In the aftermath of any celebration - even something as special yet ordinary as a birthday - there is a sort of comedown. You get indeed easily overcome by feelings of nostalgia, sadness or, maybe, even loneliness as the excitement and chaos of the previous day abate and relentlessly fade away. The aftermath of Christmas is even harder, maybe because the year is slowly coming to an end and you end up feeling suspended, almost in transition between something old and something new, you feel tired and a bit sad as Christmas is over, but so is another year, while at the same time you know that there is still something to look forward.
There is an image, a photograph by Nan Goldin that we could use to perfectly summarise this feeling of transition or this dichotomic combination of elation and tiredness - "Trixie on the cot" (New York City, 1979) from the volume "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" (1986).
Entitled after a song from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s play "The Threepenny Opera" (1928), this visual diary is a collection of images of Goldin herself, her friends, fellow artists, performers, and drag queens - her chosen family. All the images tell short stories of human relationships, of public spaces and intimate spaces, of love and loss, sex, passion, abuse, joy and pain, euphoria and dysphoria in a variety of environments - downtown bars, bedrooms and bordellos, cars and beaches - and locations, including Boston, New York and Berlin. In these unstaged portraits of the underbelly of society in bright and vivid colours, there's hope and despair.
Like all the other portraits, Trixie's is fraught with contradictions: her pose is reminiscent of Degas' ballerinas putting on or adjusting their shoes, she's glamorous in her 50c thrift shop white party frock with vivid red floral embroideries that evokes '50s Haute Couture dresses and she's wearing heavy pancake make-up. Yet these signs of exaggerated femininity, of identity as a performance, contrast with the messed up satin ribbons in her hair, her run down high heeled shoes (was she dancing hard in them or were they already so ruined? We will never know) and the squalid environment surrounding her.
Trixie is therefore a dichotomic fantasy suspended between the life she would like to lead and the life she is trapped in, between the party fantasy and the post-party phase, she is suspended in a limbo, hesitantly hoping like Madame Butterfly, but doomed as well, exactly like her.
Trixie is in an in-between state: she is beautiful, but also looks dishevelled; she seems carefree as she nonchalantly smokes her cigarette, but she's probably hurting. She's revealing herself, but also hiding behind her hair. Trixie is in transition: between genders, between states of minds, between the day and the night, between the '70s and the '80s, between one excess and the next. You get easily obsessed with her because we are more or less like her - in transition.
We are all collectively transitioning into a new year, leaving behind 12 difficult months and swapping them for an uncertain future; besides, some of us may be transitioning between loves, between careers; others may be experiencing another type of transition, from good to bad health as they confront an unexpected illness or vice versa as they welcome a much-hoped recovery.
As humans we are all dynamic entities, so, like Trixie, we are works in progress, glamorous yet battered, in tattered shoes but with a tiny spark of hope in our hearts and the illusion that a cheap dress can be Haute Couture; worried about the future, but, at the same time, unapologetically not giving a damn. So don't believe those who fake static happiness as that is unachievable because we are all in a constant transformative state. In a nutshell, like Trixie, we are in transition.
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