Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs by Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen; J. Paul Getty Museum, $59.95
Can Robert Mapplethorpe be deciphered? Does photographer, provocateur, pornographer, political sexual radical/activist, and person with AIDS exhaust or just skim the list of identities? Since his death in 1989 and the fading of headlines, enough time has passed so we can reexamine the artist and his career. With the publication of a sumptuous tribute and the recent documentary on his life and work by HBO, this is a banner year for Mapplethorpe. Clearly he changed photography forever and still triggers controversy today.
Mapplethorpe isn't a figure on whom one can remain neutral. Both the man and his pictures demand a visceral response. So it is fortunate that, drawing from the extraordinary collection jointly acquired in 201l by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the authors Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen provide a rich and exhaustive selection covering the remarkable range of his photographic work, including the "scandalous" ones, and have also assembled five superb essays to give fresh perspectives on the man and his creativity.
Mapplethorpe was renowned for his portraits of both the famous (his lovers Patti Smith and patron Samuel J. Wagstaff, Andy Warhol, singer Deborah Harry, David Hockney) and obscure, including Lisa Lyon, the first World Women's Bodybuilding champion and favorite muse. Between 1977-80, his photographic focus was on the gay s/m community, these infamous explicit sex pictures celebrating the post-Stonewall gay subculture of the 1970s-80s, which he both participated in (inviting men back to his loft for sex, getting them to model for photographs) and observed, using himself at times as his own subject. He loved to use African-American models such as Milton Moore, subject of one of his most notorious pictures, "Man in Polyester Suit" (has a man's cock ever looked more delicious?). He also was a master of still life, especially his sensual flowers (the sexual organs of plants), which for him expressed compositional order and control, the perfect aesthetic arrangement. Less well-known and fewer in number are his striking landscapes, the stark "Winter" (1979), with a man contemplating under a tree during a snowfall; and "Waves" (1980), pulsing ocean sprays resembling liquid fireworks.
Mapplethorpe's elegant, formal style, reconciling light and dark, order and chaos, sacred and profane, is captivating. While his subject matter was revolutionary, his work was classical, with balanced composition, obsessive attention to detail, statuesque poses, and sophisticated lighting. For Mapplethorpe, eroticism is a function of its classicism, and vice versa. He wasn't the first to photograph the male nude, but even in the 1970s, this was still scandalous, a de facto expression of homoeroticism, with male bodies both targets of prohibition and sources of pleasure. Because of his technical mastery, his nude photos were among the first to be displayed in museums.
His greatest legacy as an artist was redrawing the boundary of the aesthetic to include what had been excluded, unlikely subjects such as anuses, erections, and s/m, forcing viewers to see the erotic in a new light. Human sexuality in all its forms could rise to transcendent heights functioning as religious themes, complete with Catholic iconography Mapplethorpe absorbed in his youth. He wanted to make pornography art because he believed they both shared the pursuit of beauty and the solicitation of desire. So Mapplethorpe could say, "I don't think there's much difference between a photograph of a fist up someone's ass and a photograph of carnations in a bowl." He wanted to open people's eyes that any subject was acceptable as long as it was photographed well. Sexuality wasn't in the photograph, it was the photograph. He claimed in sex we give up differentiation, that it functions as the great leveler, Thus Mapplethorpe is not "documenting sexual activity, but representing it as a purified ideal."
From the beginning, discovering himself through art, Mapplethorpe set about creating a dynamic public image, taking pictures of prominent people to foster a demand for his work among the creative literati. Three months after he died of AIDS, his Perfect Moment show, partially funded by the National Endowment of the Arts, and denounced in the Senate by homophobe extraordinaire Jesse Helms, was canceled at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., causing a storm of controversy. When it relocated to the Contemporary Arts Center, its director, Dennis Barrie, was arrested on charges of obscenity, but acquitted. Being ground zero in the 90s culture wars elevated his work's stature and international visibility, as well as the monetary and cultural value of his oeuvre. Mapplethorpe once told Patti Smith that he "held hands with God when he made art." Through the decades, critics and the public alike have come to share his estimation. With the book's four loosely chronological plate sections, five in-depth essays exploring sexuality and identity (with queer curator Jonathan Katz's "Queer Classicism" a standout), the artist's vast exhibition history, an illustrated chronology of his life and work, a useful bibliography, and gorgeously reproduced photographs, Martineau and Salvesen's accomplishment is not only authoritative, but indispensable.
The exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium will be on view at the Getty and LA County Museums through July 31.