TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/88/88capenv.7

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 6.0 KB | 116 lines

                ├UÖ                                                          August 22, 1988

ART

Leatherboy and Angel in One


Robert Mapplethorpe's show blends the serene with the unsettling


The volume of his photographs that Robert Mapplethorpe
published three years ago carried self-portraits on both front
and back. There he was on one cover in a black leather jacket,
sporting an updated biker haircut, with a cigarette dangling
from his lips. It was the Mapplethorpe of whips and sexual
appliances, the one who had careered into the art world in the
late 1970s with images of homosexual sadomasochism. But on the
back cover he offered a different version of himself, bare
chested and slender, in pale makeup:  the artist as breakable
cherub, with a whiff of androgyny and maybe a hint of Pierrot,
the pantomime clown. Perhaps it was this Mapplethorpe who made
his other pictures, the voluptuous orchids, the portrait faces
glowing like bulbs in the dark, the riveting nudes.

Of those two self-portraits, only the second is in the
retrospective of Mapplethorpe's work currently on view at
Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art. But both spirits,
the dark leatherboy and the angel f light, preside jointly in
most of the 111 works on display. The obsessions with sex and
death that are palpable in his scenes of heavy leather are still
visible in the phallic tumescence and mortal shadows of Calla
Lily, 1984. The straightforward but unreal quality of the S-M
images is there again in his portrait of Ken Moody and Robert
Sherman, 1984--two hairless heads, one black, one white, an
uncanny feeling built from blunt facts. After a while, even the
taunt compositions of Mapplethorpe's portraits start to look
like another form of bondage.

At 41, Mapplethorpe has been one of the most visible
photographers of his generation for a decade, but this year is
a high-water mark in his career. The Whitney retrospective,
which runs through Oct. 23, is his first one-man show at a major
American museum in years. And in December, the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Philadelphia will open a somewhat larger
Mapplethorpe exhibition that will travel to Chicago, Boston and
Washington. With the era of sexual extremity now closed, some
of Mapplethorpe's pictures look even more loaded and unnerving
than they once did. But the durable qualities of his work are
also appearing in clearer relief.

For Mapplethorpe, the camera is mostly just a device for
distilling images that correspond to his obsessions. Some of
the earliest pictures in the show, made soon after he finished
studying art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1970, are images
simply torn from magazines and reworked. Others are Polaroids
of himself or Rock Singer Patti Smith, for years his muse,
companion and fellow traveler through the New York City
avant-garde.

That early work is interesting but tentative. The real
Mapplethorpe is the one who arrived on the scene suddenly in
1977 with three Manhattan gallery shows. One was devoted solely
to his S-M imagery, pictures that brought him quick notoriety.
They were affronting but memorable, and hard to pigeonhole.
At first glance they were in the venerable photographic
tradition of scenes brought back from exotic territory, like
19th century portraits of Indians in full headdress. But the
people in them were not foreign to Mapplethorpe. They were his
friends and sexual playmates. If this was documentary, it was
from the inside looking out.

Those pictures also brought to Mapplethorpe's basically
conservative style the electrical charge of the forbidden. Take
that away, and it becomes easier to see that he has a
classicist's taste for the symmetrical, the serene, the
perfected, the imperishable. But against it he plays a
romantic's fascination with forceful material that classical
form cannot digest. In his male nudes, mostly of black men, the
genitals present themselves with a frankness that explodes the
composition. In his pictures of female Body Builder Lisa Lyon,
the photographic conventions that ordinarily apply to the male
anatomy--flexed muscles, sculptural lighting--are used to
confound every expectation of female form. A picture like
Thomas, 1986,  variation on Leonardo's image of a man inscribed
within a circle, could be an emblem of Mapplethorpe's work:
vital force straining against formal bounds.

Mapplethorpe's imagery comes trailing a long pedigree, from the
Yellow Book decadence of Aubrey Beardsley to Edward Weston's
peppers, from Cocteau's classical echoes and erotomania to the
chiseled male nudes shot by George Platt Lynes in the '30s and
'40s. It also indulges a fascination with style and surface
that is very much of the present. Mapplethorpe trafficked
expertly in the prevailing moods of the '70s and early '80s, the
appetite for both glamour and decadence, high fashion and
subterranean sex. That has caused him to be dismissed at times
as a vendor of deluxe fantasy. But if his work has sometimes
been complicit with the indulgences of the day, it was never
fully in service to them. He never aimed for the lugubrious
swank of Helmut Newton, whose corseted women can look like sale
goods in a fancy furniture store. he never settled for the
sexual salesmanship of Bruce Weber, whose boys live in a world
made of equal parts Ralph Lauren and Leni Riefenstahl.

The Whitney show takes on a special poignance from the fact
that Mapplethorpe is now in the midst of a debilitating struggle
with AIDS; that the show contains so much work produced in the
past year is a tribute to his powers. But boundless drive has
always been at the root of his work. His imagery bears the
stamp of passion, an aesthete's passion, even in a century in
which beauty has an uncertain status as a basis for art.
Mapplethorpe does not care; he is a true believer. The poet
Czeslaw Milosz, musing on the visible world, once wrote, "Out
of reluctant matter/What can be gathered? Nothing, beauty at
best."  Mapplethorpe might agree, but he would add that beauty
seems like magnificent compensation.

--By Richard Lacayo