SlideShow at the BMA

Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a sequence of 690 projected photographic images with recorded musical accompaniment, stands at the center of SlideShow, curator Darsie Alexander's exhibition currently on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through 15 May. This is due, in part, to Ballad's resemblance to that most accessible of slide shows, the family slide show, where the subject and the audience is coincident. Goldin's presentations, originally screened for her extended family of friends and acquaintances in New York's Lower East Side, function and are recognizable as these family rites, at their peak popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. Blake Gopnik, in his review for the Washington Post, notes that

The sheer quantity of information in the images on show seemed to compensate for a lack of quality in any single shot. In fact there is a sense that Goldin's quantity may put the whole idea of quality in doubt. . . . A slide show presents reality as full of undigested stuff, with our job being to somehow try to sort it out.

In fact, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency mirrors the structure of the exhibition as a whole: as individual pieces, they often fail to hold our interest, relying on conceptual hooks (and an expected "I get it" response), but the sheer magic of wondering about in the dark—and one is reminded of this often, as the beautifully-installed exhibition leads one about with slatted light patterns suggesting the carousel, spotlighted wall text, and a sense of discovery in following the labyrinthine path from gallery to gallery—packs an unexpected and integrated weight over the entire show.

Other pieces of interest include one of Jack Smith's slide performances, and Krzysztof Wodiczko's projected trompe l'oeil apartment. (A small complaint: the onerous wall text.)