Sexuality in the Arts

Artworks by Nan Goldin, Gilles Dusein, and Gotscho:

Nan Goldin in Wikipedia

Nan Goldin wrote: 

“My art was the diary of my life.  I photographed the people around me.  I didn’t think of them as people with AIDS.  About ’85, I realized that many of the people around me were positive.  David Armstrong took an incredible picture of Kevin, his lover at the time, right before Kevin went into the hospital.  I photographed him when he was healthy.  At that stage, we still didn’t know very much.  There was a lot of ignorance.  We were very obsessed with what caused it:  There were all kinds of rumors, everything from amyl nitrate to bacon.  People were tested and being told they had something called ARC, that quickly became medically non-relevant.  I was in denial that people were going to die.  I thought people could beat it.  And then people started dying.

One of the ways I started becoming involved was through artist and activist Avram Finkelstein in ’86, ’87.  I’d become friends again with him, having known him when I was 18 and living with the drag queens in Boston in the early ’70s.  He was in art school then.  In the 1980s he became my hairdresser up at Sassoon.  He had helped start the Silence Equals Death Collective, which turned into Act Up.  He was one of the people who designed the logo Silence = Death, and the triangle.” - From this article written by Nan Goldin: 

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0106/voices_goldin.htm

- - - -

AIDS orgnanizations:

http://www.worldaidsday.org/

http://www.visualaids.org/

http://www.gmhc.org/

-

-

-

-

- - - -

This series of photographs was taken by Nan Goldin of Gilles Dusein and Gotscho, lovers who lived in France in 1992 and 1993.  The photographs chronicle many important things, from casual pictures of the caring couple in relatively good health with knowing expressions of their imminent health crisis, to Gotscho kissing Gilles after he passed away from consequences of the AIDS virus.*

*Source:  Alyce Mahon in her book Eroticism & Art, published by Oxford University Press.

(Click on images to view them individually.) 

- - - -

-

-

-

-

-

Gilles arm, 1993, Paris:

Gotscho kissing Gilles (deceased), 1993:

© All rights reserved by Nan Goldin.

- - - -

Thank you to Nan, Gilles, and Gotscho for their bravery in sharing the love they saw in each other.

Other Nan Goldin posts on SIA:

Nan Goldin Part 1 of 2

Nan Goldin Part 2 of 2 

- - - -

Most Recent Artworks   All the Artists’ Artworks Index   my43things