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Momentum

Whether resting momentarily, sleeping during the evening hours, posing for a picture, reclining lazily, or standing perfectly still, we are always, without pause or recess, in motion. The heart pumps, blood circulates, breath is taken in and out, the sun moves almost imperceptibly across the sky, and every second that passes is one step further from birth, and one step closer to death. Yet even in demise, only the individual’s physical vessel ceases to move, its memory living on in various ways, and its soul ascending to another realm while other organisms around it begin the process of mourning, burial, and/or moving on. Like the technological medium of the Internet that this exhibition inhabits, made to function without beginning, end, or central command, every destination and apparent endpoint is just another entryway to another series of portals and passageways. It continues, ad infinitum. The act of photography has been said to interrupt this process, fashioning little ‘deaths’ by capturing and sequestering moments of life onto film, paper, glass plates and various other materials that may differ in format, but unite in the cessation of motion. However, is this ever completely true? Can the dynamism of life and nature be fully immobilized by the eye of the camera, and frozen into the perfect, autonomous moment? These are complex questions that cannot ever be entirely answered, but the photographic work of artist Robert Mapplethorpe provides an invaluable lens by which to continue the dialogue and peer deeper into its mystery.

Working with ever-greater refinement and precision to achieve immaculate compositional structure, Mapplethorpe self-professedly pursued “perfection” in his artwork.[1] From his earliest Polaroid’s and assemblages to his penultimate clicks of the shutter, he consistently strove to package provocative and often jarring subject matter into strict formal parameters, forging a spotless standard in the pristine prints that followed. Whether flowers set in a piercing light, nudes and portraits of sculptural sublimity, or sado-masochistic sex acts composed with drama and delicacy, the many subjects of Mapplethorpe passed through the idealistic filter of his vision, sublimated into an airless arena of aesthetic purity. In weaving this intricate fabric of lighting, balance, proportion, content, and emotional valence, he endowed his art-works with a seductive mix of unrest and serenity, and distinguished a style all his own in the process. [2] Within this signature approach he evoked the ideals of Antiquity, and revealed his ancient inspirations with the comment, “If I had been born 100 or 200 years ago, I might have been a sculptor.” [3] He quickly amended these words with the qualifying statement, “but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture”. Between substitution and amalgamation, Mapplethorpe’s work teetered on the brink of two very different disciplines. Some of his earliest works were indeed quite sculptural, and even as he maneuvered his way through assemblages and collage into a more conventional photo-centric practice, Mapplethorpe’s sculptural proclivities lingered, and he explained much of his work in plastic terms. [4]

In this he was not alone, as numerous critics, writers and theoreticians came to entrench this interpretation of his work – in an often, resolute manner – into the body of literature that grew around his practice. A brief, but emblematic cross-section of this contingent begins with author and art historian Charles A. Riley II, who argued, “Mapplethorpe’s idiom is one of unadulterated classicism,” and enthusiastically acclaimed him “a priest of the Classical ideals of balance and serenity.” [5] Curator Janet Kardon echoed these sentiments and carefully detailed the sculptural dimensions of the artist’s neoclassical enterprise, observing a serene “stillness” which surrounded images that, to her, “appear as if they might have been chiseled.” [6] In 1985, author and well-known photography scholar Susan Sontag went as far as to eliminate the accidental and/or spontaneous from Mapplethorpe’s purview altogether, arguing that his camera could capture only what could be posed and made perfect. [7] Yet through it all, through these and similar arguments from the artist and his onlookers alike, from virtually the beginning of his career to its very last throes, a converse current sporadically bubbled to the surface of his photographs. Recognition of this current (to be elaborated below) is not meant to disavow a classical reading of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre as incorrect or even misleading, but rather to contest its totalizing implications with a group of photos that complicate previous assumptions and enrich a body of work with that body’s seeming antithesis.

The works in this exhibition, although short in number compared to the multitude of examples that articulate the aforementioned aspects of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, are arguably the most representative of the turmoil that simmered throughout the artist’s life and work. Against the stasis inherent in the photographic frame, and his highly articulated aesthetic methodology, this collection of photographs, each, in its own way, marks a passage of time. This passage tempers classical tenets with unexpected contingency and blurs Mapplethorpe’s famed aesthetic pinnacle of “the perfect moment” into momentum. [8] For in every case the immobilizing gaze of the artist runs headlong into elements of chance and unpredictability, creating images that slide in artificial suspension – their dynamic potential momentarily paused, but never precluded from changing in the next instant.

