11/08/2024
"I want to see the devil in us all. That's my real turn on."
Robert Mapplethorpe
– November 4, 1946
In January 2016, MAPPLETHORPE: LOOK AT THE PICTURES, directed by World Of Wonder founders Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, was shown at the major film festivals and released on HBO. It's an intriguing, insightful work that shows us Mapplethorpe in the context of his life and artistic vision. He dared people to turn away from his explicit photographs and Bailey and Barbato's film does that too, forcing us to consider his most controversial pictures, proving that he still has the power to provoke, persuade and perturb.
Mapplethorpe's photographs range from graphic depictions of gay s*x to exquisite portraits of flowers; his work is all over the artistic map, magnificent, still frequently shocking, and ultimately very beautiful. Even his more extreme S/M photographs have a tenderness about them, and the seemingly harmless botanical photographs have an edginess that's difficult to dismiss. With a strict sense of formalism and composition and bringing a new iconography to queerness, it's not really surprising that Mapplethorpe provoked so much controversy in his era.
Mapplethorpe has now become the essential "Gay Photographer", even as his ho******ic pictures continue to be disturbing to many viewers. He made no concession to the closet. He brought a captivating and challenging version of his vision in his work.
Aside from being one of the planet's most influential photographers, Mapplethorpe, along with his lover, art collector and curator Sam Wagstaff, put together a world-class collection of photography. Mapplethorpe also collected furniture, fabric, and artifacts. He painted, made sculptures, and designed furniture. One of his own coffee tables was the centerpiece of Mapplethorpe's exquisitely decorated apartment in Downtown Manhattan.
In 1987, at the very apex of his career in 1987, he was diagnosed with HIV. Mapplethorpe became a symbol of bravery and defiance to the plague. He didn't hide his illness, which did a lot to help focus attention on HIV/AIDS when much of the world was ignoring this plague. Never shy of celebrity, as an art world icon infected with the virus he changed how the people looked at his photographs. His death in 1989, at just 42 years old, gave his short life a special symbolic significance.
Before he left this existence, Mapplethorpe established The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, providing funding and focus for medical research with an emphasis on HIV/AIDS, and also funds for the visual arts with an emphasis on photography.
Mapplethorpe's photographs are in the collections of the world's greatest museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim, The Getty, and The Pompidou Center in Paris.
I feel that Mapplethorpe needs to be noted in history as Mapplethorpe: The Artist, not just as "The Gay Photographer". He should be remembered in the tradition of the greats of Classical Art, and like all of the greatest artists, he can be both overrated and underrated.
The establishment art world's view of photography and how the U.S. government funds the arts changed completely because of his work. His pictures continue to be accused of being obscene. Mapplethorpe made art and p**n the same thing, and that's his greatest contribution to our culture. For me, his most erotic pieces are the photographs of the s*x organs of flowers. They are startling.
Considered too dirty for sensitive eyes just three decades ago, you can now Google "Mapplethorpe" and view any of the photographs that caused conservatives to lose their s**t back in the day. Right-wingers know nothing and care nothing about art, but they somehow need to tell us what's morally fit to see. They've successfully ended much of the public funding for the arts and now that they have power, they continue their outrage over the photographs by Mapplethorpe. The controversy seems a bit overblown for the 21st century. They need to spend time looking, really looking, at Mapplethorpe's work. He continues to be cutting edge, controversial, and a true original.
