©
Wendell Ricketts, 1995, 2008. All rights reserved.
First published in the Bay Area Reporter, July 20, 1995, pp. 29,
35.
MASTER OF THE ZEITGEIST
(Review of Patricia Morrisroe’s Mapplethorpe: A Biography)
In
the six years since photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s death at the age
of 42, two biographies have appeared. The number is perhaps small for an artist
whose work nearly single-handedly reignited censorship mania in America: His
exhibit, “The Perfect Moment,” opened at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in late 1988; six months later, Washington,
DC’s Corcoran Gallery abruptly canceled the same show and, a year after
that, “The Perfect Moment” prompted law-enforcement officials in
Cincinnati to prosecute the director of its Contemporary Arts Center for
obscenity. But the biographies themselves are profoundly revealing. What they
reveal, ironically, speaks more loudly of our revisionist and schizophrenic
times than it does of the books’ subject.
First out of the
gate was Jack Fritscher’s 1994 Mapplethorpe, Assault with a Deadly
Camera: A Pop Culture Memoir, An Outlaw Reminiscence, which the author
should be embarrassed to have written; and now comes Patricia Morrisroe’s
Mapplethorpe: A Biography, which the author should be embarrassed to
have us read. Not since Dotson Rader’s 1985 life of playwright Tennessee
Williams, Tennessee: Cry of the Heart, in fact, has a biographer made it
so clear that she found her subject pitiable.
And perhaps never
in American publishing have book reviewers and journalists made so obvious
their delight at being able to express disdain for the sex lives of gay men;
for photography as an art form; and for the celebrities, sycophants, and sugar
daddies who make up the beau monde and without whom both Vanity Fair and
the National Enquirer would have very little to write about. Judging
from the major considerations of Morrisroe’s book that have appeared
recently in the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and
the Wall Street Journal, among others—with titles like “The
Devil’s Disciple,” “Fallen Angel,” and “The Road
to Abnormal”—you’d think Morrisroe had written the ultimate
exposé of Art World Babylon. In fact, the accomplishments of Mapplethorpe: A
Biography are more modest—but the commentary on Morrisroe’s
book is as American as apple pie and as contemporary as welfare cuts.
So let’s
get right to the prurient details: Everything you’ve heard (or, possibly,
imagined) about Robert Mapplethorpe’s sex life is true. He was what would
probably be called today a “sex addict” and he engaged in sexual
practices designed to outrage as much as possible the voices of an uptight
Catholic upbringing that rang in his head. (An antique meaning of
“debauch,” significantly, is “to forsake allegiance.”).
With an
arrogance reminiscent of Caravaggio, who chose street urchins and pickpockets
as models for paintings meant to decorate the Vatican, Mapplethorpe transformed
his quondam tricks into photographic subjects before showing them out into the
cold light of a Chelsea morning. Later, portraits of men whom Mapplethorpe had
besmirched with his own shit would hang in the nation’s finest galleries
and museums.
Mapplethorpe’s
photographs of sadomasochist sex, moreover—including the infamous
“X,” “Y,” and “Z” portfolios—were not
the work of a photojournalist on some assignment in the sexual
“netherworld” (a word Morrisroe overtaxes). Rather, Mapplethorpe
was documenting his own sexual interests (fisting and hung black men, to name
only two). Whether he did so to be shocking or because he was courageous is
beside the point. Only those who believe that an artist’s work is mute
unless accompanied by a psychological profile would take interest in such a
debate.
But that is,
evidently, just what Patricia Morrisroe does believe—along with many of
those who have reviewed Robert Mapplethorpe’s life in the guise of
reviewing Morrisroe’s book. In fact, one of the most irritating aspects
of Mapplethorpe: A Biography is Morrisroe’s unstinting effort to
explain Mapplethorpe almost entirely in the context of his sexual psychology
and, in the process, to create intellectual distance between herself and her
subject.
Having
determined that Mapplethorpe was, so to speak, a sexual artist, Morrisroe
explores his childhood, adolescence, and adult life in a manner that is
frustratingly predetermined: If Mapplethorpe’s greatest accomplishment
was to become our most infamous pervert photographer, Morrisroe suggests that
nothing is so appropriate as the attempt to understand him as the accumulation
of sexually tinged childhood peccadilloes, a fascination with the Occult, and
an ineptitude at sports that identified him as a budding sissy. (We learn,
among other things, about the first time Mapplethorpe masturbated, a detail
whose inclusion is a kind of establishing shot for the book’s overarching
theme.)
