Chapter 6

Nan Goldin's Retrospective and Recovery: Framing Feminism, AIDS, and Addiction

In 1986, Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency was first published, making available Goldin’s personal photographic diary of herself and her friends exorbitantly exposed to sex, drugs, and violence. In her preface to the book, Goldin visits familiar feminist turf by suggesting that these explicit images highlight and critique the normative systems of gender and sex:

The thematically organized photographs bear out this critique of gender "clichés" through her close study of the struggle for intimacy and the often ill-fated efforts to simply "connect." Ballad begins with a provocative shot that is literally described in its title, "Nan on Brian's lap, Nan's birthday, New York City 1981," echoing the style of a caption in a family album. Goldin appears vulnerable in the photograph, wearing a green party dress and pearls, posed with a forced smile, and framed tightly in the far right-hand end of the frame. She embraces her companion who stares blankly back at the camera. This opening movement to Goldin's Ballad introduces the reader to her relationship with Brian (her companion in this first shot), which will unfold throughout the course of the book as emotionally and physically abusive. The thematically organized images in Ballad describe all connections with other people as compulsive or habitual and Goldin herself repeatedly appears to be a casualty of this "need to connect." Goldin proposes that such dependencies might be handed down through inheritance, provocatively implicating her own family legacy in a pair of photographs featuring Coney Island wax replicas of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor opposite a shot of Goldin's mother and father sitting stiff and pinched with their pursed mouths mirroring those painted on the wax royalty.

Following these opening shots are pictures of "downtown" types on the beach and looking oddly out of place in the outdoors. There is a series of "Suzanne" who we suspect to be another object of Goldin's "dependency" as Goldin's camera follows her to dark, enclosed, isolated spaces all over the world. Suzanne also appears in a series of images featuring women alone, looking into mirrors, staring thoughtfully at themselves or out into space--awkwardly overdressed in fancy party clothes or vulnerably underdressed and naked (again including herself in this series). The narrative of Ballad then turns back to Brian and a series of men caught by Goldin's camera alone, acting macho, getting tattoos, looking out windows, naked and asleep in bed, masturbating, getting high, and drinking. The series is punctuated by a head and shoulders shot of Goldin with two black eyes, one filled with blood. This confrontational image is followed again by several more images of women scarred, bruised, and crying. They are then shown in pairs and comforting one another. There is a wedding, a series with children, a series of parties, and then a series of couples--straight and gay--embracing, kissing, having sex. Nan and Brian appear in several of these images, each with different partners. Then, a series of post-sex alienation, of a pathetic Valentine's Day still life, of twin graves, and finally crudely rendered graffiti on a wall depicting a pair of skeletons embracing. The narrative conclusion is clear: that intimacies and inter-personal connections are habits and often addictions that we carry to our death.

Ten years later, in 1996, Ballad was reissued in recognition of its relevance to an era ravaged by AIDS and drug addiction. Goldin explains in her new afterward that many of the people pictured in the photos are now dead, mostly from AIDS. She writes:

This lesson--that suffering cannot be the prerequisite for creative agency--is also the lesson that I have suggested feminisms must learn with regard to its "treatment" of the ‘disordered’ female body. Just as Goldin affirms that the artist's will to survive has grown ever more vigilant with the crisis of AIDS, so too should the subjective "crisis" of feminism (feminism's legitimacy) prompt feminists to be all the more invigorated to renew their project with respect to past, present, and future.

But, with a 1997 large-scale retrospective of Goldin's work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a 1998 pseudo-fictionalization of Goldin in the film, High Art, the feminist critic has cause to wonder about the extent to which the political engagement of her project has survived institutional recovery. As I show below, the mainstream reconsideration of Goldin's work often suggests that the subjective conditions for feminist advocacy have been displaced by the event of AIDS and that feminism has outlived its usefulness in the time of AIDS. At the same time, critical interest in these images has been oddly disengaged from the concerns of AIDS activism; picturing feminist advocacy and AIDS activism as individually ineffectual and at poles apart. Goldin's archive of images has been recovered, it appears, for the interests of the dominant oppositional structure of public/private, art/life that feminisms and progressive aesthetic movements sought to disrupt.

Nevertheless, despite the suspicious terms surrounding the recovery of Goldin's life and work, I maintain that the ambivalent representations of the addicted women often featured in Goldin's portraiture need not be fixed for a divisive rhetoric that pits feminist advocacy in opposition to the interests of AIDS activism. Rather, they may be read as positing a radical transaction that imagines new wills, identities, and subjectivities. This promise in her work is what I hope to activate as I examine the discourse surrounding a resurgence of interest in Goldin's ongoing project. I offer this hope in order to reinforce my thesis that suffering and the ultimately complicit renunciation to the pathologizing, self-directed, and politically disabling oppositional language of recovery cannot be the prerequisite for a feminist politics. This concluding analysis is meant to redirect attention toward the possibility for feminist outmaneuvering of dominant heteronormative logics by offering a notion of performativity and engaged feminist cultural practice that reserves the power to save lives and end suffering without asserting itself in oppositional terms and thus remaining reconcilable to patriarchal interests.

This final effort will draw on the problematics that I laid out in previous chapters concerning the risk of feminist cultural criticism with respect to the representation of the female "addict"; the generational divides that oppose theory to practice, public to private, life to art, and feminists to lesbians; the primitivization or juvinilization of race and sex within the rhetoric of recovery; and the ambivalence of the addiction/voluntarism pair in the wake of the critique of an intending author. Both the Whitney exhibition and the film, High Art, appear steeped in representations of addicted women and hence, are exigencies for feminism. As such, the feminist interpreter of these critical sites of addiction must be wary of the possibility that a recovery of these works may be taken up and translated into a neoconservative cultural agenda which draws its legitimacy from suffering and reifies individualized, private, injured subjectivities. Following Wendy Brown’s discussion of the liberal mandate to produce injuries and Hal Foster's account of the shift in the conception of the "real" as an event of trauma, I notice the ways in which the 1997 Whitney retrospective of Nan Goldin risks participating in and perpetuating the injurious circumstances her work might also redress. But, the retrospective may just as well open the transformative possibility for unimagined alliances and transactions that would challenge the liberal mandate to divide the interests of diverse progressive movements, bringing together the interests of feminism and AIDS activism rather than pitting them at poles apart. The 1998 film, High Art, features a character roughly based on Goldin and liberally borrows its cinematographic visual strategy from Goldin's distinctive photography. Like the retrospective, the film similarly functions to nostalgically glamorize suffering while confirming it as a thing of the past. The film disavows the social circumstances of its character's addictions and reinforces generational divides among the characters while disregarding the historical/material dimensions of these divisions. Nevertheless, the film may also be instructive for a feminist performative interpretation that specifies the ambivalence of Goldin's project in a contemporary context. It is to the questions of feminism, AIDS, and recovery rhetorics that I will direct my concluding proposals on performativity and engaged, activist, aesthetic practice.

