The topic of sexuality in art history has been approached in a myriad of ways, but perhaps desire must be the essence but not the ending.
In Western Art, you could argue that the erotic was long ignored, hidden or condemned, and we have to view mythological images or religious works to encounter it. It’s only more recently that erotic art has become truly transgressive in its nature.
I have a collection of favourite artists that deal in part in eroticism, humour, feminism, pain and loss, and these are my favoured ones:
Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, Bob Flanagan, Ann Hirst, Sophie Calle, Annie Spinkle and Tracey Emin.
A long way we have travelled.
They don’t hide it, it’s not jugular, but it’s not a hootenanny either, but sometimes ‘it’s just daft shite or titting about’ as Ann Hirst calls it.
The artists I have chosen to write about in this blog are Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, but I will discuss other artists in future blogs.
I read the memoir ‘Just Kids’ by Patti Smith some years ago, which was recommended to me by a lovely Waterstones assistant. I needed a good holiday read with a sandstorm into a creative wilderness, and she suggested this book; it was a lucky find, and it turned out to be one of my favourite books.
I think I adore it because it reads as a genuine account, a homage to a long and painful love story of kindred spirits; you see honesty, louche poverty, two creative minds streaming together, reflecting back on their times and the poetic nature in which Patti captures it all.
Patti and Robert were reportedly friends, lovers, artistic collaborators and soul mates.
I remember at Art school, we were asked to talk about an artist that inspired us and a particular image I settled on was Robert Mapplethorpe’s ‘Man in Polyester Suit’. The black and white image is of a man wearing a polyester suit with his penis so casually hanging out from the zip part of his trousers. The image is cut off from the head, and the man is wearing a tailored suit, but the material of a cheap cloth.
He tries to bridge the gap between anarchy and the ideal, expanding sexuality that upsets traditional morals.
The subject is Mapplethorpe’s lover. I remember reading somewhere Mapplethorpe said he was trying to find the ‘perfect cock’.
Perhaps for him, this was anarchy and the ideal, and maybe that’s why I put this image up to my fellow students on the projector on that day. I remember my tutor, when I showed this image, came up to me silently, yet furiously changing my image; to one of Mapplethorpe’s tulips and trying to get the students to appreciate how his work developed! And in Mapplethorp’s words ‘sell the public flowers, things they can hang on walls without being uptight’ and exactly how my tutor felt.
There is something just mammalian about the image ‘Man in a polyester suit’. I showed the image to my friend, and his first reaction was WTF, and then he said ‘I wouldn’t want to feed it any peanuts’. Perhaps that was exactly what Mapplethorpe was trying to capture, but he just wasn’t able to say it, so frankly. The animal within, no matter how we dress it up.
Patti wrote in this memoir such a clear recollection of the times they both lived. They were both destitute, arriving in New York in 1967, both hungry to become Artists. Patti was a dropout from teacher training college who had just given up a child for adoption, boarded a bus for Philadelphia, and the rest was history.
She writes, ‘At 20 years old, I boarded the bus to New York. I wore my dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old grey raincoat I bought In Camden. I was superstitious; Today was Monday, I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.’
Patti had no real friends or career plans when she first moved to New York. But other hippies helped her find food and the essentials. Patti had a passion for French poets, American rock n roll and strong black coffee.
When Patti and Robert first met, in the beginning, they were so poor they sometimes slept on the street, two of a kind, outsiders to an insider world and neither of them seemed too distraught about it; she describes ‘we woke up knowing we were no longer alone’.
They came together, drew together, like a form of molten meditation
Robert describes himself as coming from Suburban America ‘It was a good place to come from and that it was a good place to leave’.
He studied drawing, painting and sculpture, influenced by Cornell and Duchamp.
He chose, above all else, to explore his sexuality, and it took him to the underground subculture scene of New York sex clubs. He began working as a hustler, to feed himself and Patti and his own curiosity. This enriched his practice and blurred many lines; consequently raising many eyebrows. His need for symmetry, beauty and a search for self-expression was strong. He made photography at a time when it wasn’t considered an art form.
Mapplethorpe examined many undercurrents, he secreted national debate like nobody else around artistic freedom and eroticism. His critiques considered his work too edgy, on the verge of being pornographic or racist. That was never his intention, and he simply photographed what he thought was beautiful, be it Patti, the devil, a penis or a flower.
He is most known for his gay, BDSM portraits, proving that queerness and erotica were compelling and important subjects, and he said, ‘I want to see the devil in us all’.
Both beauty and satan held him, and he believed they were the same thing.
He found satisfaction in the photographs he took, he also worked in sculpture, combine and films.
He was diagnosed with Aids in 1986.
The most extraordinary part, it took Patti 20 years to write their love story, and she promised Robert she would do it before he died.
The moments I really remember of the book:
How they met, him picking out her favourite piece of jewellery in the bookstore she was working in – a purple necklace from Persia, the goings on of the Chelsea hotel with fellow artists and musicians, how insanely sick they became at times, how they made toss up’s between spending their money on grilled cheese sandwiches or art supplies, Mapplethorpe’s regret but mostly, his insurgence of incalculable freedoms that he created.
He was so perfectly himself, the eye of a lens of desire. He was his own beautiful catch-22.
Anyway, I think the final words should belong to them.
‘When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera, I forget I exist.’
Robert Mapplethorpe
When Robert was dying, Patti composed a letter for him, a letter he never got to read. She ends the letter,
‘The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off too. But before I did, it occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that out of all of your work, you are still the most beautiful….The most beautiful work of all’
Patti Smith