Mapplethorpe

Here's my review of the Robert Mapplethorpe show at SNGOMA, from yesterday's Herald:

The first photograph you see in the Gallery of Modern Art's survey of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe shows a little girl in pigtails, clutching her toy bunny rabbit. It is not what most visitors will expect, and serves as a statement of intent: this is a show that seeks to puncture the image of Mapplethorpe in the popular imagination.

There are some of the photographers more notorious works here, but the focus is firmly on his formalism, classicism and compositional eye. His portraits of one-time partner Patti Smith are a case in point. On the one hand, they are a record of Smith's beauty, on the other, each is an exercise in the arrangement of the human body against the geometry of the room around it. And Mapplethorpe goes further in his photographs of men, homing in on body parts, presenting them as forms - an architectural arch made of feet, two arms clasped around a white block - working with light more than he works with people.

Most of all, though, this is a show devoted to Mapplethorpe as portrait photographer, and on the evidence here, he took two kinds of portrait.

First, he was a sensitive collaborator, allowing his subjects to project themeslves, and, more importantly, the image of themselves they wished to show. Keith Haring, balding and bespectacled, plays the consumate geek, but his arched eyebrows reveal his savvy status. Lawrence Weiner, the conceptualist who replaced his work with instructions on how it might be made, is cast as a revolutionary thinking aloud, his beard cribbed from a bust of Marx and a star tattoo on his wrist.

Second, in a show that seeks to reposition Mapplethorpe, it is fitting that there are so many works here in which the photographer seeks to undermine his subjects. Truman Capote, photographed in 1981, has gone to seed, but oozes a quiet confidence, and is content - is this the man behind the shrill wit, or Mapplethorpe's invention? William Burroughs, usually photographed with a gun in his hand and a sneer on his face, is pensive, deep in thought, his head bowed and hands clasped. More simply, Iggy Pop is transformed from wild man of punk into a bewildered simpleton.

And then there is Warhol, who looms large over this exhibition. Mapplethorpe began their relationship as an adoring fan, and ended it in a position of mutual mistrust, to put it mildly. Here, three portraits border on the cruel. In the first, Warhol is allowed to display his usual blank expression. In the second, Warhol is exposed, his public image as asexual being mocked, his hands positioned like one of Charles Dodgson's little girls, and what looks like fear in his eyes. The last is pure parody: Warhol as a Warhol, his head floating in high-contrast space. The favour is returned, too, with the Warhol screenprint of Mapplethorpe shown here, a glib monochrome taken from a snap of the photographer looking rather kindly, in marked contrast to his self-portraits.

Talking of which, it is hard to know how serious Mapplethorpe was in presenting himself as an artworld outlaw. Playing the knife-wielding street tough, Mapplethorpe is thoroughly unconvincing. And yet, when he casts himself as Patty Hearst, gripping a machine gun, it is deadly earnest. And he pulls it off. The same goes, surprisingly, for Mapplethorpe as horned and horny devil, a bullwhip up his bum.

It is worth noting that this is one of very few images from Mapplethorpe's long investigation of the S&M scene. A portrait of Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter shows the pair trussed up in their leather finery, but seated in a prissy suburban living room. Cock And Devil shows a bound penis, captured by a trident-bearing statuette of Satan. It is a silly, painfully obvious work: Catholic Guilt For Dummies. Balance is provided by Dominic And Eliot, an upside-down crucifixion, like St. Peter's, and a 'portrait' that dehumanises its subject, reducing him to nothing but genitals and leather straps. Still, there is a sense that this show - which leaves much out, and is, tellingly, mostly drawn from a single collection - goes too far in revising Mapplethorpe's reputation.