery walls according to compositional, thematic, and chromatic likeness. Both video works are housed in round black pavilions shaped like sweat lodges or ceremonial huts (co-designed with French-Lebanese architect Hala Wardé), a nod to the premise of the exhibition: that encountering art can be nothing short of rapturous, a portal to another dimension.
So it has been for Goldin; so it was for Stendhal. Stendhal Syndrome is named after the 19th-century French novelist’s account of viewing Il Volterrano’s ceiling frescoes at the Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. Seated backward on a prie-dieu, with his head resting where the bible’s supposed to go, Stendhal had an intense physical reaction to the sublime beauty before him. In a state of ecstasy, he left the church with such violent heart palpitations that he was afraid of collapsing in the street. Though he didn’t actually keel over, the term has become synonymous with the physiological effect of witnessing great art, at once the mark of and the portal to spiritual transcendence. If celestial transport is the result of Stendhal Syndrome, it’s also the goal of the eponymous slideshow — in illustrating her own, Goldin aims to reproduce the experience for the viewer.
But the exhibition is also very much about the phenomenon of self-consciousness. Can you have a sublime experience — Stendhal Syndrome, for example — if you’re watching yourself have it?
Stendhal himself was plagued by this question. According to most interpretations of his writings, the answer is no: Self-consciousness has to be completely extinguished to reach authentic transcendence. But as I argue in my forthcoming book Becoming Stendhal: The Performance of Authenticity and the Making of a Novelist (University of Virginia Press), this isn’t entirely true. If you look closely at his account of seeing Il Volterrano’s Sybils at Santa Croce, it’s clear that his euphoria is not the result of escaping self-awareness, but of submitting to it.
He describes looking at the frescoes as “the greatest pleasure that painting has ever given [him].” But his state of mind before entering the chapel also played a role: He writes that even before seeing the work, he “was already in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence.” In other words, his transcendence is partially brought on by the very feeling that we often assume ruins the experience of looking at art — that feeling of, Here I am, looking at art. It’s the romance of his adventure in Florence, it’s the idea of being there, looking at the frescoes, and not just the frescoes themselves, that pushes him through the portal to “celestial sensations.”
Most crucially, thanks to a kind monk who unlocked the chapel for him, Stendhal had the place to himself. This was also the case for Goldin, as recounted in Stendhal Syndrome: Alone in the Louvre, she fell in love with a woman in one of the paintings, and began to see the faces of her own friends in the masterpieces that surrounded her.
The 26-minute film is a visual feast of startling resemblances, a dynamic patchwork epic of the artist’s own past. While listening to Goldin retell the tale of Pygmalion — the artist who swears himself to celibacy, only to fall in love with his alabaster statue — you realize that the intimacy she evokes with her inanimate subjects is of the same ilk. She seems to have loved them into life. Her eye is naturally drawn to the most sensuous corner of these subjects; she captures their most ornate moments of emotional vulnerability. It starts to feel as if you’ve woken up in bed next to these masterpieces. You’re gazing at them, but they haven’t noticed yet.
Goldin herself seems wary of the power of her eye and its impact on her subjects. She speaks of “scopophilia,” or “the intense desire and fulfillment of that desire through looking.” But her retelling of Ovid’s myths reveals a particular focus on the danger of looking: There’s Actaeon who, after glimpsing a naked Diana bathing, gets turned into a stag and devoured by his own hunting dogs. There’s Orpheus who, because he can’t help but turn around to make sure his beloved Eurydice is still behind him, loses her forever to the underworld. There’s Narcissus, whose gaze of self-love is doomed because it is unrequited.
Maybe this is Goldin’s own self-consciousness, analogous to Stendhal’s: She is as taken by the idea of looking as by looking itself. But to me, her gaze reads as pure generosity. It’s this generosity that serves as the emotional portal that bathes the viewer in Goldin’s celestial sensations, and refashions her earthly friends, some who are no longer here, into mythical heroes. The womb-like darkness of the Wardé pavilions, the eerie, string-heavy orchestrations of the scores, the uncanny resemblance between Goldin’s human friends and her inanimate ones, even the timbre of her voice as she narrates — all work together to create an alchemical magic that lulls you into, if not Stendhal Syndrome, then something pretty close.
Nan Goldin: You never did anything wrong continues at Gagosian gallery (522 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through October 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
