Mapplethorpe
By Patricia Morrisroe
Random House, 461 pages, $27.50
If any single person can be said to have crystallized conservative opposition to the arts establishment in this country, that person would be Robert Mapplethorpe, an exhibition of whose photographs–including 13 images of men engaged in sadomasochistic sexual acts–caused Sen. Jesse Helms to sponsor legislation banning National Endowment support of “obscene” or “indecent” works of art. Helms’ targeting of Mapplethorpe’s work was no accident. With his penchant for drugs and kinky sex, his ostentatious, unconventional lifestyle and his slow death from AIDS while at the height of his fame, Mapplethorpe symbolized in his person as well as his work the excesses of the age.
In this thoroughly researched biography, Patricia Morrisroe resists the impulse to treat Mapplethorpe as a documentarian (he despised photojournalists himself) and instead shows how he sought to impose on his subject matter an often steely control. This cool handling of hot material, which gave Mapplethorpe’s work its characteristic edge, also distinguishes Morrisroe’s account of the work and the life. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of Mapplethorpe’s friends, family members, lovers and associates, as well as on 16 lengthy, candid conversations with Mapplethorpe himself, she has created a kind of postmodern Portrait of the Artist–cool and nonjudgmental, less narrative than evocative.
On the face of it, Mapplethorpe seems an unlikely candidate for a life spent shuttling between society drawing rooms, chi-chi gallery openings and S&M clubs. Born in 1946, he grew up in Queens, in a neighborhood of postwar Cape Cod bungalows where baseball and barbecues and plastic wading pools were the order of the day. His parents, staunch middle-class Catholics, seemed ill-matched with a child who impaled his pet turtle on his index finger, spent Saturdays at the Metropolitan Museum of Art instead of on the ballfield and preferred the freak show to the carnival rides at Coney Island. Harry Mapplethorpe, an engineer, was a stern disciplinarian; his hobby was photography, which he enjoyed for the technical challenge of developing his own prints and because he could pursue it in solitude. Joan Mapplethrope was a compulsive supermom whose spotless house and flawless Christmas cookies would have put Donna Reed to shame.
Morrisroe describes Mapplethorpe’s early fascination with the mystery and ritual of the Catholic church, which later would be embodied in the religious motifs he included in many of his photographs; and she draws a sad picture of a sexually confused adolescent who strove in vain for the undivided love and attention of his overburdened mother and his witholding father. He tried to be an All-American boy: He attended Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute (his father’s choice), where he endured a brutal sadomasochistic hazing in order to join an elite and emphatically macho ROTC unit, the Pershing Rifles. But he was still sexually conflicted when he embarked on his first serious relationship–with a pale, scrawny, scratchy-voiced, androgynous 20-year-old waif from New Jersey named Patti Smith.
Smith, who had yet to achieve punk-rock notoriety, moved in with Mapplethorpe, the two living in a succession of shabby apartments, hotel rooms and lofts. Mapplethorpe was unsure of what he wanted to do but sure he wanted to make art. A fellow tenant at the Chelsea Hotel got him interested in photography and lent him a Polaroid camera with which he took his first flower studies. Suddenly he had a vehicle for his sense of line and composition–a vehicle that compensated for his surprising lack of color sense.
At the same time, the “Dionysian atmosphere” of Max’s Kansas City, a pop hangout frequented by Mapplethorpe, and the post-Stonewall sense of newly liberated homoeroticism encouraged him to use gay pornography in his art. But Morrisoe says that his choice of such material wasn’t grounded in the pornographer’s impulse to pander or titillate: Instead, she infers, Mapplethorpe was trying to re-create the effect pornography had on him–“that feeling in my stomach . . . not a directly sexual one, it’s something more potent than that. I thought if I could somehow bring that element into art . . . I would be doing something uniquely my own.”
