ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE THE PHOTOGRAPHS - PAUL MARTINEAU & BRITT SALVESEN

Should photo books count? Doubtful, but this one is huge and comes with 5 essays about Mapplethorpe and is organized around a show I ended up seeing at LACMA when I lived in LA. So, Imma count it. First, the easy stuff. The book is gorgeous and wonderful and the prints looks great and I wish I owned it. The collection of 176 plates (plus some extra featured as examples in the essays section and printed smaller) does really show Mapplethorpe’s diversity. They are all portraits (except for one bad landscape). Even the ones flowers and fruit and furniture are portraits. They take a discrete subject which Mapplethorpe then drips in elegance and sex, lights perfectly, theatrically, almost religiously. Have you ever seen a bunch of grapes that ache sex and longing and elegance? Mapplethorpe’s got you. They whole aesthetic and vibe reads to me as very renaissance sculpture. Composed and beautiful and balanced and very homosexual. The bulk of the photos are from the X, Y and Z portfolios. Y is the collection of flowers, X is the S/M (which apparently Mapplethorpe backroynm-ed to Sex/Magik) stuff and Z is a collection of black male nudes. It’s weird that none of the essay writers point out the most obvious connection between the X and Y portfolios, namely that flowers are sex organs. Flowers themselves are shaped and colored and designed to facility pollination. The flower is the sexual organ of the plant. Since we aren’t plants, or even insects, the pleasure we get from smelling them or thinking about them or looking at them or composing superb photos of them isn’t really “sexual” in nature, but the joy largely universal. Flowers are wondrous, sexual, varied and strange.Mapplethorpe is asking us to take this same impulse and apply it to human sexuality, which he sees as equally diverse and elegant. While he does give us a good and unflinching overview of the sorts of stuff that was going down in the NYC S/M world in the early 80’s. But this isn’t anthropology, you aren’t suppose to to look at the photos of fisting or digital urethral sounding and ask how and why. you’re suppose to admire how wonderful and strange it looks, like a rare orchid. 

The book’s inclusion of the Z portfolio also brings up some interesting ideas about desire and race. First of all, put in the content of this book overall, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Mapplethorpe had a particular obsession, in his photography, with Black men. The subjects are varied by race and gender (with a noted absence of Black women) and unvaried in terms of physical beauty and musculature. Mapplethorpe makes everyone a sculpture. The body is always prime. Likewise, the criticism that he is reifying the big black dick stereotype also seems off to me. Yes, there are big black dicks, ask Jesse Helms, but all the dicks are huge. Mapplethorpe’s photos, even when photographing himself while dying, float in a cold and perfect world. The one photo I can’t get over though is one he made, in ’81, entitled Isaiah. In the photo, which like all of them is beautiful and well composed and balanced, a Black model posses with a cheesy prop spear and leopard loincloth. I assume this is suppose to be a sort of ironic answering to criticism about his work w/r/t race but still, yikes. 

Beyond it’s overt racism, the other thing that stands out in Isaiah is the fakeness of the prop spear. The model clearly didn’t “use” the spear in his day-to-day life, which puts the photo out of step with the overall philosophy of Mapplethorpe’s photography. The people in the S/M gear really use it. Mapplethorpe time and time again pointed out how he trolled for subjects and hookups at the same time in the same infamous clubs. How he’d bring someone home and fuck them and photograph them in the morning. It’s important to the mystique that Mapplethorpe be a participant in the culture he was documenting (the saddest iteration of this is that Mapplethorpe himself got carried off by AIDS right as the disease was decimating this community). Mapplethorpe himself got ahead by cultivating a sexual and professional relationship with Sam Wagstaff Jr., a very important member of the art world, especially photography. The essays quote several gallery owners as saying the only let Mapplethorpe in the door because Wagstaff. It’s hard to imagine this going down if you reverse the genders or orientations. A famous artist who began her career by sleeping with a much older established pillar of the art world. Or a male photographer going to clubs to pick up young women to have sex with then photograph engaged in pretty extreme sex acts. At this point your basically describing Terry Richardson (who, and maybe I’ll elaborate on this more some day, is basically a bizarro, much worse Mapplethorpe). Do I not view these situations as the same because of misogyny on my part? Probably, but I’d also propose that perhaps the gay community, specifically the S/M community is much better at understanding power and power’s relationship to sex and the ways you can erotically encounter or embody or give up power. Straight power relations are much more fixed and thus, somewhat paradoxically, easier to abuse. Anyway, wonderful stuff. I could look at these photos all day. 89 fists.