Robert Mapplethorpe: A Season in Hell
Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1985 self-portrait with little devil’s horns is one of the most instantly recognisable self-portraits in modern photography. Short-haired and cherubically handsome, his face turns back to the camera, an inappropriately appealing daemon, complete with a ‘devil-be-damned’ look in his eye. It’s half full of wit, half haunted by an almost childlike vulnerability.
It’s one of three brilliant self-portraits here in this retrospective, A Season in Hell, which takes its title from Mapplethorpe’s photographs of 1986 which he produced for a new translation of Rimbaud’s poem. From 1980 is an image of the artist as a young man (he was 33), good-looking, punky in black leather and sulkily talented. This is hung opposite one of his last self-portraits from 1988. Only eight years separate the photographs but, suffering from Aids, Mapplethorpe looks decades older. The black leather and rockstar-poet persona are replaced by a silk dressing-gown and slippers, and a resigned and accusatory stare. Months later he was dead. It’s a picture full of pity, made all the more haunting here by being hung in a literal face-off, opposite the attitude-fuelled earlier work.
Another powerful image depicts human hands praying yet burning in flames. As an artist, as well as someone (in an era before HIV awareness) who paid the highest price for his freedom, the idea of having your fingers burnt is all too apt an emblem. Whereas Rimbaud’s ‘A Season in Hell’ marked a sea-change (the end of his relationship with Verlaine) and, so he resolved, the end of his relationship with excess, Mapplethorpe’s photographs famously celebrate extremes. Sex as a subject and Mapplethorpe’s interest in S+M inspired horror in the right in America and changed the whole nature of public funding for artists. Even as recently as 1998, a British university was almost charged with indecency for keeping one of his books. The show’s epigraph uses one of Rimbaud’s more cheerful, celebratory lines: ‘Heavenly voices, nations on the march! We are all slaves. But that’s no reason to curse life.’
In ‘A Season in Hell’ Rimbaud says farewell to the artist who would be god: ‘I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers...I! I called myself a magician, an angel, free from all moral constraint.’ It’s often forgotten that the appeal of newness was what most appealed to Mapplethorpe — sex was interesting as a subject, he maintained, in that it was ‘unmapped’ territory.
In a more homophobic decade, and as one of the first victims of Aids to speak out, Mapplethorpe came to curse the way those now notorious photographs defined him. At the end of his life he thought they had skewered people’s perceptions: ‘I thought people’s eyes would be opened, because I always showed them in conjunction with other pictures...My intent was to open people’s eyes, get them to realise anything can be acceptable. It’s not what it is, it’s the way it’s photographed. But it made people hate the flowers and hate the people in the pictures.’
The stated premise of the exhibition, however, is to highlight the ‘Catholic’ aspect of his work. As well as photographs that play with Christian motifs, there are never-before-seen collages done in his twenties with a whole apparatus of religious and private emblems. There’s a heart with hands ticking like a clock, Jesus, a lamb, and the three graces, who are added to his cast of ‘religious’ characters. The sacred aspect seems a little overstated but, as a show that resists the boxes (erotica, pornography, propaganda) into which his work is sometimes placed, it’s both compelling and, 20 years after his death, very much on the terms that he felt eluded him in his lifetime.
One of the most powerful images in the show is a sculpted mirror he made with chicken wire, which puts the viewer in a cage of his own making. We are our own perspective, Mapplethorpe maintained: ‘What separates the pictures that I take from the pictures somebody else takes is the personality of myself relating to the subject.’ Beyond the myth of Rimbaud and Mapplethorpe, the two beautiful doomed libertines, the unique perspective with which an artist looks on the world is perhaps where true communion lies.