Robert
Mapplethorpe (1946 – 1989). Love is colder than Death
Artist Rooms: Robert Mapplethorpe, Tate Modern, till 26th October 2014
A comment on the subject
In one of
the last photos of him made in his New York
home, more alike to the puritan interiors of the New England upper class than a
New York
clubber’s shelter, Robert Mapplethorpe, worn out by AIDS, seemed almost timid.
Despite a change of context, such a display of one’s own mortality is almost
equal in meaning to a piece he made ten years earlier, a self-portrait with a
whip shoved in his anus, close-up. Uncompromised candour of these
demonstrations, presented on the antipodes of his wild life, will often cause disgust. Thinking about Mapplethorpe, Susan Sontag
realised he did not present “the truth about something, but the most powerful
version of it”. Photographs of coprophagia, fistfucking, sex slaves, chained
and depersonalised by leather masks, that brought him both fame and infamy,
seem subversive not only because of their content, but also due to the highly artistic
vocabulary he used to describe it.
Mapplethorpe took Walter Benjamin’s
statement negating photography and lead it to extremes: “It
has even succeeded in making misery itself an object of pleasure, by treating
it stylishly and with technical perfection.“ Can the romance Mapplethorpe depicts truly be
called utmost misery? Yes, but only if it were opposed by a profusion of
mutually selfless love. Even though he repeated that he dealt with pornographic
content only because no one else had before, only because he found it
interesting, Mapplethorpe used it to radicalise universal behaviours of lovers,
convincingly described in the words of Reiner Werner Fassbinder: “Is love
possible without the interference of power? We are raised in a way that makes
this impossible. The one who loves or is more attached to the relationship is
inevitably losing, which is related to the fact that the one who loves less is
more powerful. The greatness most people do not possess is what it takes to
accept other people’s feelings, love and needs. Therefore, a relationship
usually becomes ugly. I can hardly imagine any kind of relationship between any
people I would find beautiful... Love provokes violence, and violence provokes
love.”
Searching
for an expression of his own
The
daringness to step out of the traditionalist birthplace framework served many
artists as a basis for emancipation. Mapplethorpe was raised in a humble
catholic family in the suburbs of New
York, once described as an “ideal place for growing
up and an ideal place to run away from”. The famous photograph “Man in
Polyester Suit” (1981), where Mapplethorpe counterpointed an obscenely
displayed penis to a cheap three-piece suit simulating ‘class’, is one of the
most humorous comments of the social standards he rejected at a very early
stage. After five years of study at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, in 1969 he
moved with his friend Patti Smith in a small room in the legendary Chelsea Hotel. Searching for an expression of
his own, the anonymous couple spent every evening at Max’s Kansas
City club that hosted the most diverse exponents of the New York scene, from
William Burroughs and Robert Rauschenberg to Andy Warhol and Brian Epstein. The
exciting atmosphere of the club, filled with the sound of Velvet Underground,
practically raised Mapplethorpe and Smith. Influenced by Pop Art, Mapplethorpe
made collages and assemblages with built-in photographs cut out from
pornographic magazines bought on 42nd
Street. At a certain point it seemed faster and
cheaper to use his own photographs, so he bought a Polaroid camera. Patti Smith
and his many friends and acquaintances he met in gay/BDSM clubs in the
Meatpacking District, at that time an infamous industrial part of Manhattan, became the
models in his instant-photographs. The fact that he was not only an observer,
but an active participant helped Mapplethorpe to create the most convincing
testimonies of the life of the teeming city’s subcultural stage after the great
Weegee. Mapplethorpe’s New York was a far more
obscure place than Weegee’s Naked City in the 1940s, therefore it took more
courage to portray it with sincerity. Early Polaroids, often depicting socially
unacceptable scenes, possessed an aura of intimacy due to their spontaneity and
absence of directing. After he moved on to a more sophisticated photographing
method, Mapplethorpe still often returned to the early chapter of his art. A
special effect he managed to attain with a simple procedure is evident from the
triptych Jim and Tom Sausalito (1977),
depicting a man urinating in his lover’s mouth. The bitter image possesses an
ethereal quality equal to the photograph of a bouquet of dead flowers laid on
the bedside.
