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Echo chambers. Music, space and memory, by Alice Leroy
Music runs through all of artist Nan Goldin's slideshows and films, shaping their rhythm and perception. On the occasion of the exhibition devoted to Nan Goldin at the Grand Palais until June 21, 2026, Alice Leroy, teacher-researcher and film critic, offers a series of texts about her work.
Some sorrow, some joy. Memories are made of this.
Jimmy Paulette on David’s bike, NYC, 1991
In the half-light, everyone groped their way forward, called by the musical rustle towards the small dark rooms arranged in the space. Sound guides viewers into these confined alcoves, giving shape to their experience in these rooms where the film never ends. But music also commands the editing of the films, giving them an organic dimension, underlining equivocal motifs, giving each character a voice, and Nan Goldin a role as narrator. In The Ballad, the men's sulky poses take on a playful air with music by Ennio Morricone (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly)and lyrics sung by James Brown (It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World). It's a theater where everyone performs the genre that suits them.
But the eclecticism of the references also melts into a shared lyricism: from Klaus Nomi to Bambi Lake, from Charles Aznavour to Marianne Faithfull, the destinies of the queer community of The Other Side (1992-2021) are embodied in the breath of these heart-rending voices. This song of pain, addressed to one and all, ties the deepest intimacy to a common memory, "It's a song that makes you cry - A song for crying" says Nick Cave's track.
Goldin sometimes collaborated with musicians who played during the projection of his slides. In the 1980s, the Del Byzanteens, a group to which filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and painter James Nares belong, accompanied The Ballad during performances on the Lower East Side - a song from them, My World Is Empty Without You, remains on the slide show soundtrack. More recently, British artists Patrick Wolf or The Tiger Lillies set The Ballad to music at the Tate Modern in 2008, at the Rencontres de la photographie in Arles in 2009, or at the Philarmonie de Paris in 2017. Until 1992, every screening of The Ballad was a performance, a live-show that mixed countless songs to the rhythm of the scrolling images.
Today, slideshows are more often accompanied by a soundtrack than a live performance. But Goldin now invites artists to compose pieces for her found footage slideshows and films: Mica Levi and Soundwalk Collective collaborated on the soundtrack to Memory Lost in 2019, interweaving their unsettling sounds with the voices of Goldin and those close to him once recorded on his answering machine, before working again on Sirens (2019-2021) and Stendhal Syndrome (2024). If Goldin prefers music to text, perhaps it's because the latter exceeds the meaning that the former confers on images. Music never simply "sticks" to the image or ironically dissonates with it, it opens up another space. "Pleasure is dictable, enjoyment is not", wrote Roland Barthes. Goldin's music acknowledges this nuance, and is entirely on the side of jouissance, that which "discomforts (...), shakes the historical, cultural, psychological foundations of the [spectator] (...), the consistency of his tastes, values and memories".
Nan Goldin in the mirror of cinema
This article, written by Alice Leroy, is part of a series of texts exploring Nan Goldin's work through the prism of cinema, from her slideshows to her films, highlighting in particular her links with New York experimental cinema. Published fortnightly, this series offers an intimate, cinematic reading of her work, echoing the Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well exhibition at the Grand Palais (March 18-June 21, 2026).
[1] Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte, Paris, Seuil, 1973, p. 25-26
[2] Ibid. p. 11.
