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This programme contains strong language and explicit sexual scenes. | 0:00:02 | 0:00:04 | |
Robert Mapplethorpe was the ultimate bad boy of the camera. | 0:00:04 | 0:00:07 | |
The only thing more shocking than his photographs was his life. | 0:00:07 | 0:00:10 | |
He gained notoriety in the 1970s with images of New York's underground gay scene, | 0:00:11 | 0:00:17 | |
which he glorified, uncensored, until his death from Aids in 1989, | 0:00:17 | 0:00:22 | |
at the age of 42. | 0:00:22 | 0:00:24 | |
A master of form and light, no subject was off limits. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:28 | |
Fetishes and sadomasochism were captured with the same meticulous | 0:00:28 | 0:00:33 | |
detail as eroticised flowers. | 0:00:33 | 0:00:36 | |
His work convinced art dealers that photography could be as collectable | 0:00:36 | 0:00:41 | |
as painting and sculpture. | 0:00:41 | 0:00:43 | |
But exhibitions of his sexually explicit work inevitably raise questions. | 0:00:43 | 0:00:47 | |
In 1990, | 0:00:49 | 0:00:50 | |
a Cincinnati art centre was taken to court for displaying work considered pornographic. | 0:00:50 | 0:00:56 | |
It's this controversy which opens the film you're about to see. | 0:00:56 | 0:01:01 | |
Directors Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey were given unlimited access | 0:01:01 | 0:01:05 | |
to Mapplethorpe's archives and work, and the result is, | 0:01:05 | 0:01:09 | |
Look At The Pictures. | 0:01:09 | 0:01:11 | |
An unflinching, uncompromising profile of one of the most provocative | 0:01:11 | 0:01:16 | |
artists of the 20th century. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:18 | |
Robert Mapplethorpe, | 0:01:29 | 0:01:31 | |
a known homosexual who died of Aids and who spent the last years of | 0:01:31 | 0:01:36 | |
his life promoting homosexuality. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:38 | |
Now, if any Senator doesn't know what I'm talking about | 0:01:38 | 0:01:41 | |
in terms of the art that I have protested, well, look at the pictures. | 0:01:41 | 0:01:46 | |
Now, any Senator who thinks that I'm attacking aesthetic art... | 0:01:47 | 0:01:51 | |
..I don't know whether television cameras can see it or not, | 0:01:52 | 0:01:55 | |
I'm going to be fast enough with it that they can't. | 0:01:55 | 0:01:57 | |
But I want Senators to come over here if they have any doubt and look at the pictures. | 0:01:57 | 0:02:03 | |
In Cincinnati, police close down the Mapplethorpe exhibit. | 0:02:03 | 0:02:06 | |
We are sending the Mapplethorpe exhibit to trial. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:09 | |
Come over here. Look at the pictures. | 0:02:09 | 0:02:11 | |
One of two artists whose works led to a dispute. | 0:02:11 | 0:02:14 | |
Look at the pictures. Look at the pictures. | 0:02:14 | 0:02:16 | |
Look at the pictures. | 0:02:16 | 0:02:18 | |
It was Mapplethorpe. | 0:02:18 | 0:02:20 | |
The art gallery and its director are charged with obscenity | 0:02:20 | 0:02:22 | |
for exhibiting photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:25 | |
-Look at the pictures. -Mapplethorpe's work is highly controversial. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:29 | |
-Can I show it to you? -I don't want to look at it. -I don't even acknowledge that it's art. | 0:02:29 | 0:02:33 | |
I don't even acknowledge that the fellow who did it was an artist. | 0:02:35 | 0:02:39 | |
I think he was a jerk! | 0:02:39 | 0:02:40 | |
This is one of five vaults in which Mapplethorpe's archive resides. | 0:02:59 | 0:03:04 | |
Audiovisual material is in here along with more ephemeral paperwork | 0:03:04 | 0:03:09 | |
from his studio and personal correspondence. | 0:03:09 | 0:03:11 | |
The photographs are in a cooler | 0:03:17 | 0:03:19 | |
environment and Polaroids are in an even colder environment. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:23 | |
One of our big challenges is to really make a case for why we're doing two | 0:03:32 | 0:03:36 | |
concurrent exhibitions about one artist. | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
This is two sides of one coin. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:41 | |
-Yeah. -There is a duality that runs through Mapplethorpe's work and life, | 0:03:41 | 0:03:45 | |
and we hope to be able to divide the material up in a way that would | 0:03:45 | 0:03:50 | |
highlight that duality. | 0:03:50 | 0:03:52 | |
-This is a box of self-portraits. -Great. | 0:03:57 | 0:03:59 | |
-Oh! -Oh! -Yeah, biker jacket from the back. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:03 | |
Yeah. | 0:04:03 | 0:04:05 | |
I really like this white piping and how it leads up to this other shape. | 0:04:05 | 0:04:09 | |
That's one of the great ones. | 0:04:12 | 0:04:14 | |
When you say Mapplethorpe, | 0:04:14 | 0:04:15 | |
people immediately think of the controversies that happened during | 0:04:15 | 0:04:19 | |
the '90s. Guerrilla rebel. | 0:04:19 | 0:04:22 | |
-Yeah. -Mapplethorpe was being demonised by Conservative politicians, | 0:04:22 | 0:04:27 | |
so one of our goals was to humanise Mapplethorpe, | 0:04:27 | 0:04:30 | |
to bring him back into people's consciousness as a human being. | 0:04:30 | 0:04:34 | |
It's quite convincing. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:37 | |
-Ah! -Ah! Mapplethorpe and bullwhip. | 0:04:41 | 0:04:46 | |
I remember it being a slightly higher contrast. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:48 | |
-It's a different paper. -Right. | 0:04:48 | 0:04:50 | |
-This is a lot warmer and softer. -Mm-hm. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:53 | |
The way his hand is, | 0:04:53 | 0:04:55 | |
it's so great, it almost looks like he's releasing the shutter. | 0:04:55 | 0:04:57 | |
Yes, because that... | 0:04:57 | 0:04:59 | |
..cord comes just to the edge of the frame. | 0:05:00 | 0:05:03 | |