{A}Retrospectives and the Institution{/A}

It may be correct to partially attribute renewed interest in Goldin's career to the currently fashionable status of Goldin’s subject matter over the past 25 years: "the urban demimonde, the world of drag queens and slum goddesses, of Lower East Side nightclubbers and Tokyo teen-agers in black rubber." Goldin's work has even been a model for the "fashionable addiction" that I discussed previously. The popular mainstreaming of the transgressive fringes of society (who are the stock subjects of Goldin’s work) in the "drug chic" school of fashion photography has liberally borrowed from Goldin's exemplary documentary-style realism. It became common in the late '90s for young fashion photographers to request that their lab recreate Goldin’s style of printing and, in fact, Nan Goldin herself shot publicity photos for the Italian fashion firm Matsuda. Even the bruised eyes of sleepless junkies and battered women that have been the touchstone of Goldin's photography for over two decades became a "look" in high fashion makeup application. But, it is also important to recall that while Goldin's style has been coopted as a fashion statement, the political statement of the work has done much to reveal the political hypocrisy of the same disengaged "art world" that has more recently recognized and embraced her. Most notably, Goldin has made numerous controversial public avowals of support for engaged, activist, cultural practices that have responded to the event of AIDS in the United States. In 1989, for example, Goldin curated an exhibition about AIDS at Artists Space in New York entitled "Witness: Against Our Vanishing." The catalogue for the show became the center of huge controversy when John Frohnmayer, then the recently appointed head of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), tried to stop its publication which had been supported by NEA funds. And, in 1990, Goldin turned down a much needed NEA fellowship rather than sign a censorious and homophobic oath required by the NEA (known as the "obscenity pledge") which asked grant recipients to declare that they will not use federal funds to create work or exhibit works of art that may be considered obscene. Goldin righteously stated after she declined funding: "I don’t believe in following illegal laws. You can’t sign away your constitutional rights."

But, as the "art world’s photographer of the hour," it appears that the art world has chosen to overlook Goldin’s past critical stance toward this institution as critics confirmed that she was "no longer on the margins of the art world." The recovery of Goldin’s work by an institution like the Whitney (with its corporate funding provided by Philip Morris, for one, who also supported the political career of the most dubious patron of the arts, Jesse Helms) should rightly cause a critic to take pause before construing the museum’s inclusion of such "alternative" and previously censored subject matter with a public show of support for the advancement of a "progressive politics." It seems that the recontextualizing of Goldin's life and work in retrospect follows an ahistorical model of recovery. Goldin's work would appear to be anathema to a neoconservative agenda--images that testify to the abuse of women, drug addiction, and AIDS, as well as a variety of lifestyle choices and alternative sexual practices. But these same images have been made palatable to an ultimately conservative, antifeminist agenda. The dominant acceptance of her work follows from at least two critical strategies that fix the ambivalence of the work and recovers the individual images as private, singular, isolated instances of suffering. First, the critical justifications for the exhibition commit the mistakes of visibility politics by equating the representation of marginal identities with the empowerment of cited communities. Second, counter-hegemonic readings of the retrospective operate through a logic of victimage and the structuring ethos of ressentiment which must be confirmed and authorized through auto/biographical claims to subjectivity in suffering.

I want to emphasize that I am not arguing here that institutional art-world acceptance must necessarily be the kiss of death for critical art practices. My own suspicious stance towards the recovery of Goldin’s work is not an attempt to make the case that all museum recognition and exhibition can finally do is turn the counter-hegemonic into the institutional. This would make the mistake of conceiving of some "pure" politics that exists outside the "autonomous" institution, recovering the public/private dyad. The error of such an out of hand dismissal may foreclose any transformative possibilities in contemporary art. It would also seem politically and historically myopic to dismiss Goldin's past protestations of antidemocratic cultural practices. Rather, I am emploring feminist critics to keep an eye sharply and uncompromisingly on the hegemonic readings of institutionally sanctioned aesthetic practices that co-opt and neutralize the critical impact of activist art with a recovery rhetoric that registers only in the conventional, ahistorical, visible dimension. My purpose in pointing out the complicit and retroactive implications of the recovery discourse that underwrites the Whitney retrospective of Goldin's career is to specify the ambivalence of the representations of addiction in her work and the consequences of fixing such a simultaneously productive and threatening site of difference. I show that the strategic recovery rhetoric at work in and around the retrospective is directed towards the recovery of the artist and the heroic yet corrupted resurrection of the author pronounced dead in a poststructural critique of the self-knowing subject. It becomes the task in what follows to survey cultural uses of Goldin as suffering artist which bear out both racist and antiracist readings, which elicit homophobic as well as homoerotic ones, and which warrant antifeminist as well as feminist judgments.

{B}Mirror Images of Identity and Injury{/B}

Goldin’s work has been distinctive for its intimate and sympathetic portrayals of the "underbelly" of straight society. In Goldin’s "world," the privileged status of the first term of the dominant oppositional pairings--male/female, health/illness, white/black, straight/gay, inside/outside--has been overturned and her self-styled "family" of "inverts" reign supreme. This overturning of dominant relationships has been understood as the source of the radical politics of her work. As gallerist and art dealer Marvin Heiferman writes in a catalogue essay for the 1997 Whitney retrospective entitled I'll Be Your Mirror:

The politics of Goldin’s work is assumed by more sympathetic critics for its revaluing of dominant definitions of the negative and the deviant. But, in so doing, such critical approaches may allow rhetorical reversals to stand for politics as such without transforming the organizational logic that produces and perpetuates these normative oppositions. The critical recovery of Goldin’s work leads to identitarian political axioms, equating increased visibility with increased power for the hitherto marginalized and underrepresented. Such logic is even more troubling insofar as it also equates a critique of aesthetic conventions with a critique of art institutions. Goldin's unconventional stock subjects and informal approach to portraiture are taken as critiques of dominant institutional exclusions of artists who do not conform to the canonical tradition. But, Goldin’s bohemian photography verité has a long art historical history in the museum, typified in the "vernacular-style" of artists like Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander or the "social portraiture" of Robert Frank, August Sander, and Larry Clark. Beginning in the 1960s, this "vernacular style" grew, in part, out of a reaction against the pretensions of the middle class and a rebellion against bourgeois standards of beauty and the "proper" artistic subject. Photographers tended to embrace the snapshot aesthetic in a departure from the conventions of fine arts photography. But, such a style has itself become conventional and in turn critiqued for its predominant privileging of white men. A feminist response has exposed the "male gaze" of such "vernacular" portraiture and redressed the masculinist representations of women. Ironically, Goldin’s work has also been associated with this latter critique of the male-centered art world and compared to a generation of artists like Cindy Sherman who turned identity into a political issue and an aesthetic strategy.

