Exhibitions 1
Robert Mapplethorpe (Hayward Gallery, till 17 November)
Lust for fame
Edward Lucie-Smith Picture this: I am sitting on the floor in an almost totally unfurnished room in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, some time in the late autumn of 1970. Wilting flowers lie scattered on the white linoleum and Andy Warhol helium pillows float lazily towards the ceiling. Occasionally they interrupt the beam of a movie-projector which has been
Ajitto; 1981 by Mapplethorpe set up so as to use one of the walls as a screen. The film is the latest product of the then flourishing underground movie scene (video has not yet taken over). Its title is Robert Having His Nipple Pierced. The soundtrack is a poem improvised on the spot by the future rock icon Patti Smith. Also present is the star of the film, a whip- pet-thin, intensely ambitious would-be artist called Robert Mapplethorpe. He is Patti's lover, but he has male lovers as well In the movie, he lies cradled in the arms of one of them as the operation is performed. Picture this too: it is about three years later and Robert and his new patron and lover, the pioneer collector of vintage pho- tography Sam Wagstaff, are seated side by side on a sofa in the elegant Belgravia drawing-room of my then business partner. They are giggling as they show her an album of Polaroids — 'the wedding pic- tures', they call them. My partner is an extremely sophisticated American woman in her fifties who has known Sam since they were both teenagers, but she is a little taken aback by the imagery she is confront- ed with. The pictures show male genitalia, evidently those of her two guests, tied up in various ingenious and probably painful ways, and then photographed in close-up. I offer these two vignettes, both taken from a period in Robert Mapplethorpe's life before he had fully created the persona people now know him by because I think they both, in different ways, tell one a good deal about him. A clear view of his charac- ter, in turn, offers insights to the body of work which is now at the Hayward Gallery. From the beginning of his career Map- plethorpe lusted for fame in the New York art world (for him the only peer group that counted). At first, however, he could find no very obvious talent of his own which would provide him with this. The critic Robert Hughes remembers being lured to a walk-up apartment on 14th Street to look at the three-dimensional collages Map- plethorpe was then making, with rubber webs and bits cut from homosexual porno- graphic magazines, and thinking he was a non-starter. I had precisely the same expe- rience. Yet I couldn't help being impressed by the intensity of his need to arrive, to become a personage whom people would recognise. That was what his appearance in the film was about.
At the same time, Robert loved (but also despised) posh society. He was peculiarly adroit in his manipulation of the rich, and especially of rich women who wanted just as desperately as he did — to be accepted as part of the inner circle of the art world. His method was simple. Later I would come to call it 'the game of New York chicken'. Show them something designed to shock. If they flinched, sneer — make them feel that after all they weren't cool enough to be accepted as part of the gang. Later, he was to refine these tactics a little. His photographs of flowers, though obviously derivative like so much of his work (in this case from the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe), were validated for those who bought them by the knowledge that they were the work of the man who also made the outrageous erotic images everyone in New York whispered about.
Mapplethorpe's campaign to get himself to the very top of the slippery pole was for- tuitously aided by the fact that there was a moment at the end of the 1970s when S&M leathersex almost became main- stream in New York. The film Cruising introduced the leather scene's cult imagery to a mass audience. Society ladies donned masculine disguise and tried to smuggle themselves into the notorious gay S&M club the Mineshaft, hidden in the meat- packing district, while their chauffeur-driv- en limos waited round the corner. Then Aids came along, and the fashion was over.
All of this forms an essential background to the Hayward exhibition, which is a rather hugger-mugger retrospective of Mapplethorpe's career, illogically hung, and crammed into too small a space. It offers an overview of most of the different kinds of imagery he produced. Categories which have not so far been mentioned are the pictures of the female bodybuilder Lisa Lyons, and the pictures of African-Ameri- can men — the `Blackrnales' series. They show that Mapplethorpe became, though in a rather limited and standardised way, a skilful photographer. The look he aimed for was usually hard, smart, rather brutally chic. It epitomises the revival of Art Deco which was taking place at the time when he rose to prominence. This is particularly true of the images of black men (blacks were one of the staples of 1920s Deco iconography). His African-American sub- jects are reduced to the status of objects, personality and humanity stripped away.
Mapplethorpe is clever at seeing how the part — usually part of a body — can be used as a stand-in for the whole. The exhi- bition is full of isolated images of penises, emblems of pure masculinity.
Equally he aimed to contradict or sub- vert expectations. An outrageously sexual image becomes a detached exercise in pat- tern making; Lisa Lyons strikes a series of generically male poses. The prints them- selves, however, offer no technical surpris- es — they are assembly line products, skilfully but impersonally executed. Map- plethorpe was impatient with technical niceties, and spent little or no time in the darkroom himself.
Confronted with his oeuvre in its totality, one can't help being surprised that he remains such a cult figure, since his gifts seem genuine but minor, an echo of more original talents. I think there may be sever- al reasons for this. One is the `rainbow coalition' aspect of the present contempo- rary art scene. In the United States, partic- ularly, every grouping must be allowed a voice: African-Americans, Native Ameri- cans, Chicanos, feminists and gays. As a spokesman for homosexuals, and a victim of Aids, Mapplethorpe is forgiven for aspects of his work, such as his depersonal- isation of his African-American subjects, which in other hands would be condemned as politically incorrect. Second, he is the posthumous beneficiary of the censorship controversy which broke out just before his death, and which culminated in an unsuc- cessful prosecution for obscenity in Cincin- nati in September and October 1990. Effectively the trial whitewashed Map- plethorpe's image with the liberal establish- ment, and all the unsavoury details revealed in Patricia Morrisroe's biography published last year have not been able to undo this — or not yet. Third, there is his genuine historical importance: more than any other individual, Mapplethorpe, through his ruthless ambition, was respon- sible for establishing photography in the public mind as the peer of other forms of expression in the fine arts. This was some- thing which America's greatest photogra- pher, Alfred Stieglitz, had earlier been unable to do. Fourth and last, there is the accessibility of his work. Where else, among all the things which are now suppos- edly avant-garde, will you fmd so much which is essentially clear, simple and direct? If one also adds `derivative', that doesn't matter too much.
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