|
|
[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
|
|
|
||
|
||
|
Controversial classicist
Mary Abbe Remember Robert Mapplethorpe? For Americans of a certain age, the name conjures bullwhips and leather, celebrity glamor, phallic flowers, lawsuits, NEA controversies, AIDS, death at an early age. From the mid-1970s until 1989, when he died at 42, Mapplethorpe was the New York photographer whose elegant "uptown pictures" were hung in stylish homes and celebrated in magazines, while his taboo-violating "downtown pictures" were endlessly debated but rarely published -- and never seen in family newspapers. Now a show of about 40 Mapplethorpe classics, opening Friday at Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, offers an opportunity to assess his 15-year career. Housed in a neighborhood storefront, the exhibit includes sexually charged images but no S&M photos.
As gallery director Martin Weinstein put it, "We have figurative work, clothed and unclothed, still lifes, florals, entertainers ... so people can make their own judgements." Like Andy Warhol, whom he photographed and admired, Mapplethorpe made his life his art, photographing his friends, lovers and associates in the demimonde. He also did commissioned portraits including, in the Weinstein show, actress Isabella Rosellini, singer Patti Smith, musician David Byrne, dancers Bill T. Jones and Gregory Hines, painter Francesco Clemente and himself. Mapplethorpe often is associated erroneously with the avant-garde. In fact, his photos are thoroughly traditional in technique and aesthetic. He typically posed his subjects -- be they bodybuilders or slender orchids in elegant vases -- in front of seamless monochrome backgrounds that stripped them of context and lofted them into a mode of timeless classicism. Using the Hollywood lighting techniques of conventional portrait photographers, he played up symmetry, accentuated the velvety glow of flesh and fabric, and turned bones and muscle into two-dimensional sculpture. It was his deep-rooted classicism that was the key to defending Mapplethorpe's work against charges of pornography in a 1990 Cincinnati lawsuit in which a museum director was indicted for showing seven of the S&M images. Sidestepping the dicey content, art experts steadfastly touted the pictures' formal artistry, and the jury acquitted the director. Classical symmetry and silence are everywhere in the Weinstein show. Its images were chosen from the 2,484 that Mapplethorpe left in his estate. They include one orchid, a few still lifes and elegant fragments of bodies -- the navel of bodybuilder Lisa Lyon in a circle of light, the curved back of a favorite model, the head of lawyer Roy Cohn floating in blackness as if it were a death mask. Sexual undercurrents swirl through many of the photos, sometimes with unintentionally comic results. In an amusing 1976 exercise in soft-porn kitsch, the then-unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger strikes a campy, bodybuilder's pose beside a fey-elegant paisley curtain in the artist's shabby studio. In a later photo, similar draperies surround a statuette of a beautiful white youth gazing longingly at a big, black marble ball. Testosterone oozes even from a dramatically lit still life of grapes whose dusky globes dangle suggestively in low-angled, raking light. And then there's Lyon exquisitely pinching her nipples. The cool elegance of the portraits suggests why Mapplethorpe was among the most sought-after image-shapers of his generation. He was brilliant at eliciting riveting eye contact, catching a fawnlike glance by Rossellini and a glint of fear in the eyes of Smutty, a fetchingly tattooed punk rocker. And he used slow shutter speeds to capture the lithe, muscular grace of dancers Hines and Jones in motion. The most startling portrait is a 1979 image of a model known as Aira who resembles Mapplethorpe enough to be his alter ego in drag, recalling Marcel Duchamp's famous feminine self, Rrose Sélavy. A sexually ambiguous figure in furs and mannish jewelry, Aira already has the manic, frightened eyes that Mapplethorpe exhibits much later. Within a decade, he records himself wary and frightened, and then as a virtual ghost clutching a skull-headed cane. These are all handsome photos, but Mapplethorpe without controversy is flat champagne. I'm no fan of the nastiest of the controversial pictures, but they're what made Mapplethorpe noteworthy, as he well knew. In his prime, he once photographed himself with devil horns because he perfectly understood the world's fascination with risqué types and taboo behavior. Along with Bill Clinton's heterosexual escapades, Mapplethorpe's sado-masochistic and homoerotic antics exemplified the sexual license of their era. The legal imbroglios the two men inspired polarized the nation and became controversies of convenience for ambitious politicians, moralists and public scolds. Today, with war in Iraq, possible nukes in North Korea, genocide in Sudan and AIDS rampaging through Africa, both controversies appear in retrospect as strange, almost self-indulgent digressions in the nation's cultural history. Still, Mapplethorpe's claim to history's attention is not that he photographed lovely flowers or glamorized the culturati, but that he successfully mainstreamed pornography by wrapping it in neoclassical drag and selling it as high art. |
|
|