-The cord kind of connects the viewer with Mapplethorpe. -Yeah. | 0:05:03 | 0:05:07 | |
-Because it's coming out of the picture. -As well as the eye contact, | 0:05:07 | 0:05:10 | |
-obviously. -Right. -It's very defiant. | 0:05:10 | 0:05:12 | |
He's not hiding his face. | 0:05:12 | 0:05:13 | |
He's not hiding his identity. | 0:05:13 | 0:05:15 | |
He's not hiding what he's doing. | 0:05:15 | 0:05:16 | |
Robert was just my younger brother. | 0:06:01 | 0:06:04 | |
I'm the oldest. That's myself, my brother, Richard, Robert, Edward, | 0:06:04 | 0:06:09 | |
Sue and James. | 0:06:09 | 0:06:11 | |
That's the six of us. When we were young, we did a lot of colouring. | 0:06:11 | 0:06:16 | |
Robert always had weird things. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:18 | |
You know, he'd have a green face, or... | 0:06:18 | 0:06:21 | |
..just not the norm. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:24 | |
Or purple hair or something. | 0:06:24 | 0:06:25 | |
And I'd say, what are you doing that for? | 0:06:25 | 0:06:27 | |
That's not the way it's supposed to be. | 0:06:27 | 0:06:29 | |
As far as, like, photographs, he never took photographs. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:32 | |
My dad took a lot of photographs. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:35 | |
But Robert, he had no interest in that at all. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:37 | |
My wife and I and the children moved here in 1949. | 0:06:40 | 0:06:43 | |
I was always interested in photography, | 0:06:45 | 0:06:47 | |
but none of my kids were until Eddie. | 0:06:47 | 0:06:50 | |
I had all the equipment downstairs - | 0:06:50 | 0:06:52 | |
a darkroom, enlarger and printer and drier and everything else. | 0:06:52 | 0:06:58 | |
This is the block we lived on. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:00 | |
See, all the houses were the same? | 0:07:00 | 0:07:01 | |
This was during the snow. | 0:07:06 | 0:07:08 | |
This is Robert here with two of his friends. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:11 | |
You know, we had to be home a certain time for dinner, and | 0:07:11 | 0:07:13 | |
you had to sit at the table until you've finished your dinner. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:17 | |
Robert was a regular kid. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:20 | |
One thing was his endurance on a pogo stick. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:23 | |
He was having competitions with people. | 0:07:23 | 0:07:25 | |
He would go all the way around the block on a pogo stick. | 0:07:25 | 0:07:28 | |
Robert was the pogo stick champ of 259th Street of the neighbourhood. | 0:07:28 | 0:07:33 | |
He just could go on forever. | 0:07:33 | 0:07:35 | |
And he was so proud of that! | 0:07:35 | 0:07:37 | |
You know, there's something about black and white pictures that are so | 0:07:40 | 0:07:43 | |
much better because they last. | 0:07:43 | 0:07:44 | |
I took this of Robert in front of our house, right? | 0:07:45 | 0:07:49 | |
The rest of them, all these, he took of me, | 0:07:49 | 0:07:55 | |
and I believe it's probably the first pictures he took. | 0:07:55 | 0:07:58 | |
There was this television programme in the early '50s. | 0:08:03 | 0:08:06 | |
Someone would give them something to taste with their blindfolds on. | 0:08:06 | 0:08:09 | |
You would have to guess what it is. | 0:08:09 | 0:08:11 | |
That's how we play the game - | 0:08:11 | 0:08:12 | |
identifying items by means of our five senses. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:15 | |
Well, we Mapplethorpe kids made our own Sense And Nonsense game. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:19 | |
Robert, the little devil that he was, | 0:08:23 | 0:08:25 | |
went to one of the many ashtrays around the house, which were always full, | 0:08:25 | 0:08:30 | |
and put ashes in my brother's mouth. | 0:08:30 | 0:08:34 | |
And they were fuming. | 0:08:34 | 0:08:37 | |
That's the kind of stuff he did, that kind of needling stuff. | 0:08:37 | 0:08:40 | |
So he was a devilish guy. | 0:08:40 | 0:08:42 | |
SHE CHUCKLES | 0:08:42 | 0:08:43 | |
We never missed Mass on Sunday. | 0:08:47 | 0:08:49 | |
We always went to church, and I still do. | 0:08:49 | 0:08:52 | |
I first met Robert Mapplethorpe when I was assigned to Our Lady Of The Snows Parish in Floral Park. | 0:09:10 | 0:09:15 | |
They were active in the parish, you know, | 0:09:16 | 0:09:18 | |
so I got to know the whole family. | 0:09:18 | 0:09:22 | |
So Robert just kind of took to me, | 0:09:22 | 0:09:24 | |
and I, you know, took to him, and he used to paint me pictures. | 0:09:24 | 0:09:30 | |
He drew me a couple of paintings of the Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary. | 0:09:30 | 0:09:36 | |
And I thought to myself, he's been too influenced by Picasso. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:41 | |
But anyway, I have to say that, first, | 0:09:43 | 0:09:46 | |
he was the only person I knew who could sit on a couch and chew his toenails. | 0:09:46 | 0:09:52 | |
The other thing was you'd look at Robert, and I think the first thing | 0:09:53 | 0:09:57 | |
you'd notice is his eyes. | 0:09:57 | 0:09:59 | |
They were huge. | 0:09:59 | 0:10:01 | |
And as if he was always looking, always penetrating, always... | 0:10:01 | 0:10:06 | |
..trying to get through. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:08 | |
I come from this, you know... | 0:10:09 | 0:10:11 | |
..suburban America. | 0:10:13 | 0:10:15 | |
It was a very safe environment... | 0:10:15 | 0:10:17 | |
..and it was a good place to come from, in that... | 0:10:18 | 0:10:21 | |
..it was a good place to leave. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:23 | |
He never quite really fit in... | 0:10:27 | 0:10:29 | |
..with all these other teenage boys, you know. | 0:10:31 | 0:10:34 | |
There was something very fragile about Robert. | 0:10:35 | 0:10:37 | |