Any reduction of Goldin's work to identitarian equations or aesthetic conventions finally reproduces a logic of recovery in which prescribed norms are found in opposition to an "other" that is affirmed in rhetorical reversals of paired terms. Such is the structuring discourse that frames the retrospective of her work at the Whitney. The title of the show, "I'll be Your Mirror," highlights the binarism of identity logic that turns difference into the "Same" and produces a politics that is additive rather than transformational. Identitarian equations, rhetorical reversals, and the recovery of a politics of visibility fix the subjects of Goldin's work as a series of individual identities and refuses the public discussions of AIDS activism, feminisms, and antihomophobic assertions that would seem to necessarily accompany these images. The framing of the retrospective without an eye to the public failure to address the policy issues that have produced and perpetuated the "crisis" of AIDS and in the eerie absence of feminist critiques is perhaps best demonstrated by beginning briefly with one of my own recollections of anecdotal commentary that I overheard while attending the Whitney retrospective. This anecdote will press the question of how such a large-scale museum exhibition featuring frank images of the physical consequences of abuse suffered by women and haunting portraits of the ravaging effects of AIDS and addiction, can disavow the public dimension of these conditions.

Visitors to the Whitney retrospective were privy to the exposition of several white, female, immaculately groomed docents echoing their rehearsed interpretation through the galleries of the Whitney museum. During the course of my own visit, I became extremely uneasy with the commentary directed towards several sequenced images recording the lives of a number of Goldin’s portrait subjects who died of AIDS. As one docent entered the gallery followed by a throng of inquisitive art appreciators, she announced that this is what "we" call the "AIDS room," disclosing the private shorthand pet name that she and her fellow docents had for it. On the far wall of the "AIDS room" hung several large prints from Goldin’s 1993 series entitled Vakat that depict empty rooms in bars, hotel bedrooms, brothels, lofts, and her family home, each adorned with flowers or sprayed by blood, but strikingly absent of any human figures. On the wall that shares the entrance to this gallery is a sequence of photographs featuring Cookie Mueller, the writer/actress who appears in a series finally laid out in her own coffin after her AIDS-related death in 1989. On the adjacent wall is a series of the impressively muscular couple, Gilles and Gotscho, documenting the progression of gallerist Gilles Dussein’s illness and exposing the strain on a relationship when one partner is dying of AIDS. On the adjoining wall are a number of family-album type montages featuring artists Alf Bold, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. When the docent called attention to the grid-format presentation of images by pointing to and identifying which people in the photographs are now dead, she paused on the particularly haunting photograph of Fran Leibowitz and David Wojnarowicz at Peter Hujar’s funeral, stumbling over the pronunciation of Wojnarowicz’s name and noting: "I think he is dead too, and that’s Fran Leibowitz and of course she’s not dead."

My understanding of at least one of the implications of this comment is that women, and particularly lesbians like Leibowitz, don't die from AIDS. This observation by the docent suggests an inquiry into the interests in both indulging and at the same time denying the social context of suffering. The exhibition was commented upon prolifically, but there was a striking absence of critique of the social conditions and practices that produce the circumstances depicted in Goldin’s photographs and which render them both intelligible and sadly tolerable. And it is particularly AIDS activism and feminism that is most anxiously and thoroughly suppressed or sustained as competing, incommensurable political agendas. But, it seems that these discussions and interarticulations are so fully stomped out and pitted at cross-purposes in order to conceal the fact that the show may most powerfully function to make multiple intersections of interests imaginable and suggests possibilities for potent coalitions. Such a transgressive transaction is, however, interrupted by the structuring recovery discourse that frames the retrospective--an interruption that has been prefigured and informed by numerous feminist recovery discourses that have sought to fix women's relationship to the AIDS crisis.

As has often and quite aptly been noted, AIDS is not only a medical crisis but also a crisis of representation. At least two issues complicate the AIDS crisis: who gets AIDS and how the person with AIDS is represented. Significantly, the struggle for representation is the very struggle that has earned feminism much of its distinctive character, informing many of its activist strategies and "creative responses" to radical redress. Feminist critics, artist, and activists offered critiques of the dominant imaging of women and pointed out the lack of women producers of culture in a whole range of institutions. They have variously addressed such oppressive circumstances by staging theatrical demonstrations that seemed to defy mainstream perceptions of "feminine" behavior and by offering "alternative" or "positive" images of women that might bring more pride to the ranks of women who have been left out or led astray by so many "negative" images. But, the intersection between AIDS activism and feminism has been incidental at best and at worst denied by both communities as a potentially profitable or relevant collaboration. These latter denials have often been reified as feminist contentiousness or ambivalence towards the political concerns of lesbians and gay men.

Some feminist responses to AIDS are exemplary of the problematic principles of indentitarian political rallying and its accompanying recovery rhetoric in which women are considered both integral and irrelevant to the "crisis" of AIDS. In their introduction to the edited volume, Women Resisting AIDS: Feminist Strategies of Empowerment, Beth E. Schneider and Nancy E. Stoller argue that while women become ever more infected by AIDS, their key relationship to this increasingly medical, political, and social problem is a function of their own subordinate position worldwide. And, while women’s social, sexual, political, and economic subordination structure their increased vulnerability to infection, it is their very subordination that must be maintained in order to place women in strategic positions to check the course of HIV’s spread. As Schneider and Stoller write:

While acknowledging the social relations of race, class, sexuality, and culture as factors that affect perceptions of health and illness, kinds and availability of care, and the community and political reactions to people with AIDS, Schneider and Stoller understand feminist empowerment as a function of women’s universal, cultural, political, economic, and historical subordination. They emphasize skills and activities unique to women and their similarities across vast cultural differences which empower women to be leaders in the fight against AIDS. According to Schneider and Stoller, women’s political consciousnesses are influenced primarily by their socialized positions as mothers and nurturers, and also by "aspects of gender not rooted in childbearing or family relations--in the experience of being vulnerable, poorly paid workers, in being politically disenfranchised." Also, according to their formulation, a feminist politicized identity is fostered by women's collective experience of maginalization and oppression as women--states of injury that must be preserved and codified by the very discourse that might redress it. Women are granted a privileged role in the worldwide crisis of AIDS, conceding to women the dubious position of domination in the realm of illness and infection, and simultaneously attributing to women responsibility for the pandemic. In all this, a certain masculinist ‘norm’ in AIDS discourse about women in presumed, pointing out that it is men’s activity that is the problem and it is hence, male (not female) activism that might lead to real social change. Finally, agency is again a male prerogative. With regard to lesbian involvement in the AIDS epidemic, the emphasis has been on lesbians' relationships to the gay male community as it has been defined in popular, political, cultural, scientific, medical, and linguistic representations and discourses through the event of AIDS. The distinctive contribution that lesbians make to AIDS is not through infection (the injury that "truly" authorizes the suffering subject), but through association--compelled by a shared gay identity lesbians "naturally" feel with gay men and by the devastation of losing gay male friends to AIDS. Lesbians are associated with "risk groups" but not "at risk" themselves. This characterization of lesbians as empathizers and care givers and as not "at risk" given their "safe" sexual behavior, again reifies the notion of women as passive, perpetuates the misinformation and misunderstandings about every aspect of lesbian lives, and disqualifies them as objects of ressentiment.

One critical response to such arguments about the origins of lesbian involvement in AIDS organizing has been to counter such characterizations of lesbians as not at risk by affirming their "high risk" behavior. Amber Hollingbaugh, for example, argues that it is the task of lesbian/feminist organizations to specifically identify lesbian’s vulnerability to HIV high risk behaviors including s/m, using hands, mouths, bodies, sex toys, and sleeping with men as a matter of "bisexuality," "coming out," or "economic necessity." Hollingbaugh argues that such leadership by lesbians who are infected or affected by HIV "is a powerful and original model for building a new, more inclusive movement of women-who-partner-with-other-women." While certainly the denial of lesbian risk of HIV infection is politically misguided and unethical, the politicizing of lesbian identity as a "high risk" group vulnerable to infection codifies suffering as the route to political representation. However important these political gestures have been--and I do not wish to minimize them--they all depend upon a reductionist notion of identity and visibility. They presume that the recognition of what has previously been suppressed, ignored, or denied will yield increased representation and, in turn, increased power. In so doing, they accede to the very logic of neoconservativism and its patriarchal underpinnings that trade in representative reproduction of "others" in order to secure the continued dominance of the "Same." The "at risk" subject is afforded privileged status as suffering subject, but such status is still the paradigmatically bourgeois, white, male subject. This "at risk" subject is the legitimate object of ressentiment which, Wendy Brown argues, is sanctioned by therapeutic liberal discourses that find injuries to be the necessary precondition for agency--an agency that paradoxically precludes the possibility for systemic social change. Brown explains that the problem with such a "politics of ressentiment" is that it constrains the suffering subject within a structure of injury and blame:

The voluntary self-infliction of suffering that an ethos of ressentiment encourages presents the horrifying conclusion to feminist transformative possibilities and leads to a politics that produces and perpetuates injuries in order to legitimate its own project. Ressentiment requires the very structures of oppression that feminisms stand in opposition to and deligitimizes the injuries suffered by those who are not permitted the privilege of authorial intentionality. The precondition of the dubious "voluntary addict" is that they are usually white, middle class, and straight. But their injuries become valorized as liberatory rhetorics, making virtue out of those very conditions in the wider political economy and culture that shape the systemic subordination of "marginal" populations. Furthermore, when artistic responses to "social illnesses" are reduced to their autobiographical specificity, the political dimension of the work is suppressed in favor of the privileged injured identity of the suffering artist. The suffering subject that is granted opportunity to speak from the specificity of its cultural position has been recovered for a "new" paradoxically intending author who bears the mark of addiction. And, while such authenticity and its concomitant authority can carry high rewards for the chosen few, speech authorized by the mere fact of suffering is rarely about equality or the massive reorganization of social power.

Supporting such prerequisite injury is a certain refrain in nearly every review of the Whitney retrospective that mentions Nan Goldin’s own personal trials with addiction and her subjects’ "obstacle" of AIDS. Within this refrain is the dramatizing of the connection between intravenous drug use and AIDS, and addicts as members of a whole community of "at risk" subjects. Goldin, as the addicted subject, is granted the ethnographic status of "native informant" and ideological status of "truth-teller." Her "injuries" accord her the heroic rank of author but her authorship is predicated on an affirmation of her unified "addict" identity which would function in opposition to willful intention. Insofar as this resurrection of a modernist, self-centered notion of authorship recovers voluntarity for the addict, it restricts injuries to individuals and isolates suffering from its social contexts. Goldin is both victim and victimizer, author of her own addiction but unable to produce systemic critique, only inwardly directed self-scrutiny. In all this, the institution is absolved of any responsibility for reifying injury-producing conditions.

The critical neglect of the historicized social/cultural conditions that produce suffering and the aesthetic legitimacy granted to suffering subjects is evident throughout the Goldin exhibition catalogue for the Whitney retrospective. There are repeated references to Goldin’s "insider" status as one of "them," herself battling the "obstacles" of addiction and sexual "confusion." The catalogue’s distinctive format emphasizes the artist’s "traumatic" subjectivity by including four double-page color self-portraits (that appear before the title page) of the artist gazing into a mirror naked, alone, battered, and seemingly self-reflective (see figure 6.1). Throughout the Whitney exhibition itself, the visitor is drawn into a narrative of the artist’s life. Goldin's dubious honor of authorship is awarded to her only so long as she bares witness to her own suffering; a responsibility that Goldin seems to have conceded to. Upon stepping out of the elevator and into the first gallery of the exhibition, we learn from the wall texts written by Goldin that her elder sister committed suicide, that she took her first photographs when she was 15, and that her roommates during art school in Boston were two drag queens whom she photographed mercilessly at home and at gay bars. After viewing a bulletin-board wall full of tiny black and white snapshots from these early years, we come face to face with her large luxuriant color Cibachrome photographs. We see a close-up of a man being tattooed, a woman standing in a shower, a man in a blue bathrobe and furry red slippers bleaching his eyebrows, people in various states of undress staring pensively into the lens, and couples lying naked in each other’s arms. There is a sequence of photographs featuring a man who, the wall text reveals, is the subject of Goldin’s most extensive portrait, (her longtime friend and occasional collaborator) David Armstrong (who also shares the curatorial credit for the show). Here too is the first of many pictures of Goldin herself, her face barely visible in the bottom corner of a bathroom mirror. She appears further along the wall costumed in head-to-toe leather as a sexy dominatrix and the narrative proceeds by marking time through the evolution of Goldin's hair-dos, wardrobes, and weight fluctuations.

