Life And Works Of Robert Mapplethorpe Film Studies Essay

The third of six children, Robert Mapplethorpe was born into a working-class Catholic family in Floral Park, Long Island on November 4th 1946. His childhood and adolescence were difficult because of his gawky physicality, his brother’s athletic and academic success and his own early demonstration of artistic talent. After an accelerated career in high school, Mapplethorpe entered the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to study technical illustration and where he became a member of the ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) in a bid to placate his father who disapproved of his artistic ambitions. Because of his experimentation with hippy culture and his father’s hostility, he never completed his degree at Pratt; instead he moved to Manhattan just before the summer of 1969.

Mapplethorpe’s early artistic endeavours focused on collage work with found objects and jewellery design. In 1970 a fellow resident of the Chelsea Hotel introduced him to photography with the gift of a Polaroid camera and Mapplethorpe started by experimenting with self-portraits. Mapplethorpe had his first one-man show in November 1970, but did not achieve recognition in the New York art world until 1977. On February 4th 1977, Mapplethorpe had joint shows at the Holly Solomon Gallery and the Kitchen. Although both shows were organised by Solomon, the mainstream exhibition featured his flowers and portraits while the avant-garde exhibit consisted of his ‘sex’ pictures. This segregation of subject matter would continue throughout Mapplethorpe’s career. Just over a decade later, Mapplethorpe was the subject of retrospectives in Amsterdam, London and the United States. In July of 1988 the Whitney Museum of American Art honoured Mapplethorpe with a retrospective exhibition, their first for a photographer. In December 1988, a slightly larger retrospective, “The Perfect Moment,” opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

Mapplethorpe was able to experience his rise to the pinnacle of the art world, but, as he commented to numerous interviewers, he was unable to take advantage of the fame. He died from complications related to Aids on March 9th 1989. Memorial services were held at the Catholic Church Mapplethorpe had attended as a child in Floral Park and at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Populated mainly with members of New York City’s social and artistic elite, Robert Mapplethorpe’s book of portraits, Certain People, has a title with more than one possible meaning as noted in Susan Sontag’s essay.

There is certain in the sense of some and not others; and certain in the sense of self-confident, sure, clear. Certain People are, mostly, people found, coaxed or arranged into a certainty about themselves. That is what seduces, that is what is disclosed in these bulletins of a great photographer’s observations and encounters.

Although they are not famous in the same way as Annie Liebovitz, Philip Glass or Bruce Chatwin – people who appear in Certain People – Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter are exceptional in their own right. In their stance and with their defiant gaze, they have the same self-assurance as the celebrities that Mapplethorpe photographed. His camera treats them with the same dignity as that reserved for Lord Snowdon or Louise Bourgeois. Their portrait exemplifies many of the formal and thematic concerns that inform Mapplethorpe’s larger body of work.

Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979) (fig. 1) is a portrait staged according to the conventions of the royal couple portrait of Enlightenment Europe or the formal family portrait of the Victorian Age. Ridley and Heeter are centred in the frame and positioned frontally with respect to the viewer. Ridley is seated with Heeter standing at his side. The setting for the portrait is clearly domestic, presumably the living room of the couple. The heavy buttoned wing-backed leather chair in which Ridley is seated, the Oriental carpet beneath his feet, the modern lines of the console table to his right as well as the objets d’art on the various surfaces indicate a degree of taste and wealth. The ‘just-so’ arrangement of the furniture clearly signifies a gay male aesthetic of a particular kind. The parallel costuming of Ridley and Heeter indicate a gay male aesthetic of a very different but equally stylised kind.

Heeter stands to Ridley’s left casually holding two metal rings from which hangs a chain connected to the studded leather collar around Ridley’s neck. In his left hand, Heeter holds a riding crop, angled toward Ridley, resting inside the arm of the chair, in ominous proximity to Ridley’s body; much as a rider would hold it against the flank of his mount. Heeter is adorned in full leather drag: cap, jacket, studded belt, cod-piece trousers and biker boots. To emphasise the confidence with which he carries his power, he leans against Ridley’s chair and crosses his right foot over his left in a relaxed, semi-swaggering stance. Ridley’s leather uniform is virtually identical to Heeter’s – biker boots, leather chaps, biker jacket. The differences between Ridley’s and Heeter’s costumes indicate their respective positions in the relationship: instead of a cap, Ridley wears a collar, instead of a riding crop, he sports chains; these differences, along with the pair’s physical positions gesture toward the power differential that the couple perform.