Lovers and
acquaintances as models
The turning
point in Mapplethorpe’s career occurred in 1972 when he became involved in a
relationship with the charismatic Sam Wagstaff. This Yale graduate and former
marine in the Normandy
battlefield created modern advertising industry on Madison Avenue after the
war. In the early 1960s, Wagstaff, an art history graduate, contributed to
revolutionising the American art stage by promoting minimalists, performance,
Land Art and Pop Art. His artistic viewpoint suddenly changed when he met and
visited the New York
exhibition of photographs by Mapplethorpe, five years his junior, whom he
identified as a powerful photographer. The converted Wagstaff resigned from his
post as a curator at the Institute of Art History in Detroit,
sold his collection of art and became an insatiable collector of Daguerre’s
medium. The immense collection he would sell to J. Paul Getty’s Museum in 1984
established a new history of photography and revived photographers such as
Nadar, Gustav Le Gray and Carleton Watkins, while Wagstaff, alongside John
Szarkowski and Susan Sontag, became the key figure of the belated recognition
of photography as a serious artistic genre. Even though Mapplethorpe in his
vanity liked to consider himself self-made, the collection of his mentor and
lover who gave him his first Hasselblad camera, and later a half a million
dollars’ worth of studio in Manhattan,
was undoubtedly the central formative component of his work. Mapplethorpe’s
inclination to appropriation has rarely been mentioned until this day and is
evident in his portraits, nudes and still lives equally. More than Wilhelm von
Glöden’s nudes, whose work was quoted in the photograph of his model Ajitto,
Albert Rudomine and Herbert List, Mapplethorpe’s images of naked bodies are
close to the works of George Platt Lynes, an artist similar also in terms of
biography. A man of impressive looks and personality, as a twenty-year-old in
the 1920s Lynes became a key figure in the intellectual homosexual circles.
This acclaimed portraitist and fashion photographer’s favourite subject was the
male nude, with a focus on the genitals and musculature. His models were mostly
his lovers and acquaintances, many of them dancers. Mapplethorpe’s collection
of photographs also included works by Minor White, famous for his
representation of the object’s texture. A concealed part of White’s body of
work, made public only in 1989 after his death in jail where he was serving a
sentence for arson and crime of passion, were male nudes. Most of these authors
share an antiquing idealisation of the model similar to the 19th
century stylistic traits, which characterised Von Glöden, and the German
neoclassicism of Liszt’s youth, but not to the spirit of Mapplethorpe’s times.
The choice of black and white technique, athletic bodies with muscles
accentuated by dramatic light consisting of both daylight and electric light,
and frequent cropping procedure points to his inspiration drawn from antique
sculpture, appropriated by means of his predecessors. Mapplethorpe fully achieved
the described style in his Black Book,
a collection of black male nudes also comprising photographs of the model
Ajitto placed on a stand like a sculpture. Photographing a dark-skinned body is
a technical challenge for all photographers, and Mapplethorpe managed to tackle
it through a special procedure of lighting the object, thus achieving a
convincing representation of shiny Negro skin. Such velvet skin is what
Mapplethorpe considered the reason why he often selected women and young black
men as his models, unable to shun the accusations of sexism, abuse and racism,
reducing the black model to the animal level. Still, Mapplethorpe’s muscular
model with erection is not sexually available because of the reserved,
terrified or severe look he is giving the spectator. An interesting fact is
that the artist spared the black model of sado-masochist context; the
protagonists of violent scenes are always white.
Penis as a
flower, flower as a penis
A special chapter in Mapplethorpe’s
work are photographs of the so-called ‘New York’ flowers, influenced by Edward
Weston’s still lifes. Even though he denied being inspired by Weston’s work,
Mapplethorpe approached the object in a stunningly similar manner. Just like
Weston’s peppers, Mapplethorpe’s flowers seem as consistent as a human body,
bearing strong sexual allusions due to their penis-like shape. Mapplethorpe
said he did not consider a penis that much different from a flower, and that he
approached the penis as if it were a flower and a flower as if it were a penis.
Mapplethorpe’s statement: “Had I been born one or two hundred years earlier, I
would have probably been a sculptor. Photography is a very quick way to portray
and make a sculpture,” is best reflected in the transformation of a fragile
plant into a consistent body.
On the opposite side of this cold
objectification there are Mapplethorpe’s portraits, each and every one of them
an expression of a shrewd and emphatic observer. Just like People of the 20th Century by August Sander, whose work
Mapplethorpe was familiar with, their look is mainly attached to the lens,
which strengthened the impact of their existence. Leo Castelli, one of
Mapplethorpe’s models, expressed his views with utmost precision while
accidentally touching on Mapplethorpe’s work. This gallery-owner described him
as a portraitist with a strong awareness of mortality and the capability of
expressing it, while he compared the posing in front of his camera with a love
affair you care about and after which you feel sorry not to have expressed love
as much as you wanted to.
Mapplethorpe’s pandemonic sexuality
is closely related to the fundamental difficulty of the modern man – the loss
of the spiritual justification of existence. When he was asked what he
considered sacred, Mapplethorpe answered: “Sex.” A society that has abandoned
the religious viewpoint finds oblivion from the painful experience of absurdity
by sexually relying on the Other. Erotic consecration of the body annuls its
mortality. Writing about Mapplethorpe who “replaced God with sex,” Janet Kardum
and Arthur Danto interpret sado-masochist scenes in his photographs as a
mutation of Christian martyrdom, where the suffering of the body cleanses the
soul. Their interesting assumption is opposed by the artist’s epicurean nature.
Once he said; “While I am having sex, I forget who I am. For a moment I even
forget I am a human being. The same happens when I am behind the camera. I
forget I exist.” Originality of Mapplethorpe’s work is debatable, but one thing
is certain: very few have been able to effectuate the universal striving for
oblivion from the banality of life and the futile manner we use to attain it
like Mapplethorpe.
