Follow Robert Mapplethorpe and ignite a light in the darkness
Original article
BY YUAN JING
"I think it's time we got to know each other. What's your name?"
"My name is Bob."
"No, you look like your name should be Robert."
This was the third time Patti Smith and this shepherd-like boy met in New York - at that time, one of them had just arrived in New York from New Jersey, and the other was still worrying about his future artistic path at Pratt Art Institute. No one expected that the name "Robert Mapplethorpe" would leave a strong and controversial page in the history of photography and contemporary art. At that time, like most of the fringe artists and poets struggling in New York, they lived a bohemian life and persisted in their creations. However, they have each other as mirror-like companions, partners, and even family members, which allows them to constantly add courage and confidence to each other.
“To understand my work, you must first understand the American culture of that era ,” Robert Mapplethorpe once said. Indeed, although he received a professional education in art from an excellent art college, what really gave him a strong impact and stimulation was precisely the Chelsea Hotel and Max's Kansas City Nightclub, social "art schools" filled with artists, musicians, poets, and writers."In the New York art world in the 1970s, artistic creation showed full possibilities and various contradictory tensions, elegance/vulgarity, orderliness/chaos, charm and rampage, everything was so fast and full of temptation. Mapplethorpe, who was there, borrowed a Polaroid camera from a friend by chance. It was like opening his own treasure box. In his opinion, "The photos taken by the Polaroid camera are in line with the fast pace of New York," and a certain sense of incredible intimacy." As a result, these "accurate raw materials that truly belong to him" became the basis for his subsequent creations.
In fact, there was no lack of participation in pictures when he was growing up. As a photography enthusiast, his father even had his own darkroom at home, and most of his early works were based on journals, books and other sources. The photos were appropriated and modified. However, what really made him realize photography itself, in addition to the rapid imaging of Polaroid, was also the meeting of John McKendry, the distinguished person he met in 1971, who was the curator of the Department of Prints and Photography at the Metropolitan Museum - he was attracted by Mapplethorpe's works. , so he gave him a Polaroid camera and took him to visit the museum’s photography collection. This visit made Mapplethorpe start to think seriously: "Photography could become art. I had never thought about this issue, and now the possibility makes me excited." As a result, photography became "the perfect medium" for him; After he met his most important partner in life, Sam Wagstaff, in 1972, he had his own studio. He completed a large number of creations in just one year, and in 1973, he opened his own studio at the Light Gallery in New York, had his first solo exhibition.
And exactly fifty years after his first solo exhibition, we have an opportunity to view his works relatively completely in China. The Aranya Land Art Festival, which opened in Jinshanling, Aranya, with the support of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, exhibited the artist's works from the mid-1970s to the end of his life for the first time in mainland China, covering his iconic image creation in three fields: portrait, still life, and human body.
Looking at Mapplethorpe's works is like looking at his short life - because the lens points to himself, the life surrounding him, and what he really felt about the people, objects, and things in New York, just like The artist said, "What I want to convey to people is viewing, a viewing that only belongs to me." What is hidden in it is his confusion, struggle, cowardice, as well as bravery, frankness, and passion. Michael Ward Stout, chairman of the foundation, said in an interview: "Mapplethorpe's works are timeless and classic. He affects people's viewing and the creation of living contemporary artists. If it were not for Mapplethorpe's portrait photos, we would not be able to imagine Louise Bourgeois , Andy Warhol, Lisa Lyon, many of his subjects never even had their portraits taken again.”
When Patti Smith met Mapplethorpe for the first time, he was a quietly sleeping shepherd boy with curly hair. Facing Patti Smith, who was still a stranger, he showed a frank smile. This may be some kind of constraint from growing up in a Catholic family that made him accustomed to it. Yu appears with an "angelic" face, but Patti Smith, who lives with him in New York, will inevitably face his "dark" side.
In the summer of 1968, Mapplethorpe began his sexual awakening. Patti Smith once wrote in the book: "Our needs are different. I need to explore beyond myself. He needs to explore himself and his creative language. His creations began to change, and various signs indicated that he was suppressed. gender characteristics. He never revealed to me his uncertainty about his sexual orientation. Later I understood that at that time he was struggling painfully with his own desires and trying to liberate his nature."
The result of this struggle is shown in Mapplethorpe's collection of works "X". Those erotic scenes are in his pursuit of perfect composition, lighting and chiaroscuro, and the discomfort that mild sadomasochism itself may bring to people. The subtle balance between them just shows his firm exploration of Catholic themes: debasement and transcendence of the body; punishment and penance, pain and ecstasy. As Italian curator and art historian Germano Celant observed,The beauty, balance and stillness in the work come from his almost harsh, formalistic perfection. Pursue."Mapplethorpe was deeply spiritual, but he plunged headlong into the dark side of religion, pursuing a 'Catholic inversion' characterized by a focus on demons, The attraction to violence and abjection, while striving towards a vision of redemption that transforms pain into grace through beauty, balance and stillness.”