From this description of the photograph, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter could be characterised as a family portrait of a sadomasochistic couple. Although hardly as shocking as many of Mapplethorpe’s other sadomasochistic-themed photographs, the image is still unsettling. First, the portrait disturbs the classificatory terms it invokes. Is it possible for ‘family’, ‘sadomasochism’ or ‘portrait to mean the same thing independently and jumbled up together? If the picture grants Heeter and Ridley a certain kind of elegance, beauty and dignity, is this evidence that notions of family, domesticity and coupling are sufficiently elastic to incorporate sadomasochistic eroticism? If Ridley and Heeter are able to pose their unconventionally adorned bodies according to the codes of the conventional family portrait, is this evidence that family, domesticity and coupling have always already incorporated sadomasochistic eroticism? Second, aside from complicating dominant narratives of familial relationships, this portrait exposes something about the relationship between the practices of photography and self-presentation. What does the staging of Ridley and Heeter in full leather drag show about the ideological work of portraiture writ large? What does this photograph expose about the relationship between power, eroticism, theatricality and image making? Given that both sets of questions relate to the tension between the picture’s subject matter and its representational codes, is it fair to conclude that the relationship between content – the sadomasochistic couple – and form – the family portrait – makes Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter such an arresting photograph? More precisely, is it the photograph’s combination of form and content which helps us to see the never-before-related phenomena – ‘sadomasochistic couple’ and ‘formal portrait’ – in a different way, that makes this photograph worthy of critical analysis?

In the following chapters I will focus on the relationship between form and content in Mapplethorpe’s images, with attention to his sex pictures. The interaction of form and content in these images, I contend, trains the viewer to see in a new way: not only to see the specific subject matter differently, but to see the practice of image making – in art or in life – differently. The beauty of Mapplethorpe’s images renders culturally unpalatable subject matter attractive and desirable. The stylised composition of Mapplethorpe’s images also reflects in the forms of self-stylisation within the images, using photographic style to expose personal styling as an equivalent staging, construction and performance. Form and content, then, function – sometimes co-operatively, sometimes in opposition – to make the spectator aware of the assumptions they bring to the photograph. The analysis of Mapplethorpe’s images will attend not only to how he represents masculinity and the performance of gay male identity but also to how his images draw attention to the dynamics of representation itself.

Most commentators identify “the curious disjunction… between the visual appeal of his photographs as pictures and the discomforting nature of his subject matter” as the quintessential element of Mapplethorpe’s pictorial style. Arthur Danto, one of Mapplethorpe’s staunchest defenders characterises the artist’s work as both “Dionysian and Apollonian at once.” According to Danto, the sexual energy of the images’ content has a dialectic relationship to their “chastely classic” style of presentation; this tension is so profound, Danto finds Hegel’s notion of aufhebung “a useful concept with which to address… Mapplethorpe’s images.” The forbidden and unsettling content of Mapplethorpe’s images is not erased by their pristine and mannered formalisation, and even the most sexually explicit of Mapplethorpe’s images both go beyond and fail as pornography, precisely because of their crisp beauty and clean elegance. “The content is preserved. But it is also negated, and it is transcended, and that means the work cannot merely be reduced to its content.” Ingrid Sischy, one of the most eloquent writers on Mapplethorpe’s sexual imagery, identifies this tension between form and content as the source of shock in Mapplethorpe’s photographs: “What shocks isn’t just the material, but how it is so artfully presented. The content, lighting, composition, sense of order and aesthetics all combine to give the photograph an unforgettable impact.” The photographs’ impact depends on the audacious choice to present the forbidden, the transgressive, the underground, the violent, and the repressed in a beautiful manner. As Sischy goes on to observe, Mapplethorpe’s eye for beauty enables the pictures to challenge, among other things, prevailing notions about sadomasochism and homoeroticism. Germano Celant’s essay in the catalogue from a Guggenheim exhibition compares Mapplethorpe’s photographs with Mannerist paintings. He argues that Mapplethorpe’s style works to both defuse and legitimise the content of his images by linking them to aesthetic codes of the past. Extending Danto’s observation about the importance of the tension between form and content for understanding Mapplethorpe’s work aesthetically, Sischy and Celant argue that this tension is the key to evaluating Mapplethorpe’s images politically. Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter illustrates how the relationship between form and content functions across Mapplethorpe’s body of work. As already noted the tension between the mundanity of the portrait’s setting and style and the atypicality of the subjects’ costume and identity generates the image’s energy and arrests the viewer’s attention. As Danto observes: “They look as though this were the most natural thing in the world for them to be doing in their middle-class living room…. [But] what is a sexual slave doing sitting that way in a comfortable armchair?” Form and content also generate tension with respect to time. To what historical moment does this photograph rightfully belong? As several commentators have noted, Mapplethorpe’s sex photographs are important, if for no other reason, because they document a certain gay male subculture whose adherents failed to survive the ravages of Aids. This subject matter, closely tied to the sexual exploration of the 70s, was captured, however, using a visual aesthetic associated with late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century photography, if not older notions of symmetry, order and perfection. As Joan Didion observed in her introductory essay to Mapplethorpe’s collection of female portraits, Some Women:

Robert Mapplethorpe’s work has often been seen as an aesthetic sport, so entirely outside any historical or social context, and so “new”, as to resist interpretation. This “newness” has in fact become so fixed an idea about Mapplethorpe that we tend to overlook the source of his strength, which derived, from the beginning, less from the shock of the new than from the shock of the old…. There was, above all, the perilous imposition of order on chaos, of classical form on unthinkable images.

Didion’s comments clarify that Mapplethorpe’s images are neither without historical context nor fixed within a single historical context. Instead, subject and style belong to different, and seemingly disparate, historical moments and social milieu. The form of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, however, renders the content of his images “thinkable,” palatable, legitimate. Mapplethorpe’s combination of form and content, then, is anything but dilettantism.

Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter also plays with the distinction between public and private spaces. The space of the picture is a living room, a domestic space, a space hidden from the world’s prying eyes and attendant judgements. The sexual identity evoked by the subjects’ costumes also signifies private space; they are culturally understood as taboo, necessitating secrecy. The space of the portrait, both generally as a visual form and specifically as an artefact in a book or gallery, is, however, public. The staged presentation of these subjects underlines that they are opening their private space[s] to public scrutiny. This picture is not a snapshot; it is not a candid photo; it is not an image captured on the sly as in the work of Garry Winogrand. It is, instead, a formal portrait that required preparation and planning. As Danto points out, when emphasising the relationship of trust that Mapplethorpe must have developed with his photographic subjects, indicated by the settings, the staging, the careful execution and the use of names, in the photographs’ titles, it is clear that Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, like Mapplethorpe’s other subjects, have consented to having this image made. They have admitted Mapplethorpe (and, consequently, the viewer) into their lives, such that “the photographer [and, consequently, the viewer] shares a moral space with them.” Heeter and Ridley’s consensual act of opening their home works to situate the spectator non-consensually in a common, private space. This exposure of the taboo to public scrutiny compels the viewer to accept this intrusion into the public sphere; by voluntarily opening the walls of their private space, Ridley and Heeter have challenged the boundaries of what is acceptable in the public space. The form of the photograph as a posed portrait, then, sharpens the political challenge of its content.

The troubling of the boundary between public and private establishes a complicated relationship between the image and temporality. As a portrait, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter is the memorialisation of a single instant in the life of this couple. At the same time, given the disconnection between their regalia and their setting, the portrait necessarily invokes a before and an after. Insofar as Heeter’s and Ridley’s costumes signify a particular set of sexual practices, they are not practices that likely take place (primarily) in the space in which they are photographed. Their costumes suggest the space of the playroom, the dungeon, the sex club – places significantly different from the one they occupy. The portrait evokes a place and time outside the environs of the setting for the erotic activity it suggests. Because the sexual activity suggested by this photograph is understood as taboo, as requiring a private space, even though it is being exposed to a public viewing, the portrait also intimates that these costumes and these roles are not the totality of the lives of these portrait subjects. Just as the picture suggests other times and places for sexual activity, the specificity of the intimated sexual activity, by negative implication, suggests non-sexual times and places in these subjects’ lives that require different styles of self-presentation. The temporal and spatial limitations on this particular self-stylisation are underlined by the incongruity of costume and setting. The form/content distinctions of this image, then, invest it with a temporal dimension.