[Figure 6.1]

The show follows a sequence of chapters that adhere to Goldin’s life story which visitors become familiar with through the wall text and the linear narrative structure to the show. For example, in one image from Ballad, Brian appears naked in a post-sex sprawl on blue sheets and the accompanying text explains that Goldin had an "addictive" relationship with him that ended in violence. Bearing this out two walls later is the self-portrait of Goldin’s bruised and puffy face. Across the way is a suite of images devoted to an attractive woman named Siobhan, the artist’s next romantic involvement--revealing Goldin's own bisexual preferences and affording her membership in what she later celebrates as "the third sex" (in text accompanying a series that appears in the next gallery). By now the wall texts have become chatty and even platitudinous as when Goldin states, "For me taking a picture is a way of touching somebody--its a caress." Nearby are images of a sparse room that Goldin occupied in a halfway house in Boston when she was coming out of a drug rehabilitation program in 1988 (see figure 6.2). Again the wall text is sentimental and somewhat redundant as it tells us what we can clearly see--that there are trees and outdoor light--and she explains the symbolic significance of that aesthetic difference.

[Figure 6.2]

The next room shifts gears to brightly colored exposures of ambiguously gendered entertainers and sex workers in Bangkok and Manila. The wall text again relates these images to the autobiographical confessions of Goldin's own sexual intimacies. She writes that "as a bisexual person, the third gender seems to me to be ideal." Goldin provides her own interpretation and contextualization of the images as she explains that the photographs are "not about people suffering through dysphoria, rather expressing gender euphoria." But it is particularly in her Asian series of drag queens and sex workers that the problematic of the exhibition’s autobiographical self-exposure most clearly enacts a recovery of oppositional norms and their dominant value attributions typical of identity equations. This series features the voyeuristic gaze of conventional ethnographic tourism which has been recovered for its quasi-anthropological dimension in critical discourse surrounding the retrospective. In so doing, Goldin-as-author is resurrected at the price of codifying individual suffering as instances outside institutional responsibility.

{B}Author, Anthropologist, and Addict{/B}

Hal Foster suggests that thirty years after the death of the author, we are witness to the rebirth of the author as "absentee authority" or what Foster calls, with respect to artistic production, "the artist as ethnographer." The Goldin retrospective typified this return to primitivist fantasies of the anthropologist remade as an artistic interpreter of culture. Foster argues that this fashion of the artist as ethnographer follows the lure of anthropology and its privileged tropes of alterity, cultural contexutality, interdisciplinarity, and self-reflexivity. The envied and appropriated discourse of anthropology is primarily favored for its status as a "compromising" discourse that resolves the contradictions dominating contemporary art and criticism in the wake of the performative postmodern's claims to non-identical subjectivity. On the one hand, anthropology has contributed to the reconfiguration of the symbolic order of culture that has advanced the "death of the author." On the other hand, anthropological discourse participates in the promise of context and identity and opposes the textual paradigms of decentered subjectivities. As Foster again argues:

This anthropological compromise then alleviates anxieties of difference and handles the threat of a denaturalization of the "natural" encouraged by cultural studies.

The artist as ethnographer is linked to the community cited in their work through an identitarian reduction of both. The artist stands for and represents the identity of the community for the institution as the artist becomes the primitivist and fulfills a whole range of fantasies called up in colonialist, Western, white imaginaries. In other words, the artist must be perceived as socially and/or culturally "other" in order to achieve access to the authentic, privileged site of alterity. This "other" continues to be the exclusive hideaway for ideological escape from Western rationality and "all the epistemological exoticisms--neo-orientalist oases and neo-primitivist resorts--that appear in the poststructuralist landscape . . ." Homi Bhabha has noticed that such representations of cultural otherness have come to stand as metaphors for not only a romantic identity and a heroics of suffering author/artist but also for an exotic metaphysics. Bhabha writes that "the place of otherness is fixed in the west as a subversion of western metaphysics and is finally appropriated by the west as its limit-text, anti-west." The "Asian" as anti-Enlightenment metaphor for cultural otherness and marginality appears explicitly in Goldin’s collaboration with Nobuyoshi Araki for the book Tokyo Love, selections of which appear in the last gallery of the Whitney retrospective. In the introduction to the book of photographs, both Araki and Goldin ground their work within the context of AIDS. Araki writes:

Araki suggests that Goldin’s collaboration with him, a 'native', would not grant her special insight and access to the "realities" of death, rather she would be shown a "happier" world and "throw this suffering overboard." Goldin, on the other hand, reaffirms her own ethnographic insider status in her project of recovery that simultaneously reaffirms the difference of her Asian subjects:

Through this return to a past time and place, Goldin recovers the autobiographical component to her work, even in this portrait of strangers, affirming that they are "so like" she was, but also insisting on their absolute difference as the "anti-west."

Goldin’s trip to Japan is explicitly described in the rhetoric of geographic return and historical recovery with respect to native "innocents." And it is now strangely her status as an Westerner, exposed to the uniquely Westernized AIDS crisis as well as her own unified addict identity that grants her status as marginalized, suffering, "other." Goldin returns, according to her narrative, to a utopian place where sexual minorities are not afflicted by AIDS and not "decimated by drug addiction." But, in reaffirming a connection between representations of sexual subcultures, AIDS, and addiction, Goldin’s work finally capitalizes on the colonial power wielded over images of the feminized "Orientals" body. The non-western subject's sexuality is represented as free from AIDS and addiction, reproducing racist fantasies of the exotic Oriental. Explicit depictions of "alternative" sexual practices paired with such a patronizing "return" to the innocence of the colonized achieves significance because of, rather than in spite of, the cultural "otherness" of its subjects (following the public dictum against representations of "at risk" populations or people with AIDS as still sexual). What is left unquestioned, and hence unchanged, is the mode of this representation of otherness, which depends crucially on how the "west" is deployed within these images. The "west" is granted marginal status as the suffering subject of AIDS and addiction and hence grants Goldin’s "authentic" author/artist status as a suffering subject of ressentiment. This odd affirmation of the Western "experience" of AIDS paradoxically allows such representations to exist without reference to the politics of AIDS and to the failure of public policy at every level of government, medical, and educational institutions to stem the course of the epidemic.

