Nan Goldin: banged up in Reading gaol with Oscar Wilde
Nan Goldin is guiding me though her unlikely exhibition space in Reading prison, which comprises a row of cells on C Wing, close to where, in the summer of 1895, Oscar Wilde began a two-year sentence for gross indecency following the failure of his libel case against the Marquis of Queensbury. Goldin discovered the writer at the age of 15 and he became a huge influence on her. “What I understood him to be saying is that you can be who you pretend to be,” she says. “You can remake yourself completely. That idea drove my desire to create myself though my art.”
Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison review – a star-studded tribute to Oscar Wilde
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Goldin is one of several artists and writers – including Marlene Dumas, Steve McQueen, Wolfgang Tillmans and Ai Weiwei – whose work is on display inside the prison for Inside, a new project by Artangel. To reach C Wing, you pass a row of cells where condemned men spent their last night before being led to the gallows. A steep flight of metal stairs takes you to the first floor landing and its long rows of steel doors painted blood red, their shiny surfaces containing long, thin windows made of reinforced glass. In Wilde’s day, the doors were oak and there was only a tiny peephole for wardens to peer through – at the “grey figures on the floor”, as he wrote in The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
As if to exorcise the silence and the solitude, one of Goldin’s pieces is a video interview with a 91-year-old man who is still campaigning for an apology from the government for his conviction for homosexuality 70 years ago. His posh voice booms out into the silence of the prison like an accusation. Next door are two more screens, each featuring synched videos of early silent film versions of Wilde’s play Salome. Next door again is an edited version of French writer Jean Genet’s only film, Un Chant d’Amour, a poetic depiction of homosexual desire in a prison. It can only be viewed though the slim, murky window in the door.
Having just spent a few sombre minutes in C.3.3. (Wilde’s cell, though it’s now changed due to a revised numbering system), I ask Goldin if she has found it an oppressive place. “Strangely, no,” she says. “I think I’m desensitised to it. What has got to me is the fact that he spent so much time in solitary confinement with just one page of blank paper to write on a day. I cannot begin to imagine how someone as social and talkative and outgoing as him survived. It makes me angry even to think about it.”
A closeup of The Boy. Photograph: James Lingwood
Goldin has always sided with outsiders – the drag queens, drug addicts and wayward friends whose lives are glimpsed in her groundbreakingly raw and intimate photobooks, such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and The Devil’s Playground. Her art has always been infused with what might be called a gay sensibility that may, in part, be a result of her long friendship with the photographer David Armstrong, whose death in 2014 she is still, one senses, grappling with.
As a troubled teenager growing up in suburban Boston in the 1960s, Goldin was “shy but disruptive” until, aged 14, she made friends with Armstrong at a hippy high school in Lincoln, Massachusetts. In their different but overlapping ways, they explored, through photography, the worlds of gay men, transvestites, drug addicts and creative outsiders.
The Winter by Steve McQueen, part of Inside. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty
“We worshipped Wilde,” she says, smiling. “We read everything we could – by him and about him. We used his lines all the time in conversation. He was a big influence, not just creatively but in the way he lived, his attitude and his flamboyance, his caustic wit and his style. It’s a shame no one has broached that aspect of him in this show, but it’s what affected me most deeply.”
The centrepiece of Goldin’s installation is a cell filled with photographs of another close friend, the German actor Clemens Schick, whom she met and slept with in 1996. “I don’t know how I didn’t clock him as gay,” she says, laughing, “as I have been clocking men as gay before they knew it since I was 14 or 15. But somehow I didn’t see it.”
‘I cannot begin to imagine how he survived’ … Nan Goldin. Photograph: Clemens Bilan/Getty Images
She photographed Schick constantly until 2012 and the images, many featuring him nude or striking provocative poses, cover two walls, scattered over and under a grim-looking iron bed. On another wall, underneath the window, there is a single fading image of an unknown young Victorian man, who looks debonair and stylish.
“I’m trying to suggest Wilde’s obsession with Bosie,” she says, referring to Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover and son of the enraged Marquis of Queensbury. “I wanted to evoke that sense of Oscar falling hopelessly and obsessively for the wrong person. We’ve all done it, but for him it had such devastating consequences. The one revelation for me in doing this project is realising how awful Bosie and his family were. I think he was evil.” She leads me across the landing to a cell in which there are two paintings by her friend Marlene Dumas: an angelic Oscar alongside a demonic-looking Bosie. “That’s him all right,” she says. “The little shit.”
As I prepare to leave, Goldin gestures at the surrounding cells and at the landing with its row of identical doors giving way to drab, deadening interiors. “In a way,” she says, “the Oscar Wilde I was so influenced by isn’t here. The openly gay, witty Oscar Wilde is not here – just as that part of him wasn’t evident in his writing from the prison. It’s like he disappeared into himself just to survive it.”
Inside runs until 30 October.