Robert was Mum's favourite. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:52 | |
I don't know why, though. | 0:10:52 | 0:10:53 | |
I can't put my finger on specific things, but I would say, oh, | 0:10:53 | 0:10:57 | |
Robert was her favourite. | 0:10:57 | 0:10:58 | |
-ROBERT: -Sometimes, that just wasn't enough for me. | 0:11:01 | 0:11:05 | |
Robert was smart. Everything came easy to him. | 0:11:05 | 0:11:07 | |
I worked like a dog for my marks, but he graduated at 16. | 0:11:07 | 0:11:12 | |
-ROBERT: -As soon as I could, I started art school training, and I moved to Brooklyn. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:17 | |
My dad was basically against it. | 0:11:18 | 0:11:21 | |
My father thought... | 0:11:21 | 0:11:22 | |
..you can do it as a hobby, but what are you ever going to do with art? | 0:11:23 | 0:11:27 | |
Did know that photography and homosexuality share something in common? | 0:11:32 | 0:11:36 | |
Growing respect for photography in the art world | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
occurred simultaneously | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
with the growing visibility of the gay rights movement. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:43 | |
Each suffered a gauntlet of prejudice during their coming-of-age. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:47 | |
Just as Mapplethorpe was starting out, | 0:11:47 | 0:11:48 | |
to be openly gay was still very much a cultural taboo, and photography was | 0:11:48 | 0:11:54 | |
considered not much more than a utilitarian medium | 0:11:54 | 0:11:57 | |
and applied art, a bastard of the arts. | 0:11:57 | 0:12:00 | |
He was very young when he started Pratt. | 0:12:04 | 0:12:06 | |
He just looked like a little boy and people made fun of him. | 0:12:06 | 0:12:11 | |
That time, his name was Bob Mapplethorpe. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:14 | |
And to further diminish him... | 0:12:14 | 0:12:16 | |
..they called him Maypo because that was a children's cereal back | 0:12:17 | 0:12:21 | |
in those days. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:22 | |
# I want my Maypo I want my Maypo... # | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
He was not macho. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:26 | |
# I want my Maypo! # | 0:12:26 | 0:12:28 | |
It makes you strong. | 0:12:28 | 0:12:29 | |
He told me he would take his father's negatives to class and present them | 0:12:41 | 0:12:45 | |
as his own work. | 0:12:45 | 0:12:47 | |
He was a fuck-up! | 0:12:47 | 0:12:48 | |
So I was interested in his experience at Pratt | 0:12:53 | 0:12:56 | |
and how he found himself as an artist there. | 0:12:56 | 0:12:59 | |
Is that a self-portrait? | 0:12:59 | 0:13:01 | |
Yes. This one's actually ink so I'm imagining he rolled an oil-based ink | 0:13:01 | 0:13:06 | |
-onto his face. -Yeah. | 0:13:06 | 0:13:07 | |
It's kind of hard to comprehend. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:09 | |
The psychedelia of it, too. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:11 | |
He was really into acid at the time. | 0:13:11 | 0:13:13 | |
We both had a similar background. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:18 | |
Right off the bat, I think we kind of hit it off. | 0:13:18 | 0:13:20 | |
He started taking drugs - | 0:13:20 | 0:13:22 | |
smoked marijuana, LSD. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:25 | |
We both were living on candy bars and cigarettes, basically. | 0:13:25 | 0:13:28 | |
And he was getting really skinny and we were both really pale-looking. | 0:13:28 | 0:13:32 | |
But we smoked, and so he put LSD in the cigarette. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:37 | |
I completely lost my memory, and so... | 0:13:37 | 0:13:40 | |
..I, er... | 0:13:42 | 0:13:43 | |
I don't know, I'm losing track. I'm kind of like having a... | 0:13:49 | 0:13:52 | |
I'm going back there too much, I guess. | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
ROBERT: When I was in art school, I'd stay up all night stoned, | 0:13:56 | 0:13:59 | |
trying to think. What hasn't been done? | 0:13:59 | 0:14:01 | |
I was obsessed with trying to come up with a new | 0:14:01 | 0:14:04 | |
approach to art, to be unique somehow. | 0:14:04 | 0:14:07 | |
Bob and I realised, you have to get a little name recognition, and sometimes | 0:14:07 | 0:14:12 | |
the weird thing can work well for you. | 0:14:12 | 0:14:14 | |
So, somewhere along the way there, he had purchased this little monkey. | 0:14:14 | 0:14:19 | |
He named it Scratch. | 0:14:19 | 0:14:20 | |
And I did some really nice drawings of Scratch. | 0:14:20 | 0:14:23 | |
The monkey had some bad habits. | 0:14:23 | 0:14:26 | |
The monkey masturbated a lot. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:29 | |
The monkey threw crap at you sometimes. | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
And he would walk around with the monkey on his shoulder, | 0:14:32 | 0:14:35 | |
and he was wearing a black cape. | 0:14:35 | 0:14:37 | |
Robert and I graduated Pratt in '67, | 0:14:37 | 0:14:40 | |
the Summer of Love, and blah, blah, blah. | 0:14:40 | 0:14:43 | |
And here's Robert standing all by himself, in a corner, | 0:14:43 | 0:14:48 | |
you know, hiding his face. | 0:14:48 | 0:14:50 | |
He's extremely mysterious. | 0:14:50 | 0:14:52 | |
And that's who he was. | 0:14:52 | 0:14:54 | |
The final project for both of us was to make a musical instrument out | 0:14:54 | 0:14:58 | |
of a bone. Then, I remember, I got a call from Bob. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:01 | |
And he was all kind of weepy, and he said, "I don't know what to do, | 0:15:01 | 0:15:05 | |
"Scratch has died." It was maybe two o'clock in the morning, | 0:15:05 | 0:15:09 | |
he came in and he was really shook. | 0:15:09 | 0:15:12 | |
He said, "I boiled Scratch's head, | 0:15:12 | 0:15:16 | |
