Robert Mapplethorpe: The Man Still In Everyone’s Mouth

July 22, 2008
STURTLE

It probably won't come as too much of a surprise to learn that we here at Fleshbot are huge fans of Robert Mapplethorpe--as if a bunch of ~~oversexed spunk monkeys~~ erotic connoisseurs like ourselves wouldn't love a badass, taboo-wrecking photographer who's currently the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum. But of course the artist wasn't without his detractors, some of whom continue to dog him nearly two decades after his death. This week, Nick Haramis at BlackBook attempts to round out our appreciation of Mapplethorpe with a brief article and a series of interviews with those who knew him.

While Haramis' quick-sketch biography is pretty engaging, the interviews tend to reveal far more about the speakers than they do about their subject. For example, painter and photographer George Dureau says:

There were so many of my things that Robert would copy. We didn't become enemies, exactly, but we became distant. His brain would see something in my drawings, paintings and photographs, and he'd carry it back to New York because he didn't know how to draw himself. His artwork was not very good.

Which might be accurate, but it still says a lot more about Dureau's ego than about Mapplethorpe's creative process. And then we have this gem from editor and author Bob Colacello:

Robert took a photo of this fat man on his knees having his genitals tortured by two guys in leather hoods. People hate the KKK and the Nazis, but then it's okay if liberals are doing the same thing in the West Village? I don't get it.

Which is exactly the sort of thing someone who doesn't understand the dynamics and theatrics of a certain kind of consensual, gay, BDSM-flavored sex would say--and again, doesn't especially illuminate anything new about Mapplethorpe's work. In the final analysis, we'd rather just look at the pictures themselves: in Mapplethorpe's case, it's better to get our thousand words directly from them.

· "Because the Night: Robert Mapplethorpe Remembered" (blackbookmag.com)
· Polaroids: Mapplethorpe (on view through September 7, 2008 @ the Whitney Museum, NYC)