For example, while Mapplethorpe pictured many of his human subjects in the same stone-bound eternity of the ancient marble sculptures he also photographed, it is a modern-day version of contrapposto that animates the playful prance of Melia Marden (Fig.1) and the penetrating forward step of Raymond (Fig.2) as he ruptures his compositional frame. The artist spoke passionately about comparing the look of his nudes to bronze or marble, and created a pantheon of immortals using an array of classical formulae, but it is the nascent movement in these two images that presses against previous parameters and suggests action that does not terminate in the instant. In two much earlier works, the mischievous actions of the artist as he intrudes into the frame with outstretched arm (Fig.3) and then exits it on outstretched toe (Fig.4) “move” in a parallel manner, using cropping and framing techniques to create a sense of spontaneous action that supplants the timelessness of formal posture and emphasizes the subject’s straining muscles and tree-like veins.

Moving from these pictorial devices that suggest movement, to the direct pursuit of moving elements, compositional stillness evaporates further in the smoky, swirling exhalation of Jack Walls (Fig.5) and the deep inhalation of a figure escaping (or perhaps entering) the binds of mummifying white gauze (Fig.6). For with each, Mapplethorpe’s photography of visible breathing invokes air currents into otherwise airless arenas, poetically representing life inside the subject, and outside the moment. In other works picturing Gregory Hines (Fig.7), Molissa Fenley (Fig.8), Puerto Rican children (Fig.9) and even himself (Fig.10), this dynamic combination of motion and life appears as blurring. And while each ghostly blur – inscribing physical shifts that took place as Mapplethorpe clicked the shutter – is admittedly frozen in frame, they nevertheless dissipate linear contours of shape and form as Mapplethorpe’s impeccable focal sharpness succumbs to the messy dynamism of movement. Like the stabbing knife thrust of Raymond (Fig.11), seen in profile as his hand, wrist and forearm merge into a single slurry of light, these photos cut into the stony anatomy of the artist’s classicism and bleed echoes of movement past, present and future.

The element of light continues to play an integral role in many of the works making up momentum, extending the ramifications raised by “blurring” into several other dimensions of Mapplethorpe’s compositional structure. In this section of works, the careful studio lighting that Mapplethorpe arranged to articulate the physical idealism of sculptural form, is adjusted and displaced along with the figures it consequently affects. As a case in point, the chiseled musculature of Lisa Lyon (which reminded Mapplethorpe of Michelangelo’s stolid female forms) is softly melted by adjacent torchlight (Fig.12), casting her body in a grainy, shadowed haze as both she and the surrounding torches dance and blur. In a related manner, rigid geometric form is bent by the play of light in both Television (Fig.13) and the crouch of Dennis Speight (Fig.14). In the former, the heavy, boxed frame of a television that is bolted to the wall and chained to its podium (by padlock), is almost alchemically lightened by the face of an anonymous actress whose ephemeral flicker across the screen challenges all the weight around her. In the latter, Speight’s initially compact, frozen crouch is made dynamic by shadows that extend out from all sides, creating a sense of imminent (or just completed) motion as a shadowy head and torso rise above him, and flanking, Futurismo-like lines simultaneously push his body back and propel it forward.

In other works of this vein, studio and/or artificial lighting is replaced altogether by sunlight that Mapplethorpe allowed to penetrate his aesthetic parameters, traipsing its way in and out of his controlling gaze. The result is a series of images where the temporal intertwines with the stationary, fusing them in matrices that simultaneously evoke elegant compositional skills and the energy of unpredictability. In one instance, the fate of Medusa’s stare (that so often befalls the subjects of Mapplethorpe) is eased, if not erased, by daubs and dashes of sunlight that frolic across a man’s bare chest (Fig.15). In other related photos, as the sun backlights a ragged, timeworn American flag (Fig.16), illuminates a passage through an ancient Venetian tunnel (Fig.17), and cuts into the timeless realm of a modernist gallery space with an ad hoc sundial cast gently upon the floor (Fig.18), the artist subtly transforms socio-cultural symbols of longevity and presence into fragile, shifting sites of transition.

