Robert Mapplethorpe: A History In (Leather) Brief(s)

Exhibition: Robert Mapplethorpe; The Hayward Gallery, Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, London SE1; 19th September 1996 to 17th November 1996; opening hours: 10am to 6pm, until 8pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays; admission: £5, £3.50 concessions.

[This piece was originally written in 1993, for publication in an Australian magazine in mid-1994, when there was still some doubt that the show would be allowed to enter that country or find sponsorship, and before Patricia Morrisroe's very revealing biography Mapplethorpe was published by Random House in 1995. It was subsequently posted on the world-wide web prior to the same exhibition in the UK...Ed.]

When he first stood on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street in the promised land of Manhattan, Robert Mapplethorpe had little inkling that this moment marked the beginning of a quest which would make him the most celebrated and notorious photographer in the world.

It was 1962 and Mapplethorpe was just 16, fresh off the bus from Floral Park, Long Island. He was alone, and the comfort and warmth of his large Catholic family home just east of the easternmost borough of New York City felt a million miles away from the dirty streets of the city. He was about to plunge headlong into a world which had only been hinted at in Sunday school and the church he attended every week; a world of guilty secrets and dark mysteries as compelling as those of the Church itself.

Mapplethorpe told the story like this: "I would see a young kid walk down 42nd Street and then go into a magazine storefront, places I didn't know anything about. I became obsessed with going into them and seeing what was inside those magazines. They were all sealed, which made them even sexier somehow. because you couldn't get at them."

"A kid gets a certain kind of reaction, which of course once you've been exposed to everything you don't get. I got that feeling in my stomach, it's not a directly sexual one, it's something more potent than that. I though if I could somehow bring that element into art, if I could somehow retain that feeling, I would be doing something uniquely my own."

It didn't take long for Mapplethorpe to become the very same kid he used to watch, and a regular of the area below Times Square, with its hookers and pimps and wide-eyed out-of-town tourists. He enrolled in art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and, like a good middle-class boy, heeded his parents' urgings to "OK, study art, but at least do something that'll get you a job later", and chose graphic design.

A year later he swapped to painting when he realised the potential of design for self-expression was strictly limited, and by now the urges 42nd Street had awoken in him were evident in his work.

Mapplethorpe's earliest published pieces are collaged pages from boy sex magazines: dyed, masked-out and over-sprayed with paint that floated misty symbols on top of scenes of forbidden love; or reproductions of religious images treated the same way.

Already he was mixing the sacred with the profane, and even though he had not yet totally opted for the twilight world that was homosexuality in '60s America, its glamour was wafting around him like sickly-sweet incense. Another formative event was imminent, when Patti Smith dropped into his life unannounced.

Mapplethorpe recalled: "I had a basement apartment. She wandered in off the street into my house. Actually I was asleep and I opened my eyes and there was someone I had never seen before. She was looking for someone else and came into my place because the door was open. Remember it was the '60s, nobody locked their door."

So the other half of a creative collaboration that continued throughout Mapplethorpe's life entered like a revenant, a ghost in a waking dream.

Fellow art student, nascent poet and future rock star Patti Smith was the first of four people who found an intimate place in Mapplethorpe's life and profoundly affected his career.

They moved in together, first as lovers then as just best friends when they found a studio apartment at the Chelsea Hotel. Now he was an initiated Manhattanite, Mapplethorpe began to hang out with the members of the downtown scene, chief amongst them Andy Warhol.

Image top: Robert Mapplethorpe Self Portrait, 1985 [# 1535] ©Copyright The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe. Image right: Robert Mapplethorpe Tulips, 1988 [# 1932] ©Copyright The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe.

The Factory crowd - Warhol's transvestite superstars, tragic heiresses, pre-punk rock stars and high finance wheeler-dealers - were the glamourous people to be seen with and Mapplethorpe followed them around their favourite haunts, like Max's Kansas City and the back-room bars and gay bath-houses that sprang up to cash in on the sexual revolution. In a memorial eulogy for her former boyfriend, Smith described how Robert would come back from a day out with his new cronies with a new identity, a new guise, proudly displaying himself as if to say, "Look, I can be this, or this, or that too!" Though by now Smith had lost Mapplethorpe as a lover, they still shared an apartment and studio, and were each other's best viewer, best listener and best subject. Mapplethorpe photographed Smith throughout his career, getting his first exposure to the wider world through his shots for her album covers. From Warhol, Mapplethorpe was learning how to get on in the hard, fast New York art scene, and most importantly that one needed a patron to arrange introductions to the rich and powerful. He had some advantage in being homosexual, as many of these captains of industry, architects, collectors, fashion designers curators and gallery directors were sympathetic to young, good-looking artists, who could go far with the right mentor/lover. In the early '70s Mapplethorpe was spotted by John McKendry, art historian and curator of prints and photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who gave him his first camera and introduced him into the artistic beau monde. By now, Mapplethorpe was ready to abandon his multi-media experiments and collages. "They were becoming so much about the photograph that I almost felt guilty," he said. "I was pasting somebody else's photographs on another sheet of paper and calling it my own, and I thought if I could take the picture myself, it would be much more mine." McKendry died suddenly in 1975, but not before Mapplethorpe had been taken up by Sam Wagstaff, an influential curator and collector. Intrigued by Mapplethorpe's experiments with the Polaroid camera, Wagstaff gave him a Hasselblad and Mapplethorpe then "knew I was a fully-fledged photographer". After Wagstaff bought him a live-in studio in once-fashionable Bond Street, Manhattan, and began promoting him as the next big thing, Mapplethorpe started working towards the three simultaneous shows that would mark his grand entrance into the gallery world, photographing flowers for one, celebrities for the other, and drawing on his intimate experience of sado-masochism for the third.