When it comes to
Mapplethorpe’s adult gay life, Morrisroe proceeds like Margaret Mead on a
junket to the inscrutable tribe of the urban homosexual, supplementing her
innocent ignorance with quotations from experts. We hear from Brian Pronger on
gay masculinity, Vito Russo on media images of gays, Frank Rich on the
“homosexualization of America,” John Peterson on “black men
and their same-sex desires,” and Randy Shilts on the frequency of
gastroenteric disorders among gay men who engage in anal intercourse. Morrisroe
has certainly done her library work. Yet a nagging question remains: How is it
possible for one so natively unfamiliar with Mapplethorpe’s milieu to
determine that it shaped—not to say consumed—his life?
What is clear,
in fact, is that Morrisroe did not understand Mapplethorpe’s
times—neither the art that was being made in the period nor the lives of
many gay men in those years—and that she had little sympathy for either.
Mapplethorpe emerges as the anti-poster boy for the “fast-lane” New
York City gay life of the 1970s that we’ve all heard so much about, and
Morrisroe’s book invites the reader to judge some (or all) of Mapplethorpe’s
behavior as “excessive.” (So much so, in fact, that novelist
Michael Cunningham’s review, published in the June 1995 Elle, was
omitted from America Online’s electronic version of that
magazine—even writing about writing about Mapplethorpe is sometimes too
much.) There’s even a sense of relief—perhaps more in the comments
of reviewers than in the biography itself—that the outcome of
Mapplethorpe’s Faustian existence was an operatically appropriate end in
the form of his death from AIDS.
It may be true,
as Morrisroe and her informants point out over and over, that Mapplethorpe was
not a nice man, that he “used” people, that he was selfish and
manipulative, that he was fanatical about being in control, and that he was
obsessed with fame and adulation. That Mapplethorpe was racist, in
fact—to choose one hot-button issue—seems beyond dispute. But that
is hardly a shock given his lower-middle-class upbringing in a white American
suburb (Floral Park, Queens) in the 1950s and the attitudes of his family and
contemporaries. Discussion about whether Mapplethorpe’s work was racist,
meanwhile, has barely begun to take place. But that is not what occupies
Morrisroe.
Rather, she
explores the question of whether Mapplethorpe was sexually racist, if
such a thing exists. She makes much, for example, of Mapplethorpe’s
reported practice of calling black lovers “nigger” during sex. It
is, of course, absurd to argue that such behavior is irrelevant to
Mapplethorpe’s racial attitudes. At the same time, in the absence of a
consideration of sexuality that incorporates contexts most of us aren’t
prepared to discuss, neither is it possible to know exactly what to make of it.
Significantly, in the commentary Morrisroe provides, the response of the black
partner in these interchanges is never recorded.
Having dispensed
with Mapplethorpe’s private life, Morrisroe and her commentators go on to
indict Mapplethorpe’s artistic work out of both sides of their mouths: He
was a sellout for the fashion shoots and flower photos that paid him
extravagantly and he was an attention-seeking brat for the sex photos that
brought him notoriety. Nor does any reviewer miss an opportunity to voice at
least one of the trendy platitudes that now pass for criticism of
Mapplethorpe’s work: “He was really a minor artist, you know”
or “The SM photos aren’t his best work” or—even more
cynically—“He took advantage of having AIDS to make himself
famous.”
And yet there is
something suspicious in the posture of those who stand back now, daintily
holding perfumed hankies over their noses, to survey the wreckage of
Mapplethorpe’s tortured life. “How could such a monster have
existed?” they seem to ask. That question, at least, is answered by
Morrisroe.
No one, she
makes clear, ever gave Robert Mapplethorpe any reason to quit being such a jerk.
No one demanded that he treat others ethically. No one stopped inviting him to
parties. No one refused to work for him or to sleep with him (no matter what he
called them). No art dealer ever refrained from using Mapplethorpe’s
illness as an excuse to urge potential buyers to hurry up their purchases. None
of the current righteous handwringing about what a creep Robert Mapplethorpe
was, then, is sufficient to get his friends, colleagues, and business
associates off the hook: Mapplethorpe made buckets of money for them, took them
along to glittering little soirees populated by the truly fabulous, got them
laid, and invited them to weekends in the Hamptons. Because of that, they
allowed him to be what he was. And after he died, they lined up to say how insufferable
they had always found him to be.
That, one
supposes, is what comes of failing to outlive your enemies, but it is not the
customary fate of one who fails to outlive his friends. If Robert Mapplethorpe
was morally bankrupt, he thrived as an equal among peers. Until the biography
he deserves is finally written, that is the story that waits to be told.