One of his subjects, Lydia Cheng, once recalled an attempt during a shoot - "Robert had a makeup artist during the shoot, and he used different brushes to apply the shiny eye makeup to the body. Every time we tried None of the colors seemed to accentuate my body properly when I was shooting. Finally, Robert came over and started blending the colors on my skin to see what would happen. All of a sudden, this amazing bronzer appeared. It made me The body looks like a bronze statue, which is what Robert really wanted." In this way, Mapplethorpe shows the beauty of the human body with praise, and at the same time, without any profanity, takes photos that are considered "pornographic". The horrifying photos even triggered one of the most intense battles between pornography and art in the history of American culture.
However, Georges Bataille mentioned in "Pornography" when discussing the fears faced by human beings, "I think that man does not have many opportunities to expose the things that scare him before he can master them. This is not to say that he One should hope to be in a world where there is no reason to fear, a fear that is equally controlled by lust and death. But man can overcome the things that scare him and face them." Perhaps what Mapplethorpe has done is through his works, which will be remembered the "worst" things in a repressive, intolerant culture are revealed, leading us to confront those things that scare us, including pornography and death.
The flowers in the "Y" series are classic themes throughout the ages. However, in Mapplethorpe's naming of New York flowers and his meticulous composition that pursues symmetry and center points, these flowers take on Mapplethorpe's artistic expression attributes, and Deeply associated with the "X" series of photographs featuring sexual acts. Through the commonality of aesthetic forms, he reminds us to regard flowers, human bodies, and sex as equal objects. They are like actors in the drama of life, performing typical themes such as desire, love, and life and death. These flowers on a clean and bright background, with curves outlined by light and dark, seem to have lost their original nature and been imprisoned in this space. However, the organs hidden under the surface burst out with original energy. Wild, isn’t this a reflection of the photographer’s own inner self?
Curator Janet Kardon once commented on Mapplethorpe's work: "He can always capture the perfect moment of his subjects." The exhibition "Perfect Moments" she curated was launched in the last years of Mapplethorpe's life, when he died of HIV infection. Even though his health was deteriorating, Mapplethorpe still continued to create. Images taken during this period even more allow us to see death in his eyes.
In the 1988 "Selfie", the artist's face is blurred in the back, as if in some kind of disappearing process, while the skull cane in his hand in the front clearly and eye-catchingly points to death. A moment of intertwined life and death is frozen in the picture, and the flowers taken later, such as "Calla Lily" (1987) and "Leaf" (1987) , deal with the contrast between light and dark in the flowers and The main part of the leaf forms a perfect balance with its soft and hard texture. Growth and withering appear simultaneously in the same life form. What cannot be ignored is the light beam that forms the boundary, which seems to represent some kind of Power speaks of life and death.
This is also reminiscent of what Patti Smith wrote on the fifth anniversary of his death: "He is a devil, but not evil. At most, he is like a small god, naughty but compassionate. He is a ray of light in the darkness.”
In 1989, the exhibition "The Perfect Moment" scheduled for the Corcoran Museum of Art had to be canceled three months after Mapplethorpe's death amid a series of conservative protests. As a result, this also triggered the American culture war in the early 1990s, and one of the legacies of Mapplethorpe's creation may be the various thoughts and innovations triggered by these controversies: they involve religion, cultural systems, minority groups , art funding system, censorship and other profound social issues, and until now, people are still happy to explore the contemporary significance of these works - just like the 2019 exhibition "Hidden Tensions: Plum Blossoms" held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now, etc.
The artist himself also founded the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation during his lifetime. The chairman of the foundation, Michael Ward Stout, explained the purpose and vision of the foundation in this way: "The foundation assisted the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in launching photography projects, and has provided substantial funding to the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute, and the Los Angeles County Museum as well as to Mapplethorpe's major art collection. Other missions of the foundation include supporting organizations related to AIDS and AIDS Medical research, care, prevention, and education related to viral infections. Over the past few years, it established an inpatient treatment center at Harvard University, St. Vincent Medical Center in New York (now defunct), and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York."
At the same time, the foundation has also assisted various institutions to organize relevant exhibitions - "In addition to Europe and the United States, it has also held exhibitions of works in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, which has triggered rich discussions and has been quite successful." And this time Aranya The Land Art Festival chose the Upper Court as its exhibition space, drawing inspiration from Foguang Temple and boldly using contemporary building materials such as fair-faced concrete and metal on the basis of traditional paradigms. This architectural space will surely be in harmony with this "most unconventional" artist of the 20th century. One forms a dialogue of some kind of collision and fusion.