"and I've got my bone, but, you know, it was terrible. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:20 | |
"It smelled terrible, I hated doing it, I had to cut his head off." | 0:15:20 | 0:15:23 | |
So he aced the project. | 0:15:23 | 0:15:25 | |
Yeah. | 0:15:25 | 0:15:26 | |
ROBERT: There was a lot of negativity, even at Pratt, toward what I did. | 0:15:28 | 0:15:31 | |
People would say, oh, that isn't art, | 0:15:31 | 0:15:34 | |
that isn't the way you make art, and I just did it the way I wanted to do it. | 0:15:34 | 0:15:37 | |
Robert set himself apart from his classmates. | 0:15:37 | 0:15:41 | |
It's a beast, and this is his backside. | 0:15:41 | 0:15:44 | |
It's a pose that he uses himself later on in self-portraits. | 0:15:44 | 0:15:48 | |
If you compare it to Bullwhip, that backward pose, | 0:15:48 | 0:15:52 | |
he already has it in his mind. | 0:15:52 | 0:15:54 | |
The last time I saw Bob, he had no clothes on, he was afraid, | 0:15:54 | 0:15:58 | |
he had all the furniture stacked up against the door and he was really | 0:15:58 | 0:16:01 | |
beside himself, and he said... | 0:16:01 | 0:16:03 | |
.."I'm afraid, I'm afraid, someone's coming, someone's coming. Could you give me 20?" | 0:16:05 | 0:16:09 | |
I met Robert accidentally, and he was just a boy. | 0:16:19 | 0:16:23 | |
I mean, we were both 20, | 0:16:23 | 0:16:25 | |
he was a kid going to Pratt, and we fell in love, | 0:16:25 | 0:16:29 | |
and he was my boyfriend. | 0:16:29 | 0:16:30 | |
-ROBERT: -It was the first time I had ever been in love with anybody. | 0:16:32 | 0:16:35 | |
The fact that it was somebody as unique as Patti... | 0:16:35 | 0:16:38 | |
I mean, she was a magical kind of person, | 0:16:38 | 0:16:42 | |
so, like, you know... And she was... | 0:16:42 | 0:16:44 | |
..supportive of what I was doing, | 0:16:45 | 0:16:47 | |
of my magic, and I was supportive of her magic. Neither one of us were | 0:16:47 | 0:16:52 | |
ever jealous, so it was, like, a storybook relationship. | 0:16:52 | 0:16:56 | |
He helped me to build confidence in my work and to think of myself as artist, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:07 | |
to have a concept of oneself as an artist. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:09 | |
That was always really important to Robert, | 0:17:09 | 0:17:11 | |
not as an apprentice, not as a student, but as an artist. | 0:17:11 | 0:17:16 | |
I loved photographing my friends, and Robert called me and said, | 0:17:19 | 0:17:23 | |
"Can you do some naked pictures of Patti and me? | 0:17:23 | 0:17:26 | |
"I want to make a little film called Garden Of Earthly Delights." | 0:17:26 | 0:17:28 | |
So then we set up lights on the back of a chair and I just took the pictures | 0:17:30 | 0:17:34 | |
that he asked for. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:35 | |
Robert and Patti were so beautiful in such an interesting way, | 0:17:38 | 0:17:44 | |
in an unconventional way, I think. | 0:17:44 | 0:17:46 | |
He exuded this kind of androgynous sexuality, and so did Patti. | 0:17:46 | 0:17:52 | |
Patti was drawing all the time and Robert was drawing all the time and | 0:17:52 | 0:17:57 | |
making things. | 0:17:57 | 0:17:58 | |
It was messy, there was stuff hanging around, tacked up on the walls, | 0:17:58 | 0:18:02 | |
it looked like a scene from a Godard movie. | 0:18:02 | 0:18:04 | |
We sat for hours and hours, night after night, drawing and, | 0:18:10 | 0:18:15 | |
you know, drawing from each other as well as drawing. | 0:18:15 | 0:18:18 | |
I'm a thief. And I dig it! | 0:18:18 | 0:18:21 | |
A good thief never hesitates, a good thief steals clean. | 0:18:23 | 0:18:28 | |
And now I'm stealing now. And now I'm stealing now. | 0:18:28 | 0:18:32 | |
And now I'm stealing now. | 0:18:32 | 0:18:34 | |
The Chelsea has been home for more than a century to a colony of artists | 0:18:37 | 0:18:41 | |
who have also celebrated it in books, poems, plays, dance and painting. | 0:18:41 | 0:18:46 | |
ROBERT: I kept on saying to Patti... | 0:18:49 | 0:18:50 | |
I loved them. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:10 | |
We were like a family. | 0:19:10 | 0:19:11 | |
He kept telling me I was like his sister. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:16 | |
Patti was working like crazy to let us live. | 0:19:16 | 0:19:20 | |
She was very generous. | 0:19:20 | 0:19:22 | |
And she wasn't jealous of me at all, which is wonderful. | 0:19:22 | 0:19:25 | |
She trusted me with Robert, totally. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:32 | |
I never was in love with him or had any sexual feelings for him, | 0:19:33 | 0:19:38 | |
but we were very close. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:40 | |
We would sit in my totally white empty room at the Chelsea, | 0:19:43 | 0:19:48 | |
which supposedly had had Oscar Wilde stay in it and had had Jackson Pollock | 0:19:48 | 0:19:53 | |
stay in it, and I had Warhol's clouds floating, | 0:19:53 | 0:19:57 | |
the helium clouds. And that's all I had in the room, and a mattress. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:01 | |
We lived on the floor and it was clean enough to eat off of, and that's | 0:20:01 | 0:20:05 | |
exactly what we did. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:07 | |
It was a 25-hour art show all the time or movie set or whatever you would | 0:20:07 | 0:20:12 | |
want to call the life. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:13 | |
It was just a life being recorded. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:15 | |
In a stark sun-drenched studio lives film-maker Sandra Daly. | 0:20:16 | 0:20:21 | |
I called him up, I said, | 0:20:21 | 0:20:22 | |
"Could you bring over some of the things and put them up on the walls | 0:20:22 | 0:20:26 | |
"cos there's nothing here, it's all white?" | 0:20:26 | 0:20:29 | |
And he came over with the stuff, and I looked and I thought, God, | 0:20:29 | 0:20:33 | |