The photograph suggests a relationship of dominance and submission; the power dynamics at play in the image, however, are neither simple nor singular. On the most basic level, there is the power of the gaze, a power generated by the image that situates both the spectator and the pictorial subject. This gaze arguably belongs to Mapplethorpe and the spectator and is exercised against Heeter and Ridley. Even if Heeter and Ridley have been costumed, posed, lit and framed by Mapplethorpe, to claim that they have been objectified by his gaze fails to account for the complexity of the image. Ridley and Heeter both look at the camera with hard and fixed stares; they are not giving over their bodies, their lives or their subjectivities to the spectator. Ridley and Heeter each adopt a physical pose that underpins the defiance of their respective looks; Heeter’s nonchalant stance and Ridley’s open-legged seating position situate them in the full solidity of their corporeal frames. When looking at Heeter and Ridley, the spectator is just as likely to feel intimidated, challenged and threatened as “in control” of the image. In this way, the power Ridley and Heeter retain vis-à-vis the gaze relates to and underscores their consent to the image-making process. At the same time, their tight leather outfits draw attention to the precise contours of their bodies. The silver studs on Heeter’s codpiece and the positioning of Ridley’s legs and hands also draw visual attention to their respective genital regions. In this way the portrait trades in traditional mechanisms of eroticising and objectifying its subjects. Because they have been trapped in the image, and because this photograph will now circulate freely outside of their control, however, their resistance to the power of the scopic regime is limited and partial. The photograph, then, transforms Heeter and Ridley into objects for contemplation. The spectator’s visual inspection of them, however, is disrupted by their respective looks, their physical poses and the iconography of sadomasochism within the photograph. The gaze that structures this image is neither straightforward nor unidirectional.

The power dynamic between the portrait’s subjects is also complex. Heeter’s superior vertical position along with his grasp of the riding crop and Ridley’s chains are evidence of his dominance. At the same time Ridley is foregrounded in the pictorial space and his face is both more clearly visible and more brightly lit, making him the focus of visual attention. Ridley’s name is also given priority in the portrait’s title. While this priority is consistent with Western left-to-right titling practice, it runs against the perceived practice of many sadomasochistic practitioners who often deny the submissive partner the referential use of a name, personal pronouns or even capital letters. As Richard Meyer observed when arguing that the formal properties of Mapplethorpe’s photographs often work to undo the power dynamics of his image’s content: “The contradictions of this portrait defeat any essentialist interpretation of Ridley and Heeter in (or as) their sadomasochistic roles.” Building on a close reading of the Meyer article, I would add that it is the compositional elements of the picture that serve to disrupt the meaning of its specific iconography. In other words, with respect to how the picture trades in the erotics of dominance and submission, the form of the image undercuts its manifest content.

