Pushing Over the Fence: Two Robert Mapplethorpe Exhibitions

Photographer Mapplethorpe is feted at the Getty and LACMA

We have celebrated or embraced a number of distinguished photographers in recent years, from Walker Evans and W. Eugene Smith to Sebastião Salgado and Josef Koudelka. But no one seems to have received more attention than Robert Mapplethorpe, who has been given the posthumous honor of a retrospective so large that it is being shown in two venues, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Well, part of the reason for that is because in 2011 the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation bequeathed nearly 2,000 works to these bastions of fine art. And what better way to reciprocate, right? Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium is on view through July 31, 2016.

The exhibitions are accompanied by two definitive catalogues, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archives and Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs. Both are essential if one wishes to appreciate Mapplethorpe from top to bottom. However, to more fully understand him one might want to throw in Patti Smith’s Just Kids, her memoir of life with Robert in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and Patricia Morrisroe’s 1995 biography, sparingly titled Mapplethorpe.

Each of the two shows is impressive in its own right, but one needs to stand back from the grandeur of the presentation and not be unduly swayed by it. “Mapplethorpe’s art is a serious, even activist, triumph of style over substance,” Jonathan D. Katz writes in Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs. Katz is a contributing essayist in the catalogue penned by the shows’ curators, Britt Salvesen of LACMA and Paul Martineau of the Getty.

In some ways, Mapplethorpe resembles Herb Ritts, but with more teeth. They both chose young and attractive subjects, for the most part, but Mapplethorpe was also a photographic provocateur when it came to sexual, or extreme sexual, imagery. “Famously,” Philip Gefter writes in the same catalogue, “Mapplethorpe’s ambition was to create fully artistic images that would be as arousing as those in porn magazines: to achieve ‘smut that is also art.’” Or, Katz again: “What sets Mapplethorpe’s work apart is that its eroticism is a function of its classicism, and vice-versa.”

Naturally not everyone who wields a camera has the guts to embark on such a mission. The poet and songwriter Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe’s girlfriend for several years, was perplexed and unsettled as he drifted into sexual relations with men. “Robert’s subsequent excursions into the world of S&M were sometimes bewildering and frightening to me,” she writes in Just Kids. However, it was a world where Mapplethorpe brought his camera along with his aesthetic sensibility, although the latter was not always in evidence. Some of his work, Smith adds, “shocked me: the invitation with the whip shoved up his ass, a series of photographs of cords binding genitals… When I asked him what drove him to take such pictures, he said that someone had to do it, and it might as well be him.”

Or, gussied up a little, as Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick phrase it in Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archives: “When asked in interviews why he produced certain bodies of work, such as his sexual images or his series of photographs of black men, the consistent answer was because it had not been done. For Mapplethorpe, originality was of absolute importance, providing the exciting challenge that comes with pioneering uncharted territories.”

Whether it was uncharted territory or an area that had been squelched and kept under wraps for centuries isn’t exactly clear. In the first decade of the 19th century, Henry Fuseli made numerous erotic drawings (“Symplegma of a Man with Three Women” and “Brunhilde Observing Gunther, Whom She Has Tied to the Ceiling,” for instance), and then of course the Marquis de Sade, whose camera was his pen. Prudery and God’s little helpers would have dispensed with the rest, while those with the vision and the courage may simply have lacked a sugar daddy like Sam Wagstaff, whose connections in the art world–not to mention the money that would eventually enable Mapplethorpe to afford a studio manager and a staff of assistants and printers–provided a much-needed boost.

This isn’t to say that Mapplethorpe wasn’t already on the right track. Between 1970 and 1975, he made over 1,500 Polaroid prints, using cameras borrowed by or gifted to him, and he not only honed his visual skills but his visual presentation as well. “You really have to work at selling photographs to art collectors,” Ben Lifson quoted him saying in the April 9, 1979 issue of the Village Voice, “and that is what I want to do: sell to people who collect art, instead of just to people who are in love with photographs only… I guess even part of why I do this framing is that I want it to be seen first as an image, then as a photograph.”