leather pants with a cock sticking out! I thought, why not? | 0:20:33 | 0:20:36 | |
It looked fabulous. | 0:20:36 | 0:20:38 | |
ROBERT: I was working with | 0:20:38 | 0:20:40 | |
articles of clothing that were kind of like fetish sculpture. | 0:20:40 | 0:20:43 | |
If I had a jacket that I wore all the time, I'd put it in a piece. | 0:20:43 | 0:20:47 | |
So it was like assemblage. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:50 | |
What's made you live in the Chelsea for the past seven years? | 0:20:50 | 0:20:53 | |
Um, my friends, I guess, live here, and my teachers. | 0:20:55 | 0:20:59 | |
-It's my home. -Robert didn't say much. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:04 | |
SHE LAUGHS | 0:21:04 | 0:21:05 | |
He didn't talk at all, did he, in that clip? | 0:21:05 | 0:21:07 | |
Robert could sit in silence a lot more comfortably than I could. | 0:21:13 | 0:21:16 | |
I'm Edward Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe's brother. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:23 | |
I was three years of age when he left the house. | 0:21:27 | 0:21:30 | |
I remember waiting anxiously on my stoop and knowing Robert and Patti | 0:21:30 | 0:21:35 | |
were coming, and I'd be like, wow! | 0:21:35 | 0:21:37 | |
Wow, look at these guys! I mean... | 0:21:37 | 0:21:40 | |
They didn't look like anybody else, they didn't talk like anybody else. | 0:21:40 | 0:21:43 | |
I would say creature. They were like creatures. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
Just the way he dressed, the way he carried himself, the way his hair was, the way, er... | 0:21:46 | 0:21:51 | |
It was just... | 0:21:52 | 0:21:53 | |
It encompassed him. | 0:21:55 | 0:21:57 | |
The art. The artist encompassed him. | 0:21:58 | 0:22:00 | |
There was no separation. | 0:22:02 | 0:22:05 | |
Wow! | 0:22:45 | 0:22:46 | |
I see them as exquisite. | 0:22:48 | 0:22:49 | |
Most porn looks amateurish and... | 0:22:51 | 0:22:55 | |
lower class. | 0:22:55 | 0:22:57 | |
Just make it look like... | 0:22:59 | 0:23:03 | |
I think I said a Louis Quinze chair, | 0:23:03 | 0:23:05 | |
so that it just takes your breath away. | 0:23:05 | 0:23:09 | |
It doesn't matter what the subject matter is. | 0:23:09 | 0:23:12 | |
It's like a love story. | 0:23:14 | 0:23:16 | |
To porn, maybe. | 0:23:17 | 0:23:18 | |
ROBERT: There was a feeling I could get through looking at pornographic imagery, | 0:23:21 | 0:23:25 | |
and I thought, if I could somehow retain that feeling, | 0:23:25 | 0:23:28 | |
maybe it was the forbidden, because I was young, you know, | 0:23:28 | 0:23:31 | |
that if I could that across and make an art statement... | 0:23:31 | 0:23:34 | |
..do it in a way that just kind of like | 0:23:36 | 0:23:38 | |
reached a certain kind of perfection, that I would be doing something... | 0:23:38 | 0:23:41 | |
..that was uniquely my own. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:45 | |
Oh, and that one even includes a camera. | 0:23:45 | 0:23:47 | |
He highlighted it, and this was before he was even making photographs. | 0:23:47 | 0:23:52 | |
But this is when he started thinking, | 0:23:52 | 0:23:53 | |
it would be cheaper for me to take photographs than buy all this porn! | 0:23:53 | 0:23:57 | |
Same great film. | 0:23:59 | 0:24:00 | |
ROBERT: I wanted raw material that originated with myself. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:04 | |
I felt that I was stealing them from other people and so that's how | 0:24:04 | 0:24:09 | |
I started with the Polaroids. | 0:24:09 | 0:24:11 | |
It was not because I wanted to be a photographer. | 0:24:11 | 0:24:13 | |
We had a Polaroid camera and Polaroid film was really expensive, | 0:24:15 | 0:24:19 | |
so my focus was always that Robert got what he needed first. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:25 | |
And we had so little money for film, | 0:24:25 | 0:24:27 | |
we concentrated on getting him the film. | 0:24:27 | 0:24:30 | |
ROBERT: It was all there from the start and, | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
when I first started taking Polaroids, | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
I was working with photographs that dealt with | 0:24:36 | 0:24:38 | |
sexuality - portraits, flowers and still lives, | 0:24:38 | 0:24:43 | |
because I used the still lives to experiment with lighting. | 0:24:43 | 0:24:46 | |
These are the first times that Robert took emulsion. | 0:24:46 | 0:24:50 | |
He washed it off of the Polaroid till it floated above the base | 0:24:50 | 0:24:55 | |
and stretched them out. | 0:24:55 | 0:24:57 | |
That's me, ugly as ever. | 0:24:57 | 0:24:59 | |
Here's Patti. | 0:24:59 | 0:25:00 | |
And that's David Croland. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:06 | |
I'm really not a model any more, I'm just, you know, | 0:25:08 | 0:25:11 | |
an object. | 0:25:11 | 0:25:12 | |
If you want an explanation of why I'm wearing this robe, | 0:25:13 | 0:25:16 | |
it's for Robert, and Robert liked robes. | 0:25:16 | 0:25:19 | |
And he liked black silk. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:21 | |
And I thought twice about it, and then I thought, | 0:25:22 | 0:25:24 | |
you're not going to think three times. | 0:25:24 | 0:25:26 | |
Patti is the first girl he photographed for Polaroid, and I was the first boy. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:32 | |
HE POPS LIPS | 0:25:33 | 0:25:34 | |
I met Robert in 1970... | 0:25:34 | 0:25:37 | |
on Memorial Day... | 0:25:37 | 0:25:39 | |
on a steamy hot day. | 0:25:39 | 0:25:40 | |
As soon as he got his camera, the film was loaded and my clothes were off, | 0:25:42 | 0:25:46 | |
starting with... | 0:25:46 | 0:25:48 | |
a robe, and then the robe was like here, etc, etc. | 0:25:48 | 0:25:53 | |
He photographed me a lot and, in those days, | 0:25:53 | 0:25:56 | |
I just thought, who cares, Polaroid film? | 0:25:56 | 0:25:58 | |
I was used to being photographed by the big format, you know, by... | 0:25:58 | 0:26:01 | |