The incongruity of costume and setting also works to complicate the readings of power in the image. In an essay largely critical of Mapplethorpe’s images, C. S. Manegold writes that “the dream… promised” by this portrait “is one of pain, of submission, of servitude, a willing walk toward death.” She goes on to claim that Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochistic photographs are funded by a fascistic aesthetic. While I agree that this image trades in the iconography of domination and submission, I would dispute that the leather gear is Nazi-esque, it is merely hyper-masculine and owes much more to the motorcycle cop or the cowboy than any sort of Nazi influence, there are certainly no badges or insignia to indicate such a position and is merely Manegold herself showing what her personal/political history brings to the table in terms of domination. Any characterisation of the image as representing only a single form of erotic or gendered self-presentation founders on the details of the photograph itself. Looking only at Heeter’s riding crop and studded cod-piece or only at Ridley’s handcuffs and locked collar, Manegold’s characterisation of the image as one infused with pain and death and fascinated with a fascistic masculinity may seem self-justified. What happens, however, when the spectator notices the antique brass clock, the carefully arranged books or the delicate figurines that are also part of the picture? Are these details irrelevant? Do they also signify death and embody fascism? Or do they expose the sadomasochistic self-presentation of Ridley and Heeter – as convincing, chilling, arousing, and disturbing as it might be – as, at root, a performance, a ritual, an enactment? Although it is implicit in what I said about the image and temporality previously, it bears emphasising that insofar as the portrait highlights the performative nature of (sadomasochistic or masculine) identity, this also relates to the temporality of the image. Because a performance requires a repeated bodily gesture, it also requires temporal duration. In other words, does the incongruity between the general setting and the specific costuming show that each signifies an alternative way to fashion a life? A less incongruous picture could have been crafted by stripping the room bare of furniture, positioning Ridley on his knees and painting the walls black. Equally less incongruous a picture could also have been crafted by stripping Ridley of his chains, positioning Heeter on the arm of the chair and dressing the pair in flannels and blazers. The posing of this master-slave duo in a well-appointed, to the point of chi-chi, living room, however, shows that the respective systems of decoration are fully parallel, even though they might imply different relationships to hegemonic masculinity. What Mapplethorpe has done is signify hyper-masculinity and then gone on to problematise it.

By focusing the spectator’s attention on the stylisation of their clothing and props through its sharp focus and bright lighting, the style of the portrait underlines that Ridley and Heeter’s gear is drag, a costume, a mode of self-presentation, a performance. In addition, by staging Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter in a setting where their self-presentation as devotees of sadomasochistic eroticism would stand out in exaggerated bas-relief, the portrait calls attention to the artifice, the staginess of their chosen identity. The inherent theatricality of the picture is further emphasised by the dynamics of sadomasochistic erotic play itself. Given its emphasis on roles, costumes, props, scenes, the adornment of the body and implements of sexual arousal, sadomasochism – despite the reality of the pain/pleasure experienced by its participants – is a complex set of ritualised gestures. With these features in mind, it becomes easier to see how form and content are not merely in productive tension, but are virtually undone – almost reversed – by the portrait.

Previously I identified the sadomasochistic couple as the content of the portrait, but the emphasis on performance, artifice and theatricality demonstrates that the term “sadomasochistic couple” is as much a formal trope enabling a reading of a situation as it is a pre-interpretive category with content. The viewer identifies Lyle Heeter and Brian Ridley as practitioners of sadomasochism not because their portrait contains sexual content, but because it trades in the signifying codes of the leather uniform. Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter provides no evidence that its subjects participate in sadomasochistic acts; it reveals only that they understand how to participate in sadomasochistic signification. If this portrait were placed next to one of a gay male couple in jeans and t-shirts posed in their living room and another couple in biker gear in a fetish bar, the mobility of “sadomasochistic couple” as an interpretive grid would be much clearer. By the same token, the classical and mannered stylisation of the image is not merely the formal code by which this portrait has been organised; it is the very subject matter of the photograph. On the one hand, Heeter and Ridley, as a sadomasochistic couple, are irrelevant – i.e. negated and transcended. They are little more than one possible signifier that enables a set of meanings and associations to attach to an image. Other visual and cultural incongruities could have been used to achieve the same kind of shock and disorientation. On the other hand, Ridley and Heeter’s identity as a sadomasochistic couple is absolutely essential to the image, not because it is at odds with the domestic setting of the portrait, but because sadomasochism – as a highly theatrical, self-aware, ritualised mode of erotic behaviour fraught with its own contradictions and tensions – provides the most useful set of signifying codes for exploring the formal concerns about self-stylisation with which the portrait engages. The theatricality of sadomasochism, captured in a highly stylised portrait exposes the performance of masculinity that Heeter and Ridley – and countless others – are attempting. In this way that portrait’s iconography both participates in and potentially disrupts certain fantastic constructions of the masculine self. Sadomasochism, then, is a useful point of entry into Mapplethorpe’s larger body of work not only because it is the subject matter of a large number of his photographs or it is the subject matter that catapulted him to fame, but because sadomasochism as a practice is so directly parallel to the notions of theatrical self-presentation with which Mapplethorpe’s images deal. As noted previously, it is not only the thematic of the photographs that are important, but also how they train the viewer to see.