Falling in with Sam Wagstaff was perfect for another reason. For ten years, up until 1984 when he sold his collection to the Getty (essentially kickstarting the Getty’s photography department), Wagstaff amassed over 6,000 photographs, one of the largest private holdings at the time. Included in it, for instance, were over 500 prints by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon). While most collectors might simply cherry-pick when building their own holdings, Wagstaff had the means to sweep up entire collections in one go. Mapplethorpe’s personal access to this large body of work was of inestimable value.

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were clearly destined for one another, with some key traits in common: They both met people who furthered their individual artistic trajectories. In Smith’s case her relationships included playwright Sam Shepard, poet Jim Carroll, musicians Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult and Tom Verlaine of Television, and eventually Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5 (she married the latter and that was the end of the Patti Smith Group). As for Mapplethorpe, in addition to Wagstaff, of course, there was John McKendry, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, plus several gallery owners and other artists.

As Patricia Morrisroe told me in 1995, “When Mapplethorpe and Smith came to New York in ‘69 they talked about ‘gaining connections.’ And, really, they moved from person to person in order to fulfill their goals. People described them as being ruthlessly ambitious, and I think that’s true. But they also accurately sized up the situation and what they needed to do as well.”

At the time we spoke, Morrisroe was in L.A. to promote her biography and I soon wrote a story for Easy Reader about the book and its author’s reflections on Mapplethorpe. What’s interesting now is that she’s quite often the go-to source for information about the photographer as evidenced by how often she appears in the footnotes of the two new catalogues.

She’d first interviewed Mapplethorpe in 1983 for the London Times, but three or four years later when she proposed writing a book about him her editor said “too small a subject.”

“And I think she was probably right at that point,” Morrisroe told me. “It was only in the summer of 1988, after he’d gone public with the news that he had AIDS–and also the fact that he’d had his major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York–that he was considered a much more important figure. And I think primarily because his pictures were a document of a life, of a subculture that was fast disappearing.”

So fast, in fact, that if Morrisroe had been approached a few years later about writing Mapplethorpe’s biography, she’d likely have turned it down. Too many missing pieces, she said, with the main one missing being Mapplethorpe himself.

But let’s step back a paragraph. The pictures documented an era and a sexual subculture that soon had deadly repercussions. Mapplethorpe, with his camera, was in the heart of it. But what about the man himself? What was Mapplethorpe apart from the photography? As Morrisroe framed it, “For all his fame, it was a relatively thin life. And when I say thin, Mapplethorpe went into the studio and took pictures. And he spent an enormous amount of time in bars, picking up men.

“That would have been truly a tremendously sordid and boring story,” she added, before naming several renowned or influential people with whom her subject crossed paths. “Mapplethorpe was able to sustain a book in that he connected with all of these people.”

If I seem to have gone off-course a little, it’s because Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, that is, the two exhibitions in one, tends to present Mapplethorpe in a reverential light that he may not have truly deserved. That’s something we do with many celebrities who die young. There’s always that “What if?” implying that the artist was still climbing up the mountain of their artistic medium at great speed.

For example, in Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive, Terpak and Brunnick conclude that “Studying the archive also makes evident how Robert Mapplethorpe’s unrealized potential in his later career would have gone beyond photography to challenge the boundaries of sculpture, film and video, interior design, and commercial publishing and advertising.” Well, maybe it would have, but maybe it wouldn’t (unlike Ritts, Mapplethorpe failed as a fashion photographer: too much of a remove between the object and the viewer; what comes through is his fetishism).

While I think that Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive is a stunning achievement and beautifully produced, I also think there are many early collages and assembly pieces at which we can roll our eyes. Mapplethorpe was pushing the sexual envelope almost from the start, although in a less refined way, of course, and Jonathan Weinstein is spot-on when he says, “Arguably, one of Mapplethorpe’s greatest accomplishments is that he effectively extended the definition of art by exhibiting his sex pictures in galleries and museums.”

But Weinstein (another guest essayist) gets a little carried away with his subject when he discourses at length upon the meaning of an “archive” and how it is to be understood (look, buddy, it’s a storage vault, one wants to tell him). As a self-professed “Foucaldian,” however, he felt a need to examine every nuance of what it means to have had access to the Mapplethorpe holdings in the Getty Research Institute (they initially arrived in five crates and over 200 boxes).

I don’t dismiss the thrill of going through the archival material (I had a small taste of it myself a couple of years ago), but this again harks back to over-glorifying the man who made or collected this stuff).