Mapplethorpe kept working toward that feeling, going further sexually as well as artistically. The increasing sexual freedom of the time, of course, meant that the further he went, the further there was to go to get that feeling. Although he and Smith remained nominally together for some time, Mapplethorpe now became a fixture in New York’s S&M scene in places like the Anvil and the Mineshaft–ultimately gravitating to haunts of biracial gays where he could lose himself in the “exotic, `primitive’ sexuality” of his black partners.
If, for Mapplethorpe, sex became both art and life, it’s perhaps inevitable that Morrisroe’s account of that life begins to sound like Leporello’s catalog aria from “Don Giovanni.” But two of Mapplethorpe`s many relationships stand out.
The first was with John McKendry, curator of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum, who set Mapplethorpe on his way professionally by showing him pictures in the Met’s collection–such as Eakins’ studies of nude boys or Stieglitz’s nudes of Georgia O’Keeffe–that weren’t yet available to the public. McKendry also laid the groundwork for the reception of Mappplethorpe’s work by introducing him to high-powered figures in society, the art world and the fashion industry.
The second was with another Pygmalion, Samuel Wagstaff, a wealthy patrician collector-curator who set him up (sans Smith, who had moved on to pursue her own career) in a loft on the fringes of SoHo. More important, Wagstaff promoted both Mapplethorpe’s pictures and the notion that photography was a truly serious art form–one in which masterpieces remained to be created, discovered and, of course, bought and sold.
Mapplethorpe’s work captured the spirit of the times perfectly–drugs, sexual experimentation, gay liberation, photography as the artistic medium of the moment and, finally, AIDS. He became, arguably, the most celebrated photographer of his generation, and one of its most controversial artistic figures. But as one friend after another succumbed to AIDS, Mapplethorpe began to sense that his time was short.
“I just hope I can live long enough to see the fame,” he said when told of the death of another HIV positive photographer. But even after he was diagnosed with AIDS, Mapplethorpe continued frequenting the bars and cruising spots where he found his amours.
“If I have to change my lifestyle, I don’t want to live,” he reportedly told an associate. What this says about his compulsions is perhaps less striking than what it says about his almost terrifying self-centeredness: and in page after page of this book Morrisroe shows how Mapplethorpe manipulated and used people. Unfortunately, she avoids commenting on this aspect of her subject’s character, although she does defend him from the charge that by often cropping out the faces of his black models and emphasizing their genitals he was “pandering to the notion that blacks only as sexual objects.” But Morrisoe convincingly argues that rather than engaging in acts of implicitly racist “exploitation and objectification,” Mapplethorpe treated all his subjects–black men, sadomasochistic crazies, flowers, semi-nude aristocratic English children, the female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon–in the same way, as formal elements in studied compositions. If this is objectification and exploitation, she seems to be saying, so be it.
It’s an arguable critical point, and one of the book’s strengths is Morrisroe’s elegant discussion (and description) of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. One wishes she had analyzed and commented on his character and motives with the same clarity and stringency. But what she has done is bring that character, and its context, alive. One may find the character fascinating or repellent, and the art beautiful or disgusting. But read the description of Mapplethorpe’s last exhibition, the retrospective emblematically titled “The Perfect Moment,” which opened on July 27, 1988, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, less than a year before Mapplethorpe would die of AIDS. Sixteen hundred people attended, pushing forward just to touch or see him, while Mapplethorpe himself–frail, almost skeletal–sat on a couch with his oxygen supply nearby.
“It was Mapplethorpe’s night, however,” Morrisroe writes, “and he was determined to enjoy it. His fingers burned from the neuropathy, yet he shook hands with every important person who was whisked to his side, and throughout the evening he could be seen chatting with artists Francesco Clemente, Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, Brice Marden, Barbara Kruger, and Louise Bourgeois, and dealers Leo Castelli, Tony Shafrazi, and Holly Solomon. Some were placed in the humble position of having to lean down so far in front of him they appeared to be kneeling at his feet.”
Morrisroe not only re-creates the scene but also Mapplethorpe’s control over it–and that, finally, may be the point.
