A new way of seeing: Robert Mapplethorpe & the perfect medium

There’s something about Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography that evokes a sense of awe no matter how many times I’ve seen a particular image before.

The images on display at the Robert Mapplethorpe: the perfect medium exhibition I saw this weekend at the Art Gallery of New South Wales were all ones I had seen before, having had the privilege of checking out the exhibition at its dual-venue inaugural run at LACMA and the Getty Center in Los Angeles last year. Yet, having seen almost the exact same exhibition before did nothing to dull the thrill of viewing #2 in Sydney. I’d like to think this is more a testament to the power of Mapplethorpe’s work than it is to my poor memory and excitability.

Self portraits, 1980. (© Robert Mapplethorpe)

That Mapplethorpe was one of his own favourite models is apparent from the very start, with a triptych of self portraits adorning the wall at the entrance to the exhibition. In these as with most of his other self-portraits, there’s a clear sense of the artist consciously adopting a variety of roles for the camera’s benefit: in the iconic self-portrait depicting Mapplethorpe in archetypal “bad boy” mode, his leather jacket and cigarette are as much a prop as his knife and make-up in the next two portraits.

There’s a single wall devoted to Mapplethorpe’s early experimentations with collage, readymade sculpture and jewellery-making before the focus shifts to long-time friend and muse Patti Smith. In addition to numerous well-known portraits (including those used on the Horses and Wave album covers, and the iconic image of Smith cutting her own hair), the 1978 short film Still Moving is on show, starring a drugged-up Smith being photographed by Mapplethorpe himself as she moves through a set comprised of draped fabric, at one stage toying with a doll/statue/puppet of Mephistopheles, the demonic figure from the well-known German folk legend Faust. It’s a surreal and somewhat unnerving film, like watching a playback of a dream. Suffice to say, I thought it was rather brilliant.

Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith in New York, 1970. (© Norman Seeff)

Besides Smith, there’s a slew of other celebrity portraits on display: musicians, actors, and most interestingly, fellow artist-photographers such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Cindy Sherman. Such images clearly impress even further on account of their subject matter, but I’m far more interested in his photographs of lesser (or un-) known models, where the style and sentiment of the image isn’t dwarfed by the illustriousness of the subject. Many of Mapplethorpe’s portraits are homoerotic in nature, ranging from subtle and tender to quasi-pornographic, and it could be perceived as an intentional tribute to his life as an openly gay man in the 60s-80s that these images are scattered throughout the exhibition rather than housed in a separate section. In glass cases, a selection of Mapplethorpe’s personal items, mostly pornographic ephemera, are on display; memorabilia-cum-penetralia including X-rated gay skin magazines, mail-order photographs of male nudes, and a copy of Stripped & Strapped: The Odd Games Some People Play. (You can probably guess what that book’s about without me having to spell it out.) While in theory it might seem odd and even mildly indecorous to display items of the sort usually expected to be hidden under one’s mattress, in this context it doesn’t come across as tasteless or even particularly shocking: these themes, after all, are openly addressed in Mapplethorpe’s work, without embarrassment. If he’s not ashamed to show us, why should we be ashamed to look?

Joe, NYC, 1978 (© Robert Mapplethorpe)

The most explicit of Mapplethorpe’s work, those photographs belonging to the infamous X Portfolio (as well as part of the Z Portfolio), were the only images displayed in a separate room with a content advisory warning at the entrance, which I suppose is reasonable enough. There, the X (homosexual sadomasochistic images), Y (floral still lifes) and Z (African-American male portraits) portfolios were displayed all together in a checkerboard-style grid, one portfolio per row. It was an arresting display, but although at first the contrast between the Y portfolio’s understated elegance and the X and Z portfolios’ raw, confrontational power seemed jarring, the three series’ images are united by their focus on perfection in the physical form, dramatic lighting, and highly-ordered composition.

X, Y and Z portfolios on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Other walls of the exhibition were devoted to further selections of Mapplethorpe’s floral still lifes and African-American portraits, as well as his series of photographs of female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, and a handful of very striking photographs of sculptures depicting figures from Greek mythology. These were new to me: I’d not come across them before at the Los Angeles venues (although they may very well have been there and I just missed them), and feel they warrant further investigation.

The exhibition’s closing image was one of my favourites: Mapplethorpe’s final self-portrait, taken shortly before his death from AIDS complications in 1989. In it he stares determinedly into the camera, noticeably aged and weakened by illness, hand clutching a skull-topped cane. Nothing of his body except his hand and face are visible against the dark, high-contrast background; it’s like he’s already starting to vanish from this world. It’s a haunting image, made all the more powerful by the uneasy feelings it evokes.

“Behold, I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep,
but we shall all be changed, in the twinkling of an eye…”

Here is that eye, and its vision. Here is the tension
we need to imagine that mystery; in the tension between
darkness and light, between black and white.
Here in Robert’s photographs.

– Paul Schmidt, from the introduction to the X Portfolio