The retrospective ultimately fixes addiction in singular moments of suffering caught on film by an artist/ethnographer who never misses an important frame and whose own suffering guarantees her authorship. The retrospective of Goldin’s work is framed as documentary realism, highlighting the intimate engagement she seems to enjoy with her subjects and the consistent use of the same subjects over time. Goldin’s collected photographs comprise a confessional diary of a downtrodden life whose heroes and heroines become familiar as audiences learn to recognize the stars from her cast of characters. But the stylized portrait gallery of faces recover these lives by arranging them at a safe distance from its interested onlookers, confined to the boundaries of their private tragedies that never appear to extend outside the photographs. The intimate nature of these seemingly unrehearsed instances caught over time, allow them to function as all-encompassing historical documents. The spectator is made confident in the knowledge that s/he has not missed a crucial moment of these character’s lives: that there is nothing outside the frame. Again this functions to remove these individuals’ lives from their social and historical circumstances and their political consequences.

Moreover, this documentary realism has much in common with the anthropological collections featured in museums that reduce the lives of the cited "other" to the scope of their institutional representation. Framed as the suffering of individuals witnessed by a paradoxically addicted but intending author and constituent member of cited community, the institution that enframes these images is absolved of responsibility for participating in or colluding with the injuries to which they bear witness. Such a framing of the individual disavows the possibility that the institution has collaborated in the injurious circumstances or contributed to their continued conditions. The conclusion of such isolated suffering can only result in the death of suffering subjects and the demise of collective and systemic social critique. Such a fatal narrative is dramatized in the film High Art which performs the identity fictions and binary constructions of the retrospective and highlights the disruption of public/private, outside/inside that constitutes the "frame." While the film importantly engages in a critical performance that specifies the consequences of its own discourse and produces a certain resistance that will be instructive for a feminist performative interpretation, the film notably reproduces and fixes other binary oppositions that cover over the potentially disruptive transactions of AIDS activism and feminist advocacy.

{A}Frame within a Frame{/A}

[Figure 6.3]

The film High Art opens (and will also close) in the aptly named offices of Frame magazine, a fictional art photography monthly that would seem to be modeled after the glossy format of Aperture. Syd, the baby-faced, newly promoted assistant editor at Frame is alone in the office and bathed in greenish fluorescent light as she scrutinizes slides on a glowing light table with a magnifying glass. The scene, like every shot in the film, references the focus, composition, and lighting of Goldin's portraiture. In this scene, the shallow depth of focus, the figure severed by frame lines, and the subject isolated from other humans, all reference Goldin's style. Syd leaves the office for home where her casually scrubbed and fashionably clean-cut boyfriend, James, greets her. James announces that he is preparing martinis as Syd sits on the toilet leaning awkwardly forward to answer him back and again replicating the visual arrangement of Goldin's intimate, tightly framed, indoor spaces.

Syd and James have a minor fight over Syd's new position at Frame which segues to the next scene where Syd arrives back at work and is greeted by a receptionist who wants to know the secret to Syd's promotion (inside Frame). The receptionist's inquiry about how Syd got her job is loaded with accusations of sexual favors. Syd responds defensively, prompting the receptionist to explain that what she meant was "what was your major?" Syd then reveals that she majored in critical theory and implies her training in contemporary academic theory which has qualified her for advancement in the ranks of Frame but will, the narrative suggests, make her ill-prepared for the "real world" outside "the frame." Syd explains what a critical theory major is to the inquisitive receptionist, offering an impromptu poststructural jingle: "Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, whateva."

The next scene again trades in intellectual currency and cultural privilege and calls attention to the double meaning of the film's title, High Art. We witness a glamorous, yet slightly worn woman, Greta, in a striking red dress kneeling next to a public toilet snorting heroin. When an angry knock rouses Greta out of the bathroom, she is greeted by an apologetic acquaintance who deliberately mentions that she just received the MacArthur "genius" grant. Greta, who is visibly high, nodding off, and annoyed by the woman's small talk returns to her table to join her skinny and slightly more butch girlfriend. We find out that Greta's girlfriend is the photographer, Lucy Berliner--the character explicitly modeled after Nan Goldin. In defensive reproach of the "genius" grant recipient, Greta (who happens to be a German actress and professes to have been the star of numerous Fassbinder films) quotes her deceased mentor's affirmation that "the ugliest quality in a woman is vanity." In her slurred heroin speech, Greta suggests that the "native lady" is unworthy of the grant which was only awarded to her because she is "disabled." Throughout its dramatic progression, the film will continue this engagement in a charged conversation and critique of how and why injured identities are granted access to "high art" status as domestic, personal spaces are insistently framed by an intermittently encroaching social context.

Following this introduction to Lucy Berliner and her drug milieu, the narrative cuts back to the soft white-blue haze of Syd luxuriating in a steaming bath when she notices a leak in the ceiling. Upstairs, we discover, is the apartment of Greta and Lucy who have a crowd gathered in their loft space that bears striking contrast to the stark, quiet layout of Syd and James' loft. Again referencing Goldin's color Cibachromes, the scene upstairs is dominated by reds, blacks, and yellows as a glamorous bunch of downtown revelers snort powdered heroin off a communal mirrored plate. Syd enters the fray to check on the leak, arriving freshly damp and squeaky clean from the tub. While tinkering with the pipes in Lucy's bathroom, Syd notices the photos on the wall--more Goldin-like portraits. Syd launches into an art critical review of their "spontaneous" quality and Lucy modestly and reluctantly confesses to being the artist. The next day at work, Syd acts the part of obsequious lackey to her goatee-ed, exploitative boss. She brings her interest in Lucy's photographs to his distracted attention and she is offered patronizing encouragement to get evidence of a show record or an artist book. In the next sequence we witness Lucy being equally harangued by her own mother who speaks with an unidentifiable accent, lambasting Lucy for her relationship with "the German" and offended by its implications for her Jewish daughter. Lucy's bourgeois privilege is revealed in this scene as we discover that her disaffected leisurely lifestyle is a luxury of someone with a generous trust fund. When Lucy arrives back at her own loft, Greta's voice is perversely indistinguishable from Lucy's mother's voice and an awkward attempt at sex ensues. This intimacy is interrupted by Greta's inability to perform and by Syd who has returned under the guise of checking on the leak again. And again, confined to the bathroom decorated with Lucy's photos, a flirtation ensues between Lucy and Syd as Syd offers Roland Barthes' theory of photographic ecstasy to describe the work. Syd apologizes for "going off" but Lucy admits (with obvious references to Greta's sexual dysfunction) that she hasn't been deconstructed in long time and likes it. Syd and Lucy join the crowd of glamorous downtown lesbians and their element of fashionable recreational junkies that has gathered in the loft while Syd and Lucy were in the bathroom. Syd finally completes her covert mission and leaves with Lucy's ten-year-old book of photographs that appears to explicitly reference Goldin's 1986 Ballad.