Should we drop some names? Someone said, "Stop dropping names." | 0:26:02 | 0:26:04 | |
I said, "I can't help it if everyone I know is fantastic." | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
I thought these Polaroids were like, what the hell are these? | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
I saw very quickly that he wasn't just stacking up | 0:26:10 | 0:26:13 | |
a bunch of Polaroids, he was making stuff out of them. | 0:26:13 | 0:26:16 | |
He was incorporating them into a new type of art, | 0:26:16 | 0:26:21 | |
which no-one was doing. No-one. | 0:26:21 | 0:26:24 | |
And then, someone called Patti to say they were boyfriends, | 0:26:27 | 0:26:32 | |
so that's...we were busted. | 0:26:32 | 0:26:35 | |
Patti knew that I was helping Robert, | 0:26:37 | 0:26:39 | |
so there was no animosity, not at all. | 0:26:39 | 0:26:42 | |
At least, I don't think so. | 0:26:42 | 0:26:44 | |
When you're young, you don't have much of a conscience. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:49 | |
I mean, when you're young, I don't even know if you think. | 0:26:49 | 0:26:52 | |
I don't even think it's a good idea to think - to this day. | 0:26:53 | 0:26:57 | |
It's just better to do stuff. | 0:26:57 | 0:26:59 | |
I had this small amount of money. I could make a movie. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:05 | |
I said, Robert, you can pick out anything you want to do. | 0:27:05 | 0:27:09 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: I just thought it would be interesting to have a ring | 0:27:09 | 0:27:12 | |
through your tit, cos I'd maybe seen it in a movie or something, | 0:27:12 | 0:27:15 | |
but it wasn't something anybody had at that moment | 0:27:15 | 0:27:19 | |
and all of a sudden, there was a whole situation where | 0:27:19 | 0:27:23 | |
I was to get my nipple pierced. | 0:27:23 | 0:27:25 | |
I had done a number of films for Andy Warhol. | 0:27:26 | 0:27:29 | |
So I was... As a model, I was used to having the camera trained on me. | 0:27:29 | 0:27:33 | |
Yes. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:36 | |
But I had no idea where that film was going. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:39 | |
Where that film went was to the Museum of Modern Art, | 0:27:39 | 0:27:42 | |
and it showed there at a big screening. | 0:27:42 | 0:27:46 | |
MoMo was very crowded and I was writing film reviews then | 0:27:46 | 0:27:49 | |
for the Village Voice and I remember | 0:27:49 | 0:27:51 | |
Robert was standing against the wall and he had this sort of angelic | 0:27:51 | 0:27:56 | |
kind of hair and I guess I had a crush on him and whatever. | 0:27:56 | 0:28:00 | |
Right away, in my mind, I saw him as an angel and a devil. | 0:28:00 | 0:28:04 | |
Then Patti has this brilliant monologue | 0:28:06 | 0:28:09 | |
that she did as the soundtrack. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:12 | |
I read this book, Robert had this book in his drawer, | 0:28:13 | 0:28:17 | |
called Leather Boys and like, I picked it up the other night, | 0:28:17 | 0:28:20 | |
cos he went out and once he got those leather pants, | 0:28:20 | 0:28:23 | |
he'd be down on Christopher Street. | 0:28:23 | 0:28:25 | |
Like, he wasn't like my boyfriend or nothing. | 0:28:26 | 0:28:28 | |
I guess the only reason I don't like it, is cos they've got secrets. | 0:28:28 | 0:28:32 | |
"In sharp counterpoint to the delicacy of the visuals, | 0:28:34 | 0:28:37 | |
"is the harsh and hilarious soundtrack by Patti Smith, poet. | 0:28:37 | 0:28:41 | |
"Robert's ex-girlfriend... | 0:28:41 | 0:28:44 | |
"..who, it seems, dislikes homosexuals because, | 0:28:44 | 0:28:47 | |
"A, she feels left out | 0:28:47 | 0:28:49 | |
"and, B, they use their assholes." | 0:28:49 | 0:28:52 | |
He called me after the review came out and said that he really liked it | 0:28:54 | 0:28:58 | |
and could we, like, meet for a cup of coffee or something? | 0:28:58 | 0:29:01 | |
Robert and I would, you know, meet up at like four in the afternoon | 0:29:10 | 0:29:13 | |
and go into some deserted restaurant and sit, you know, | 0:29:13 | 0:29:16 | |
just order coffee and... | 0:29:16 | 0:29:18 | |
He only had a Polaroid then, he didn't even have a camera. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:21 | |
But he was already, you know, planning on his first exhibition | 0:29:22 | 0:29:25 | |
and who he was going to invite and who he hoped would come. | 0:29:25 | 0:29:29 | |
This is Robert Mapplethorpe's announcement for his first solo exhibition. | 0:29:29 | 0:29:33 | |
The envelope is embossed by Tiffany & Co. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:37 | |
It was a show of Polaroids. | 0:29:38 | 0:29:41 | |
He encased his announcement in the "don't touch here" | 0:29:41 | 0:29:45 | |
safety cover from the Polaroid film pack. | 0:29:45 | 0:29:48 | |
Mapplethorpe says in several interviews, | 0:29:48 | 0:29:51 | |
an exhibition doesn't begin when you go to the opening, | 0:29:51 | 0:29:54 | |
it begins when you get the invitation. | 0:29:54 | 0:29:56 | |
It is a small dot sticker, | 0:29:57 | 0:29:59 | |
that's really not opaque. | 0:29:59 | 0:30:02 | |
THEY LAUGH | 0:30:02 | 0:30:04 | |
What do you want the viewer to feel when they open that invitation? | 0:30:05 | 0:30:09 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: I want them to remember, that's all, you know. | 0:30:09 | 0:30:12 | |
You're thinking of what? | 0:30:12 | 0:30:14 | |
Standing out from this huge morass of... | 0:30:14 | 0:30:17 | |
Being more... Why can't it be in terms of one's whole lifestyle? | 0:30:17 | 0:30:20 | |
You know what I'm saying? | 0:30:20 | 0:30:22 | |
The whole point of being an artist | 0:30:22 | 0:30:25 | |
or making a statement is to learn about yourself. | 0:30:25 | 0:30:28 | |
I think that's the most important part. | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
The photographs, I think, are less important | 0:30:31 | 0:30:34 | |
