I Want the Angel
the early life and art career of Robert Mapplethorpe
“They are not fun flowers.” Robert Mapplethorpe
“Roger didn’t even turn his head to us as he spoke, informing us in a tone which neither of us had ever heard him employ before that he was staying, that he found it fascinating, that we should leave straight off if we ‘couldn’t find any value in it.’
“Jenny was upset. She tried imploring him with a whimpering sound that was a language Roger alone understood. . .Roger acknowledged the sound with a look of hostility, that sinister quality in his eyes breaking out to the forefront from its usual recesses. Jenny grabbed my arm in half-anger, half-panic, squeezing her long, thin fingers with a power she had never before revealed, even in orgasm. It was terror.”
This short scene was reproduced in Jim Carroll’s diary from 1971, showing an outing through Times Square with his two closest friends at the time, his girl friend, Patty Smith, and her former boyfriend and still a roommate, Robert Mapplethorpe. Carroll was the youngest of the three, but seem to provide the cohesion to Patty and Robert’s on going relationship that the two lacked without him. It was a summer night, during dusk, and the three of them took a walk through Times Square, where they were led to an “exhibition” in an upstairs gallery of dummies, half manikin like models that showed in graphic plastic representations, cancerous tumors in various stages of growth.
The two poets became wary and sick almost immediately, but the future arts photographer, Robert (Roger) wanted to stay and find out more. In fact, the diary entry begins when Patty (Jenny) is complaining to her diarist boyfriend Jim, that “he was at that place again,” making it something like 5 nights in a row he went to visit the “Cancer Hall of Fame”, as it was dubbed by the two poets.
When Robert and Jim met again, Jim presented him with a short couplet:
“There is a rumor that this boy loves tumors
Enough to treat his friends with such bad humor
“He even tossed it on the floor . . . an original manuscript . . . in my own hand, no less. ‘Well, the meter is flawed,’ I teased, ‘but, it does scan.’ He bugged out the door, slamming it, leaving a bunch of his reptilian necklaces bouncing nervously on a rack. I was sick of the whole situation, and told Jenny so. I mean, Roger is as susceptible and entitled to ‘the strange’ as she or I. It’s simply a matter of taste. The fact that his taste overlaps the truly tragic bizarro is really none of our concern.”
Eighteen years later, shortly after the artist died from AIDS, in 1989, a curator with the Washington Corcoran Gallery of Art would make the artist’s bizarro taste the concern of the museum going public. Christina Orr-Cahall canceled The Perfect Moment exhibit because of its possible interference with National Endowment for the Arts appropriations in Congress. Two weeks later, a crowd of seven hundred people gathered in protest outside the Corcoran and projected photographs from the Perfect Moment on the building’s façade, and shouted, “Shame, shame, shame” at the Corcoran.
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