When Syd shows up to the offices of Frame with Lucy's book in tow, the glamorous übur-boss is incensed by the fact that Lucy Berliner had "returned" without her knowing. The goatee-ed under-boss covers up his oversight and takes credit for Syd's discovery. That evening, again on a mission to secure Lucy's work for the magazine and after another in a series of rows with her boyfriend, Syd joins the perpetual party upstairs at Lucy and Greta's. This time Syd indulges in a line of heroin and collapses in languorous contemplation of the photos on the walls. She is particularly entranced by one featuring two women (also attendees at the ongoing party) in sexual embrace shot from a high-angle close up that reveals the bottom woman's breast beneath her white tank top. Syd's gaze frames each of the photos she considers and a returned glance to the picture of the two women causes the photo to "come alive" in real time movement. Like the culturally sanctioned anthropological gaze encouraged by the Whitney retrospective, Syd is lured by this primitive culture that Lucy represents--the sexy photographs, the hot lesbian sex, and the rampant drug use. But this retreat into native territory proves to be destructive, as she is unable to become fully "one of them." When Lucy returns to her own apartment, she mounts her sleeping boyfriend and initiates sex as the camera stays outside the doorframe, distanced from the action and in striking contrast to the intimacy of the moving portrait Syd imagined upstairs.

The following scene finds Syd and Lucy in the confined space of Lucy's darkroom where more flirtations and innuendo will follow as Syd asks Lucy to meet with the editors of Frame. Lucy reveals why she dropped out of the art scene ten years ago and admits her reluctance to return, a reluctance that has everything to do with the ambivalence of public/private, inside/outside, life/art. Lucy explains that "there stopped being a line between me and work" and "people were glomming on to something I was doing then and I just got trapped . . .I felt sort of pigeon-holed, I couldn't breathe anymore." This speech will be appropriated virtually verbatim when Syd and her boyfriend finally end their disintegrating relationship and he defensively critiques her means for gaining access to the "real shit." This conversation about the dubious modes of gaining access to the "inside" of the frame by flirting with the "outside" is continued in another scene depicting the lunch with the editors (that Syd set up) where they assure Lucy that her work has a certain "allure right now . . . a cultural currency . . . a certain cache." Lucy agrees to shoot for Frame, but only with Syd as her editor. In all this, it becomes unclear who is exploiting whom--who is "inside" and who is "outside" the "frame." Such ambivalence dramatizes the anxious necessity of fixing the frame so as to secure its heteronormative boundaries.

Lucy eventually brings Syd to her family's country house where they have sex (apparently the first time with a woman for Syd). Lucy uses this opportunity to take pictures of Syd in several pathos-filled moments that reveal the way Lucy associates taking pictures and taking drugs. Lucy's camera is phallacized in these moments of seduction as she points it at the vulnerable Syd, framing Syd in the constitutive "outside" of the institution. This frame within a frame collapses the screens of representation, addiction, and sexuality in one sweeping gesture as Lucy sets her camera on automatic, takes off her shirt, and joins the newly initiated Syd in bed, topping her in an assertive embrace. Lucy thereby occupies both the masculine side of the camera as photographer, taking the active role of photographer as an act of phallic cruelty, and simultaneously assumes her feminized place as object to be photographed, gazing reactively away from the assualtive camera. Lucy is both inside and outside the frame and makes herself into an injured subject, even as she inflicts injury (see Figure 6.4). But Syd also inhabits both inside and outside as ambitious assistant editor at Frame and amorous companion to a drug addicted lesbian artist that Syd's art world bosses want exclusive access to. The "framing" of inside/outside and public/private persists through an infinite regress of frames within frames and reversible gazes, destabilizing the effects of any binary pairings.

However reluctant to submit the revealing post-sex portraits to the magazine, Syd finally consents. In the interim, Lucy has apparently gone "upstate" to deal with her drug habit and, by implication, to commit to recovering her photography career. She returns to her loft where she finds the same continuous party in progress and attempts to break up with her junkie girlfriend, Greta. After Greta accuses Lucy of being "spoiled" and following another pathos-filled moment of decision (take drugs or take pictures), Lucy joins Greta in a line of heroin, dramatically ending her recent sobriety (which will prove fatal) but ironically securing her successful career comeback (by confirming her imminent demise). As Foster and others have suggested, in the wake of the performative poststructural self-centered subject, trauma has become the only event that guarantees the subject, but is a condition that ultimately denies the possibility for engaged, activist cultural work. Such a fetishization and fascination with trauma and the envy of abjection has resulted in "a restriction of our political imaginary to two camps, the abjectors and the abjected, and the assumption that in order not to be counted among sexists and racists one must become the phobic object of such subjects." Foster reasons that the logical conclusion of such a willed defection to the ranks of abjection ("conscientious abjectors") is the ultimate state of injury: death. Foster writes: "If there is a subject of history for the cult of abjection at all, it is not the Worker, the Woman, or the Person of Color, but the Corpse. This is not only a politics of difference pushed to indifference; it is a politics of alterity pushed to nihility." Bearing out Foster's nihilistic narrative, Syd learns that Lucy has died, implicitly as a direct result of her reunion with Greta and her lapse into heroin abuse. Syd returns to the offices of Frame where the new issue has just been released featuring, on the cover, the automatic exposure of Lucy embracing Syd. Syd is congratulated by the editors for her "good work" and we suspect that the issue will be hugely successful after news of Lucy's tragic death is made public. The film ends with the knowing look of the receptionist who originally cast doubt on Syd's advancement to assistant editor of Frame with the implication of offering sexual favors. The cover photo confirms the receptionist's suspicions and frames the film in a narrative of addiction and sexual/intellectual currency. Hence, Lucy's death exposes precisely what the Whitney retrospective sought to conceal in its recovery rhetoric: that the resurrection of authorship may facilitate the death of the author. Such is the paradoxical event that guarantees an artist's immortality while killing off the possibility for systemic social critique.

