The Bad Art Cafe

Horses, Patti Smith, c. 1975 - photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe

Black & white, unglamorous, a new rock star woman poses in static form for her friend, her closest friend in the world, Robet Mapplethorpe.  They were sitting in a coffee shop - the lady rock star is Patti Smith, who would soon be famous for this photograph and her band - and Robert dragged her away from the table to Sam's apartment.  why?  because in the afternoon there was a natural shadow of light that created a triangle of light.  he posed Patti in front of it.  she's wearing a kind a unsexual garb, white ripped armed shirt, suspenders, tight black jeans on her skinny figure.  her hair is bushy. there are circle under her eyes, but that dead eye of Robert's framed everything in negative space, perfect lighting, and Patti, his best friend. in solid surroundings.  never before had the record producers seen such an unflattering pose of a woman on an album cover.  well, they didn't know art photography.  oh, yeah, the album is named horses, and on Patti's coat thrown over her shoulder, there's tiny, upside down pin of a horse.  the record producers lost.

an art poem on the back of the cover by Patti, the rest of the band photographed against a brick was and a message, "de l'ame pour l'ame" (to a friend, for a friend).  it wasn't made out to Robert, but it should have been.  that album cover went down in history.

today marks the 19th anv. of Robert's death.  RIP

"charms, sweet angels -ou have made me no longer afraid of death" - Patti Simth

patti, c. 1975

she came out of the "new york underground scene" (whatever that was) in 1975 screamin she knew the bible - the old testiment - better than debbie boone, singer of the christian themed song, "you light up my life".

her hair was pitch black, unevenly cut, she was skinny & dressed a little like a guy - except her shirtsleeves were torn off at the cuffs.
had the punk skinny tie once in a while too. a vacent, but intelligent expression, as if she was getting back at all the mundain shit the mid seventies was spewing out on the radio.

she was one of "those poets". nobody ever read in an english/american lit class. too "out there" for years to come. but her lyrics on horses hit were great, underground, alturnitive, bleak, stark, and easy to understand, even if they were way way over your head as 14 year old. but they weren't really.

her major anti-hero was brain jones, dead member of the rolling stones.
we'd stay up late on saturday nights just to catch a glimsp of jonesie on monteray pop, a movie. so of course we were instance fans of patti.

there's a picture of ms. smith on her album house taken by her best friend and former lover, art photographer robert mapplethorpe. it's black & white & stark, and mysterious, and very parisian like. something about the album cover is like paris, but you don't know what.
it looks beautiful in exhibition . . . . .

Letter to JF on RM’s birthday

11/04/04

JF,

Happy birthday to the misunderstood little boy who sat on santa’s lap as a 5 year old, and asked for a set of beads for xmas because he felt magic in his hands, as you know, he grew up to be an art photographer god. If RM was alive today he’d be 58 years old, which is very weird to think about.

Your book about RM is one of my favorites, Assault with a Deadly Camera, because you painted this other side of RM by showing the same little boy who became so famous, and in the glare of fame, he developed this other persona, which you so aptly named ‘Lord Mapplethorpe’ to the extent, if you had one of his pictures on the wall (like the one on his bio RM: a biography, by P. Morrisroe, Self Portrait, 1984), it would be the picture on the wall of his mansion with eyes that follow a person around. But he really was just a little boy at one time, who was his mother’s favorite, but she had so many children she didn’t know what to do . . . . and so he found an art mommy in Patti, whom you call the widow mapplethorpe in your book, but she’s a widow 2 times over since she lost her husband on RM’s birthday soon after Robert’s untimely death at 42 (to be continued)

I Want the Angel

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.

assault them

from an old journal entry:

finished reading Assault With a Deadly Camera by a former lover (male) of Robert Mapplethorpe's - Jack Fritscher, PhD, who tries to show the other gay side of RM.

Robert put on his personility by operating as his own Svengali to Trilby into "La Svengali" the brilliant opera singer. so robert was both Svengali and Trilbey. His Svengali persona was a brilliant but sinister photographer, and his Trilby persona was the unassuming Irish working class kid who wanted to follow in Andy's footsteps as a kid.

The gay Robert, the Leather-sex boy who "celebrates" his gay leather sex culture in his art work (important to remember the order it comes in). I was struck by the title when I found the book on the internet, after researching RM for over 4 years, I though the title captured what RM was trying to manipulate his choice of material to his art aesitic - assult them.

(to be continued)

going back to his art critics sucks

from my journal:

tried to start reading the Coral Sea (a tribute to Robert Mapplethorpe by Patti Smith), I mean after you read the creative writing RM inspired, when you can dig around for it, if you find it, going back to his art critics sucks, and I mean his good art critics too.

2 Quotes from Dublin

From the Robert Mapplethorpe Retrospective in Dublin, Ireland 11/96 - 1/97:

“I don’t feel uplifted after seeing this display. Confused, maybe. A little startled, I guess. Maybe it’s just too American or something. Just not very cultured, unless you consider the flowers but there weren’t many of them, were there?”
11/31/96, Dublin, Ireland

“I thought the guy was old-fashioned because he relied n studio equipment for his work. So much of this stuff is controlled, brilliantly controlled. I personally like less contrived set-ups where the photographer has little say concerning what is going to happen”
12/6/96, Dublin, Ireland

Playing with the Edge

(from 7/8/00) Just bought the book Playing with the Edge, the Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe by Arthur Danto. On the cover is a black & white self-portrait of RM in a feather boa and make-up, and curly feminine wig. Wait, on closer inspection, it’s a long hair natural fur piece around his neck. His lips are painted with a glamorous luster, and it’s an eerie picture of him looking tres feminique. All of RM’s self portraits are on the eerie side, even when he’s dressed “normal”, as in a tuxedo (that picture is like a haunted house picture; the eyes follow you everywehre) – or how about the self portrait of him naked, staring intently into the camera, holding his cock out for everyone to see. It’s a very sexy picture.

Calla Lily, 1988

“They are not fun flowers”
- Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1986)

It’s a white lily that shows only the flower top itself, and just a hint of the stem. It opens up in the picture perfectly halfway with an erection of a piston sticking out of it.

“and who’s the shy pornographer?”

Do you ever feel like getting stoned while you hang around your loft with a Polaroid camera and take some leather sex nude shots of yourself? Tie up your considerably ample penis and testicles in leather strips and somehow figure out a way to get the timed shutter of the camera (sitting on it’s tripod) to go off while you thrusted your body parts into the camera in a perfectly composed autoportrait? A Polaroid shot that develops itself?

Polaroid pictures are the first attempt at photography for artist Robert Mapplethorpe in 1973. He was a painter, sculptor, assemblage artist, but he has now become a photographer. Published in book form from a few years ago, Autoportraits is a huge selection of these first photos by the man known for his artwork of oversized male appendages.

It is nice to see that long before Robert recruits his male models on the run from the U.S. Navy, (he meets them in late night bars, chases them out the door, corners them with a business card, and gets them to take their clothes off for the camera later that evening after buying them breakfast at the IHOP), he himself poses in many compromising positions.

Supposedly, these pictures led to an introduction to Sam Wagstaff, millionaire art collector, who picked up Robert with the line: “and who’s the shy pornographer?”