than the life that one is leading. | 0:30:34 | 0:30:37 | |
I would just run around and | 0:30:48 | 0:30:51 | |
give people their food. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:52 | |
It really was a comprehensive scene of downtown artists, | 0:30:53 | 0:30:58 | |
not a closed world, but it was, | 0:30:58 | 0:31:01 | |
you know, almost like a clubhouse, in a way. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:03 | |
I probably saw Robert almost every night of my life. | 0:31:08 | 0:31:12 | |
You know, most people that I knew lived in such horrible places | 0:31:12 | 0:31:16 | |
that you really only knew where they lived if you had sex with them. | 0:31:16 | 0:31:20 | |
Lots of times in Max's, he would come and sit with me. | 0:31:20 | 0:31:23 | |
You know, it was probably the time I enjoyed Robert the most, | 0:31:23 | 0:31:25 | |
because he was an incredibly amusing gossip. | 0:31:25 | 0:31:27 | |
He was extremely good-looking, in a very particular way. You know? | 0:31:27 | 0:31:31 | |
No-one that saw Robert did not have a crush on him immediately. | 0:31:31 | 0:31:37 | |
No-one. Everyone... Dogs liked him. | 0:31:37 | 0:31:40 | |
He looked kind of like, you know, | 0:31:40 | 0:31:42 | |
a kind of ruined Cupid, and he was very... | 0:31:42 | 0:31:46 | |
reliant on his charm. | 0:31:46 | 0:31:48 | |
You know. In other words, he made great use of it. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:51 | |
By which I mean productive to Robert. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:54 | |
Robert was not a hustler. Robert didn't have to hustle. | 0:31:54 | 0:31:58 | |
People hustled Robert. | 0:31:58 | 0:32:00 | |
Mainly, out of his pants, if they could. | 0:32:00 | 0:32:03 | |
Me too, by the way. | 0:32:03 | 0:32:05 | |
Robert didn't think anything was wrong with his ambition. | 0:32:05 | 0:32:10 | |
He didn't think of it as selling out. | 0:32:10 | 0:32:11 | |
He didn't think... | 0:32:11 | 0:32:13 | |
He just, you know, he pursued it the way that people now do. | 0:32:13 | 0:32:17 | |
Was Robert ambitious? | 0:32:17 | 0:32:18 | |
There is no word for it. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:24 | |
For either of them. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:26 | |
That is an understatement. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:30 | |
For both of them. | 0:32:31 | 0:32:33 | |
Yeah. | 0:32:37 | 0:32:38 | |
Unbelievably. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:43 | |
I went away for a summer and when I got back, | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
Robert was suddenly into S&M. | 0:32:47 | 0:32:49 | |
One day, I showed up at his place and he was wearing leather pants | 0:32:50 | 0:32:54 | |
and it looked like a radio attached to his crotch. | 0:32:54 | 0:32:57 | |
I said, "What the hell is that?" | 0:32:57 | 0:32:58 | |
He said, "It's a codpiece, isn't it great?" | 0:32:58 | 0:33:01 | |
I said, "This is like the beginning of the end, | 0:33:01 | 0:33:03 | |
"if you keep dressing like this!" | 0:33:03 | 0:33:04 | |
He started to trick me out in leather jackets and handcuffs. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:09 | |
They started to get, not me, at all, | 0:33:10 | 0:33:14 | |
and more him, | 0:33:14 | 0:33:16 | |
and he wanted me to go, always to go further | 0:33:16 | 0:33:18 | |
and I thought, "That's not going to happen. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:21 | |
"I'm a model." | 0:33:21 | 0:33:23 | |
Sam Wagstaff. I only knew that he was eccentric, handsome... | 0:33:24 | 0:33:28 | |
And then - when he took me to his loft later that day - rich. | 0:33:28 | 0:33:34 | |
But right before we went to his loft on Bond Street, | 0:33:34 | 0:33:37 | |
he spied a little tiny picture of Robert taken in a photo booth, | 0:33:37 | 0:33:41 | |
with that little sailor cap on. | 0:33:41 | 0:33:43 | |
He looked like a Jean Genet drawing and he said, "Who is this?" | 0:33:43 | 0:33:47 | |
I said, "That's my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend." | 0:33:47 | 0:33:50 | |
So I called Robert up and I said, "Listen, your ship's come in, | 0:33:50 | 0:33:54 | |
"it's in my harbour, you're going to jump on this boat. | 0:33:54 | 0:33:56 | |
"You're going to love him, he's going to love you, I can tell." | 0:33:56 | 0:33:59 | |
They had a date that week and they fell in love, very quickly. | 0:34:01 | 0:34:06 | |
Sam was his protector, in every way. | 0:34:06 | 0:34:09 | |
You know, the way that girls are protected by men. | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
It was a beautiful match. | 0:34:12 | 0:34:14 | |
Beautiful. | 0:34:14 | 0:34:16 | |
Really beautiful. | 0:34:16 | 0:34:18 | |
I knew other people who had older, like, guys who supported them | 0:34:42 | 0:34:45 | |
and stuff like that, but Sam devoted himself. | 0:34:45 | 0:34:48 | |
The career Robert had, I don't believe would have existed without Sam. | 0:34:48 | 0:34:51 | |
I met him when he moved | 0:35:09 | 0:35:11 | |
next to us on Bond Street, | 0:35:11 | 0:35:13 | |
so he was literally the boy next door, | 0:35:13 | 0:35:16 | |
and we just instantly became friends. | 0:35:16 | 0:35:20 | |
It is just this little cobblestone street in New York. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:26 | |
Robert lived at 24 Bond Street | 0:35:26 | 0:35:29 | |
and Brice and Helen Marden lived at lived at 26 Bond Street | 0:35:29 | 0:35:33 | |
and I lived at 42 Bond Street. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:36 | |
And the '70s in New York was very different than now. | 0:35:36 | 0:35:40 | |
New York was bankrupt. | 0:35:40 | 0:35:42 | |
Things were pretty corrupt and violent. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:45 | |
There was a lot of crime. | 0:35:45 | 0:35:47 | |
And, you know, Bond and Bowery was in the middle of, | 0:35:47 | 0:35:50 | |
you know, | 0:35:50 | 0:35:53 | |