The film, unlike the Whitney retrospective, specifies the injurious consequences of fixing ambivalence within the institutional frame of "authenticity." But, in doing so, the narrative disavows the social context of AIDS that the retrospective features, even as it is recovered. By recovering the generational divides that pit feminist academic theory (Syd's) against experiential lesbian practice (Lucy and Greta's), the film narrative covers over the distinctive historical moment of AIDS. And, while the film reinforces what the Whitney retrospective anxiously tries to cover up--that inside/outside binary logic always reproduces the interests of the institution--the film obscures the historical context of AIDS by creating a generational rift forged out of a striking absence of any reference to the fact a critical mass. Like the Whitney exhibition, High Art is another instance of retrospective: one that again capitalizes on the authenticity of Goldin's autobiographical addicted subjectivity, accessing select historical references but abstracting them from their historical contexts. Addiction, in the case of the film, fixes the dominant binaries of youth and age and insists on the generational divide among women. Such a division is embodied in the youthful, poststructurally-trained, straight, Syd who is repeatedly referred to as the "teenager" by her foil, the aging, addicted, "politically incorrect," lesbian, Greta. AIDS is the unspoken determinant of such a generation gap but AIDS has no bearing on the "reality" of their world. Instead, AIDS functions as the unnamed rift that divides generations, that divides lesbians and feminists, and divides AIDS activism from feminist advocacy. In order to find a performative critical practice that does not recover such oppositionalism, I want to revisit the Whitney retrospective in light of the film's suspended performative interpretation. My hope is that Goldin's work may yet make possible the hitherto disconnected or problematically recovered transactions of feminism and AIDS activism and open up new sites for creative agency not founded in injury.

{A}S(l)ide Show: AIDS, Feminism, and Performative Acts{/A}

Significantly, Goldin’s work did not initially gain wide reception through gallery exhibitions, magazines, or films, but as slide shows--adapting a typical suburban rec-room activity of showing family vacation slides for her anti-suburbia circle of friends (and critically responding to, rather than confirming, conservative "family values"). Ill affording to make prints of her hundreds of snap-shots, she had them developed into slides and projected them at late night events in various discos and bars, and later, film festivals (and eventually pared down into book form, to become Ballad of Sexual Dependency). The slide shows are accompanied by music that conjures historical moments through the dated popularity of each recognizable song fragment, reinforcing the social themes of distinct groups of slides and making transitions between various groups. There is only ever a three-second pause on any one image and the soundtrack proceeds like a medley of greatest hits for a diminishing generation. In various ways, the themes of gender, sexuality and representation are opened out beyond any single frame and are not confined to any one image. And, the slide show in the context of the retrospective--placed ambivalently along side, inside, or outside the discretely framed photographs of individualized suffering--forcefully insists on the place of feminism in response to the event of AIDS, without itself becoming a rhetoric of recovery.

The slide show featured at the Whitney retrospective (one of several versions still maintained as an integrated multimedia performance) begins with the song by The Velvet Underground, "I’ll be Your Mirror," literally interpreted with consecutive images of individuals familiar to those acquainted with Goldin’s "family" all looking into mirrors. The next sequence of slides features "wild women" on the toilet, waiting, in bed, after sex. A succeeding series is set off by the lyrics "kiss the girl, hit the girl" (Souxsie and the Banshees) and images of women with bruises, scars, and tears. This group is followed by images of women who seem to be showing their anger and strength, carrying guns, wielding knives, clenching fists, flexing muscles, and displaying tattoos. In the next grouping, the women are soft, naked, and differently shaped, as the musical accompaniment repeats the familiar reprise, "don’t make me over." Then, there is a series of female sex worker, revealing a "made up" or "made over" female body with men paying for the privilege of seeing it. The images and popular music sequences continue around several themes that define the dominant representations of women is Western culture and then switches to parallel depictions of Western masculinity. The injuries borne by women at the hand of batterers are shown alongside images of the ravaging effects of AIDS on men with a similarly frank and unflinching stance.

The politics and polemics of the slide show that was featured at the Whitney retrospective seemed to be deliberately downplayed by critics or barely mentioned, and its radical possibilities dismissed. Curator Elisabeth Sussman, for example, comments on the slide sequence of women in their bathrooms, arguing that "the self-contained pleasure of these women is devoid of the rhetoric often associated with feminism or lesbian activism." But, I would counter Sussman’s claim by suggesting that the sequencing of the slideshow cannot be understood outside such a political context and rhetoric. The case of the slideshow reinforces the notion that feminist discourse is indissociable from the testament to the loss begotten from AIDS. The event of AIDS, which has immeasurably affected humanity both on the world’s surface and within the experience of social bonds, has not killed off the subjective conditions for a feminist contentious discourse on gender and sex. Neither has the institutionalization of feminist histories, political strategies, and engaged aesthetic practices relinquished the possibility for feminist cultural practice to effect change. Rather, such an event has called on feminist advocacy as the most critical theoretical development for the time. The slide show seems to make such a claim possible, and it is such a transactional possibility for feminism and AIDS activism that may explain the noticeable lack of commentary pertaining to the slide show--perhaps a function of its resistance to recovery.

What the slide show evidences is that an assertive stance that refuses a rhetoric of therapeutic recovery committed to self-closure and oppositional logic need not deny the existence of the illness, suffering, and death that has accompanied the crisis of AIDS, or the physical, economic, and emotional pains suffered under the law of misogyny. What it contests is the notion that an actively engaged and transformational aesthetic practice may only draw legitimacy in suffering or by reifying and recovering injured subjectivities. Aesthetic cultural practice indeed might participate in ending suffering without recourse or reduction to a therapeutic discourse. Art and cultural critic Douglas Crimp insists that engaged cultural practices do have the power to save lives, "and it is this very power that must be recognized, fostered, and supported in every way possible." But, such a promise need not reside in the logic of identity or in quantifiable suffering. The preceding essays have been attempts to clarify the status of feminism as a project that might answer the challenge of saving lives and eliminating suffering through critical cultural practices that refuse to fix the ambivalence of addiction in binary equations. It is my hope that feminist readers of culture may remain dedicated to the discovering a ‘cure’ while guarding against rhetorics of recovery that remain reconcilable to anti-democratic offensives. Such critical possibilities provide a mechanism for specifying more fully the rhetoricity of the representations of addiction as the subjective conditions for renewed feminist advocacies.