Image left: Robert Mapplethorpe Louise Bourgeois, 1982 [# 925], ©Copyright The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe.

There was nothing he would not photograph, nothing he would not do. In his autobiographical At Your Own Risk, Derek Jarman describes how, after a fast and furious affair with Mapplethorpe in London, he watched the photographer successfully hustle Sam Wagstaff. Upon meeting again, Mapplethorpe triumphantly shot back at Jarman: "I have gotten everything I ever wished for. What have you got, Derek?" What has made Mapplethorpe such an inspiration to other artists, straight and gay, besides his relentless pursuit of success and money, is his consistency. Through a career in photography lasting a little over 15 years, Mapplethorpe stuck to just four categories of subject matter - portraits, flowers, nudes and sex pictures - kept to pretty much the same style, and rarely ventured outside the studio. Once he mastered the small range of photographic equipment he chose to work with - Hasselblad, slightly long portrait lens, three or four electronic studio flash units at most, and seamless paper studio backdrop - he stayed with it. There is even a consistency between Mapplethorpe's pictures in colour and those in black-and-white. Convert his colour shots of flowers into monochrome and they are just as good, except they lose the extra depths of emotion that colour brings. This is a rare achievement among photographers, most of whom can be classified into either intrinsically colour or black-and-white shooters, very few being equally proficient in both. When you flick through the pages of his eponymously titled retrospective monograph Robert Mapplethorpe, you get the distinct impression this is how he ultimately intended his work to be seen, as a seamless image stream, following a nude with a flower with a portrait with a sex picture, ignoring the mere facts of subject matter for some more essential purpose. Study his photographs not with an eye for what is depicted, but for what it is he is really photographing, and it does not take long to deduce that his subject is himself. A clue lies partly in the shape of his photographs, the square. Unlike the rectangle of varying proportions that is a photographer's more usual choice of format, the square is a perfect geometric figure, fixed, and unable to be changed without altering its essential nature. Photographs designed within the square are hermetic, creating a self-contained, self-mirroring universe that admits of nothing else beyond the photographer's own obsession. Mapplethorpe attributed his design predilections to his upbringing: "I was a Catholic boy ... [and] a church has a certain magic and mystery for a child. It still shows in how I arrange things. It's always little altars ... whenever I'd put something together I'd notice it was symmetrical". Through symbolism and symmetry Mapplethorpe's work is drenched in the duality of opposites threatening to thrust apart or snap together in an unnatural merging - black/white, darkness/light, masculine/ feminine, decadence/purity, pain/pleasure, good/ evil, life/death. In life Mapplethorpe was a connoisseur of the symbols of evil and mortality, collecting death's heads and devils many of which he used in his photographs. Beside the obvious ploy of turning himself into a horned demon in some of his many self-portraits, Mapplethorpe made more oblique allusions to the prince of darkness as in his "Self-portrait with Gun and Star" where, clad in black leather Gestapo-style jacket and menacingly clutching a '30s machine gun, he stands dead-centre in front of an inverted five-pointed star. This form with its internal upright pentagram is a symbolic reference to the Devil, whose head in the guise of The Goat is often depicted within its bounds throughout the traditional canon of occult literature. Another photograph from the height of his sado-masochism period, the notorious "Self-portrait with Whip up Ass" layers his own portrayal as a tailed demon leering over his shoulder at us, onto a record of pain as shown in his face and hand gestures, with little evidence of whatever pleasure he may also have been seeking. There is another dimension to this picture, rare but not unknown in Mapplethorpe's other sex pictures, the scatological. The leather whip penetrating Mapplethorpe's rectum may also be read as a petrified trail of excreta he is encouraging to loop upon the studio floor - the ultimate Freudian anal retentive unwilling to flush away his own caca. One service his under-educated black lovers were required to regularly perform for him, was to eat it.

Image right: Isabella Rossellini ,1982 [# 1863], ©Copyright The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe.

When the AIDS test came back positive some time in 1986, Mapplethorpe's preoccupations in life and photography had changed. The pictures that made his name, from his excursion into sado-masochism, ceased with his active involvement in that scene in the late '70s, and he had become so much the dinner-jacketed darling of smart society that the over-priced private portrait commissions were pouring in. His studio staff had grown, with his youngest brother Edward (professionally surnamed Maxey) joining him in the early '80s, bringing a new level of sophistication to his printing and presentation methods and, more importantly, his lighting. Now light was no longer just a means of illuminating secrets once relegated to the outer darkness, but became the way to penetrate deep into the heart of the mystery of things. The light that formerly skimmed across the surface of Mapplethorpe's objects of desire now appears to come pulsing and thrusting out of their inner core, a radiant harbinger of the world beyond. And, on the evidence of his expression in his final self-portrait, gaunt dissolving face floating hazily behind a razor-edged ebony skull, he may have been looking forward to it with humour, and wit. It is open to conjecture, however, whether Mapplethorpe was expecting transportation to Heaven, or to Hell.

Mapplethorpe: A Biography; Patricia Morrisroe, author; Random House, Inc., New York; 1995; 462 pages; monochrome plates; ISBN 0-394-57650-0.

Mapplethorpe; Mark Holborn, editor; Arthur C. Danto, essay; Jonathan Cape, London; 1992; 382 pages; monochrome photographs; ISBN 0-224-03605-X. Written 1993. © Copyright Karl-Peter Gottschalk 1997.