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| Muffin, by Robert Mapplethorpe |
It is easy to forget quite how young
Robert Mapplethorpe was when he died in 1989.
The exhibition currently on display at the Alison Jacques Gallery in
Berners Street, London, was mounted to commemorate what would have been his
70th birthday. Juergen Teller has
collaborated with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York to choose 48
images. encompassing Polaroids and silver gelatin prints, spread over two
floors. A note at the entrance wisely
points out that the contents are not suitable for children, though they can all
be found on the gallery’s website.
I can’t make up my mind what I think
about Mapplethorpe’s photographs, and my visit didn’t help clarify my
opinion. They were ably selected by
Teller (a good choice of curator for such challenging material), but on this
showing what mainly distinguishes Mapplethorpe was his indifference to taboos
surrounding the explicit depiction of male genitalia and anuses, and I’m not
sure the intention to provoke, which must have been an element of his method,
is enough to put him in the first rank of photographic artists.
That said, there is a lot more to him
than naked men, and this was a welcome reminder of the variety of subjects at
which he pointed his camera. There are
still lifes and animals as well as the portraits for which he is best known. Patti Smith is present of course, but not
wearing a shirt, in fact not wearing anything up top at all as she presses her
breasts to a window pane, hands up in a pose evoking Maya Derren and so
reinforcing Smith’s credentials as a significant artist.
Mapplethorpe is particularly adept at
juxtapositions, whether with the contents of an image – a small statue of a
devil with a pitchfork about to spear a penis looking like a hotdog – or titles
– a classical statue with its arms flexed, as if stretching after sleep, called
‘The Sluggard’. Gisèle Freund was
photographed with one of her pictures of Virginia Woolf on a shelf next to her,
rather a startling addition to a Mapplethorpe.
One wonders what Woolf would have made of all this.
In aesthetic terms the still lifes work
well: eight frogs on a plate (or is this a portrait? – you don’t expect a still
life to have the capability to jump), seedpods, bread in profile at first
glance looking unsettlingly like dung; but inevitably they are secondary to the
explicit depictions of the human form,
These often have a playfulness and sense of collaboration which
neutralises any sense of seediness they might otherwise have had. If it should seem crude on occasion, most
notably in the explicitness of ‘Fist Fuck’, that says more about the prejudices
of the viewer than it does about the photographer.
Mapplethorpe clearly had a way with
people to earn such trust, and his empathy is revealed in the connection he makes
with his subjects, but my favourite of the whole show has to be the dog Muffin
pictured looking like an indolent nineteenth-century French courtesan. Some of the other work is a little obvious or
doesn’t quite succeed – ‘Corn’, in which a cob inevitably looks like a penis; a
pair of cocoanuts resembling breasts; a grid of apartment windows marred by an
ugly shadow that would be frowned on in a club competition; a long exposure
making flowing water look velvety (‘Puerto Rico’), already a cliché in 1981
when it was taken.
Such reservations notwithstanding, Teller
is to be congratulated on choosing an interesting group, as is Alison Jacques
for showing it. I would have liked to
have seen more of Mapplethorpe’s corpus so finely printed, but am grateful
these have been made available. I’m
still agnostic on their lasting value, but you could never say Mapplethorpe was
a dull personality, nor, with the odd exception (the 1982 one of a television
is surprising in its banality), producing boring photographs.
