Art Review

Enough!: Even if you are unfamiliar with Nan Goldin’s color photographs of her bohemian friends and their hip digs, which have been regularly shown in American and European galleries and museums for the past decade, the 94 large prints at Gagosian Gallery will probably cause you to scream: Enough already!

Hung salon-style in the front and rear galleries, Goldin’s overblown snapshots look like a misplaced magazine spread. To walk into the sky-lit Beverly Hills showroom is to feel as if you’ve stepped into a tidy editorial office, where an entire issue focused on the lifestyles of the down-and-out is being laid out.

It’s unfortunate that Goldin’s pictures have ended up in an exhibition titled “Reflections Through a Golden Eye, 1975-1988.” They didn’t begin as voyeuristic tidbits of authenticity, nor as portentous souvenirs of lives better seen from a distance than engaged in person.

On the contrary, the artist’s lavishly printed images began by documenting the bittersweet pleasures and pains of a loose circle of friends, who lived (and died) on the fringes of mainstream society. Goldin’s bluntly realistic photos were never meant to be formally interesting. Their grungy, shoot-from-the-hip style instead emphasized their point-blank content, a type of gritty, down-and-dirty verve that was essential to their unflinching expose of life on the edge.

But many things have changed since the artist began photographing her cohorts in Boston hospitals, East Village apartments, Baltimore dives, London clubs and Mexican motels. To scan this group of works is to notice that their settings have shifted from cheap, underground hangouts to fashionable hotels, Mediterranean resorts and exclusive clubs. A list of the cities in which Goldin’s art has been set over the last five years reads like a rock band’s world tour: Bangkok, Berlin, Tokyo, Stockholm, Florence, Venice, Paris, Capri, Krakow, Chicago and Munich.

The edgy content of her initially abrasive pictures has also softened. Now, postcard-like cityscapes and stylish still lifes appear with increasing frequency. It’s difficult not to think that what made Goldin’s oeuvre popular has been lost because of her art world success. The risque, quasi-outsider impact of her early work is absent from the recent photos, which tend, more and more, to be pretty pictures.

Goldin’s best piece remains “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” an approximately 45-minute slide-show in which hundreds of images flash by, sometimes as fast as the blink of an eye. Emphasizing life’s fragility, this ongoing project captures fleeting pleasures and lingering memories with a light-handed touch that is as true to Goldin’s roots as it is moving.

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* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through April 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.