Still not so old and not so jaded- no chortling from the back of the house- but where I find Jesse Helms’ tirade about the work of Robert Mapplethorpe an anachronism from the benighted days of the Moral Majority, Mapplethorpe’s work itself is as freshly, vivaciously intense now as it was- my goodness- 40 years ago. Astonishing, isn’t it?, how and what achieves canonical status, while its criticism becomes period buffoonery.
Initially, my enjoyment of the new documentary ‘Mapplethorpe: Just look at the pictures’ was as it served primarily a nostalgic walk down my own memory lane. Too many paid the price for the gay hedonism of the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, but no one who’s honest would say it wasn’t fun, and it was. Senator Helms castigation of Mapplethorpe’s work, with his ‘Just look at the pictures!’ on the floor of the US senate a ranting, prima facie indictment of the photographs beyond which, he reasonably assumed, no further discussion was necessary, indicates his place in a terrifyingly marginal world much more limited, ironically, in its outlook and experience than the one he sought to demonize.
The fact is, gay sex was then, in the early years of liberation, overwhelming celebratory, and I just don’t see any of the Mapplethorpe images, whether erotic or not, anything less than ecstatic. And if that ecstasy and celebration spilled over into what one might euphemistically term some of the byways of sexual expression why, after centuries of repression, would one expect anything else?
Keith and I had a vague connection with Mapplethorpe, and indeed yet maintain a friendship on social media with mutual acquaintance ‘That Boy’ Peter Berlin, himself interviewed for the documentary. Both though, were successful in their lifetimes as flagrant self promoters, but pulchritude wanes, and Peter has seen a revolution of the clock hands- as have I- a very many times. This sounds as though I am implying that Mapplethorpe’s images are, with his death in1989, trapped in time, representative only of the era in which they were taken, and, frankly, that’s not the case. Mapplethorpe wasn’t a tremendous photographic technician. Indeed, he required a substantial amount of assistance in the darkroom and processing to yield the types of images his best work represents. But with all that, he was a master at framing a picture and selecting subject matter, with his work, even his still lives, maintaining an energy that lifts the images out of any time. We know that, because we can still take Senator Helms’ cue- ‘Just look at the pictures!’ Old and jaded I may be- ‘may be’ I said- but looking at Mapplethorpe’s work yet remains a pure pleasure.
‘Mapplethorpe-“Just look at the pictures!”’ on HBO Documentaries
‘Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium’ at the Getty Center, through July 31, 2016