A similar transformation would also touch organic forms in the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, creating stirring, and sometimes tragic tableaux where the inevitable, and ultimately inescapable effects of nature take their fated course. In some of these photographs, the power and beauty of elemental forces are allowed to flash before our eyes with a minimum of mediation, fighting against the domineering gaze of the camera’s eye. The lines between vitality and violence subsequently blur as the crashing waves of the sea explode into electric light-bursts under a low horizon (Fig.19), and a forceful surge of tropical wind sweeps through the fronds of a palm tree, turning its foliate crown into a vibrant web of slashes, lines, and smears (Fig.20).

Yet from the perspective of Mapplethorpe, attuned as he was to the temporality of existence after being afflicted with AIDS, it was arguably the unstoppable passageway from life to death where nature became most powerfully manifest. In this respect, as in the oeuvre of this artist, flowers are afforded a special status by their ability to simultaneously convey expressive content and elegant formal beauty. Long considered a preeminent “still life” subject, made eternally vital and vivid by artists of all eras in all disciplines, they are here made icons of a provisional existence. [9] This is not to say that Mapplethorpe was not a major contributor to the aforementioned still life tradition of flowers, but rather to highlight a body of his works where lilies (Fig.21) and tulips (Fig.22) wilt under the weight of time, feeling the severance from an earth their once vibrant blossoms now fall to in withering death. In both these photographs, dying and still-turgid flowers are juxtaposed in vases, but the implied passage from one state to the other is perhaps most poignantly communicated in another pair of tulips photographed by Mapplethorpe in 1984. In this work (Fig.23), the tulips take on a compelling anthropomorphic quality, poised on the verge of an intergenerational embrace as one blossom ascends in new life, and the other droops with a life nearing its end. In this momentary pause, the otherwise vacant space between the pair of tulips becomes a charged intersection of imminent, but enigmatic intensity.

From anthropomorphism to the actual article, momentum rounds the loop of the infinity sign and returns to its origin as the human body descends from its artificially suspended pedestal of classical stasis, and becomes an icon of duration, life and change. The dramatic pose of Thomas (Fig.24) offers a transitional case, where his otherwise powerful, muscular body is turned into a tense, clock-like component as his hands and arms literally hold back the relentless crush of a circular frame reminiscent of the clocks that devour our time on a daily basis. Moving away from the classical body but retaining his focus on time, Mapplethorpe delivers a more subtle, but perhaps more accurate emblem of movement through life with the cigarette ashes that teeter precariously over the grasping fingers of Iggy Pop (Fig.25). In this 1981 photograph, a fragile tower of smoldering ash consumes the attention of this vivacious musician, making his eyes grow wide with apparent trepidation as previously fiery matter prepares to crumble and inflict its painful, searing aftermath. Yet fear did not completely fill Mapplethorpe’s eyes as he felt the cold grip of AIDS breaking down his immune system and pushing him towards death. Like the previously described pair of tulips, this exhibition articulates the energy he found in passage rather than endpoint. This is evident throughout the collection of photographs gathered here, but especially so in a final case that pairs a portrait of Mary Beth Hurt with her baby along with Mapplethorpe’s last self-portrait, in which he hauntingly clutches a death’s head cane (Fig. 26). For while both are iconic representations of shifting life stages in their own right, one symbolizing the joy of regeneration among a mother and daughter clad in white, and the other of looming mortality where the artist’s body disappears into the blackness of the background, together they are something infinitely more – something seen only across time, in motion.[10]

He communicated serenity, control and stillness in his artwork, but struggle and tension ultimately shaped the life and practice of Robert Mapplethorpe. Momentum brings together a collection of images that explore this reality, presenting photographs where the subject matter pushes back against the artist’s immobilizing gaze and classicist values. In each tenuously suspended instant, and even more so in combination among one another, the emphasis shifts to passage, transition, and that which escapes the perfect moment. The profound dynamism that results is as much an emblem of the uncontrollability of life, as it is of Mapplethorpe’s courage to venture into unfamiliar territory and confront his own methods.

SM 2003