Once he got into the swing of things, in what was really a very short career, Mapplethorpe wasn’t just a one-subject wonder. His portraits of the rich and famous (which may remind us of Warhol or Cecil Beaton) are often eye-grabbing, and then there’s Lisa Lyon who was, as Matthew Kluk writes, “Mapplethorpe’s most photographed subject. The images depict her in a range of guises, from bodybuilder to showgirl, dominatrix to grande dame.”

And, of course, the famous portfolios: X (with its S&M scenarios), Y (floral still lifes), and Z (black male nudes). There’s a finesse and sensitivity to these works that transcends the subject matter, especially with regard to the tonality in the finished prints (I also think of Frederick Sommer’s pictures of chicken parts, dead coyotes, etc., in the Getty’s collection).

But are we truly able to see beyond the subject matter and to appreciate the pictures solely for their lighting and composition? At what point do we stop (or start) becoming voyeurs? Part of the allure of sexually explicit pictures is whether the subject/object appears to be enjoying the situation (or not enjoying it, if that’s your preference). But Mapplethorpe often shortchanges this by cropping out the head or face and most of the physical context. In these instances, he seems closer to someone like Edward Weston with his photographs of peppers and shells or Minor White’s photography of rocks.

For all that, deny it if you will, there are various images that most certainly fall into the category of pornography, as “pretty” as they are. By exhibiting them, both the Getty and LACMA are admitting that pornography (okay, sexually explicit imagery) can be art. And why not? But no one seems to discuss whether or not certain works should not have been shown, and whether this removes the “taboo” against showing other beautiful images of what might be considered disturbing subjects. Has the door been opened so that one day we may openly view images of bestiality, young children in lewd acts, as well as images of the dead and the mutilated? Is there a definite red line in the sand, or does it constantly get pushed back? Will Mapplethorpe be used as a justification for presenting shows in the future that at times in the past would have been deemed too controversial even to consider?

Fame is one thing, but it passes. Infamy is better for one’s career. Fortunately, someone stepped up to give Mapplethorpe a big hand: North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. He jumped up and down and made a big fuss about Mapplethorpe’s traveling exhibition, The Perfect Moment, and thus was Mapplethorpe, although already dead a few months, thrust among the immortals. As Dalí and other savvy artists have long known, nothing is as good for one’s career as scandal or controversy. It’s the best form of advertising, and suddenly everyone wants to taste the forbidden truth. Remember sportscaster Erin Andrews, filmed naked through her motel room peephole? Her fame skyrocketed when the film went viral. Same thing, more or less, maybe less, but what the heck.

As noted above, Mapplethorpe was ambitious and driven. He cultivated his images and he collected press articles about himself and his work. “Somebody once said about Mapplethorpe that it was almost as though he expected that he would die young,” Morrisroe said, “and that was why he had to conduct his life like a speeding train. There was that sense, We don’t have time, we don’t have time. And that sort of pushing ahead.”

It’s a remarkable output, and a gallant attempt to merge and blend fine art with the sexually explicit. Clearly, as the current shows reveal, he succeeded. All is revealed.

And the man himself? It’s still hard to get him in focus. Did he have a sense of humor? I don’t know. Was he a good friend? To Patti Smith, at least; I’m not so sure he stood still long enough to collect true friends. Was he likeable?

It might seem strange that of all the people who came into his orbit, the one who ended up writing his story–with his cooperation–was Patricia Morrisroe. Well, they had both been raised Catholic, but what she revealed was that apparently she reminded him of Patti Smith. “I don’t see it myself,” Morrisroe replied, when asked, but in 1995 I remember thinking that I could see the connection.

“That’s not to say there weren’t times when I thought, Oh my god, what am I doing? You know, here’s this straight married woman trying to figure out the gay S&M scene. There were a lot of times when the material seemed very complicated to me and very dark. But you get to a point where you’re in there and you have to go ahead.”

And she did, which is why her book remains important and is so widely referenced today. Other people, of course, in the years since, have shared their memories of Mapplethorpe as well, and so the story of the man and his work continues to grow. Only 42 when he died, yet Mapplethorpe now seems more alive than ever.

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium is on view through July 31 at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center and at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. To get started, go to www.Mapplethorpe.LA. ER

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