Undiscovered Body Zones
Drastic,
godlike, sublime: the exhibition “Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical
Tradition” at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin is currently showing the
nudes, portraits, and still lifes of the New York artist († 1989),
highlighting existing parallels to Mannerist notions of beauty and
portrayals of the gods.
Robert Mapplethorpe: Derrick Cross, 1983,
©Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
For New
York’s
Guggenheim Museum,
Robert Mapplethorpe’s work proved to be a very special gift. The
year after his premature death at 42 of aids-related illness, the
Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation donated a large part of the photographer’s
estate to the renowned institution – thus laying the foundation for the
museum’s
photographic collection, which has continued to grow throughout the past
14 years. In this sense, the comprehensive thematic exhibition
Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist
Prints currently on show at the
Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, which features over 120 works, also pays
respect to an artist who didn’t merely change the way we look at the male
body, but who brought pornography and homosexuality into the museum in the
first place.
Ever since, the discussion surrounding gender and
sexual emancipation has spread far beyond academic and artists’ circles to
the afternoon TV talkshows. Inversely, Robert Mapplethorpe is by far no
longer the scandalous icon of the hedonist 70s and 80s, but is considered
to be a classic of nude and portrait photography together with
Man Ray,
Edward Weston, or
Robert Frank. The exhibition, initiated by New York’s Guggenheim Museum in
cooperation with the
Hermitage in St. Petersburg, goes somewhat further. In juxtaposing his
photographs with 16th-century sculptures, etchings, and prints, it seeks
to demonstrate the influence
Mannerism had on Robert Mapplethorpe’s art. The numerous pictures of Dutch
mannerists were lent by Moscow for comparison, while the
Sculpture Collection of Berlin’s State Museum provided bronze
figures such as
Barthélémy Prieur’s Young Woman Cutting Her Toenails
from 1565. Thus, Mapplethorpe’s work is inscribed into a tradition that
turns out to be an original source of visual culture: the human image that
is glorified in its immediate corporeality, regardless of the ideal of
beauty prevailing in a given epoch.
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Barthelemy Prieur: Young Girl cutting
her Nails, ca. 1565, © 2004 State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
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Robert Mapplethorpe: Patti Smith,
1976, © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
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“Order is a very important factor in my work. I’m a
perfectionist. Nothing is allowed to be unclear. If I work on a head, it
has to be in the right position, where the nose touches the cheek.” This
quote of Robert Mapplethorpe’s, taken from the July 25th 1988 issue of the
magazine Newsweek,
reflects more than just the photographer’s fastidious working process. For
Mapplethorpe, photography was the art of visualizing a desire that removes
itself from the object in the act of viewing and becomes more or less
entirely absorbed by the viewer’s imagination. Mapplethorpe, however,
sought this type of transcendence with erotically charged, at times
obscene portrayals – whether partially erect male sexual organs or
sado-masochistic sexual practices, everything became working material in
his search for perfect form.
But does this obsession in the
struggle for perfection actually link Mapplethorpe’s drastic body
scenarios to the mythical motifs of the late Renaissance? Germano Celant,
the curator of the Guggenheim Museum who organized the exhibition together
with his New York colleague Jennifer Blessing and Arkady Ippolitov from
the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, indeed sees the unabashed nakedness as a
century-old artistic strategy that has lost nothing of its fascination
over time. This is why he hung all the works available to him in mixed
groups of portraits, nude photographs, still lifes, and vanitas images
that carry through the exhibition space like a frieze. Mapplethorpe’s
group nude photo Ken, Lydia and Tyler from the year 1985 is
complemented by
Jacob Mathams’ interpretation of Hendrick Goltzius’ The
Graces from the 16th century, while the pendant to Mapplethorpe’s
dancing couple Thomas and Dovanna (1986) is
Jan Harmensz Muller’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, also from
the 16th century.
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