people sleeping in the doorways and lying on the streets, | 0:35:53 | 0:35:57 | |
but it was the art world. | 0:35:57 | 0:36:00 | |
When we first moved here, I was hysterical. | 0:36:02 | 0:36:05 | |
I said, "We have just spent 40,000 bucks on this dump | 0:36:05 | 0:36:08 | |
"and look at this area, look at this, I mean, | 0:36:08 | 0:36:10 | |
"it's like miles before you can get to a restaurant, a grocery store, | 0:36:10 | 0:36:14 | |
"you know, a light at night, the place is dark." | 0:36:14 | 0:36:18 | |
You had this beautiful free-flowing stream | 0:36:18 | 0:36:20 | |
and then there would be all the soap suds and garbage. | 0:36:20 | 0:36:23 | |
-Junkies. -That's the way Bond Street was. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:25 | |
And now, of course, the last time I tracked it, | 0:36:25 | 0:36:29 | |
the penthouse in that building I think sold for 19 million. | 0:36:29 | 0:36:33 | |
I never thought we'd have any money. Did you? | 0:36:35 | 0:36:40 | |
No, it wasn't the intention. | 0:36:40 | 0:36:43 | |
I mean, it wasn't as though it was just a band of innocents, you know. | 0:36:44 | 0:36:49 | |
You came to New York | 0:36:49 | 0:36:50 | |
because you felt you had to be in New York, you know, | 0:36:50 | 0:36:54 | |
or else you would have just gone to some place that was nice to live. | 0:36:54 | 0:36:58 | |
He loved coming over and taking photographs of my bats. | 0:37:00 | 0:37:04 | |
You know, he wasn't Robert Mapplethorpe in the beginning. | 0:37:04 | 0:37:07 | |
You know, there was no thought that this was ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, right? | 0:37:07 | 0:37:12 | |
-Right, Brice? -Right. -Nothing. | 0:37:12 | 0:37:14 | |
We were just all doing our work and chatting about it. | 0:37:14 | 0:37:18 | |
We'd go to these funny little used book stores | 0:37:20 | 0:37:23 | |
and they'd have, like, cardboard boxes filled with old postcards | 0:37:23 | 0:37:27 | |
and filled with old photo prints and Robert would go through them | 0:37:27 | 0:37:30 | |
and he'd find, you know, a Weston or Steichen or something. | 0:37:30 | 0:37:35 | |
You know, it was like no-one knew what it was and it was, like 5, | 0:37:35 | 0:37:38 | |
or 10, and he would do that much more once he got together with Sam. | 0:37:38 | 0:37:42 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: What happens is I started collecting photography, | 0:37:43 | 0:37:46 | |
so I studied it through holding these pictures in my hand, | 0:37:46 | 0:37:50 | |
which is probably the best way to study photography. | 0:37:50 | 0:37:53 | |
Robert and I liked to lie on his bed and look at all the photographs | 0:37:53 | 0:37:57 | |
Sam bought and then he would tell me how much they were worth | 0:37:57 | 0:37:59 | |
and we would laugh. | 0:37:59 | 0:38:01 | |
Never having really looked at photographs as art, | 0:38:03 | 0:38:06 | |
it really took Robert to bring me to photography. | 0:38:06 | 0:38:10 | |
That's terrific. What are you up to? | 0:38:12 | 0:38:15 | |
-Working. -You should see some of Robert's work sometime. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:18 | |
I'll be getting down after the sale. | 0:38:18 | 0:38:20 | |
There was something about the quality | 0:38:20 | 0:38:23 | |
of even the Polaroids | 0:38:23 | 0:38:26 | |
which startled me. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:28 | |
Something very knife-sharp about his work. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:33 | |
I think this is the most intimate thing we have in the archive | 0:38:33 | 0:38:36 | |
between Sam and Robert. | 0:38:36 | 0:38:38 | |
Robert doesn't write, so in a way, | 0:38:38 | 0:38:40 | |
this linen album is his love letter to Sam. | 0:38:40 | 0:38:44 | |
You can see the dialogue that's going on between them | 0:38:44 | 0:38:47 | |
-about photography and love and all that sexuality. -Yeah. | 0:38:47 | 0:38:52 | |
I used to be slightly embarrassed | 0:38:53 | 0:38:56 | |
by certain photographs that Robert took. | 0:38:56 | 0:39:01 | |
He helped me get over that. | 0:39:01 | 0:39:04 | |
Robert has always liked to play on the edge of pornography. | 0:39:17 | 0:39:23 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: I always was fascinated with the idea of taking | 0:39:23 | 0:39:27 | |
a loaded subject like sexuality and somehow bringing it to a level | 0:39:27 | 0:39:32 | |
that it hadn't been to before. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:34 | |
He's absolutely wedded to truth | 0:39:34 | 0:39:37 | |
and opens it up in front of his | 0:39:37 | 0:39:39 | |
camera in an almost surgical way. | 0:39:39 | 0:39:43 | |
I remember somebody saying, "You know, you really shouldn't | 0:39:43 | 0:39:46 | |
"do that because it's going to fuck up your career," | 0:39:46 | 0:39:49 | |
and I said I thought it was stupid for him to even think that way. | 0:39:49 | 0:39:52 | |
I was convinced that what I was doing | 0:39:52 | 0:39:54 | |
was the right thing to be doing. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:56 | |
I met Robert in the early '70s | 0:40:06 | 0:40:10 | |
on Fire Island, where his friend, Wagstaff, | 0:40:10 | 0:40:14 | |
was renting a beautiful house and they invited me to stay. | 0:40:14 | 0:40:19 | |
The '70s was a sexual time in Fire Island. | 0:40:22 | 0:40:26 | |
We went for sex, | 0:40:26 | 0:40:29 | |
for that beautiful availability | 0:40:29 | 0:40:32 | |
of sexual encounters. | 0:40:32 | 0:40:35 | |
I mean, | 0:40:35 | 0:40:36 | |
the drugs were floating around. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:40 | |
It was heaven. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:43 | |
Whenever we went out, I was recognised, right? | 0:40:43 | 0:40:47 | |
And people stopped me, and Robert liked that | 0:40:47 | 0:40:50 | |
and he was craving for fame | 0:40:50 | 0:40:53 | |
and he enjoyed to be seen with me, | 0:40:53 | 0:40:56 | |
but he was sort of feeling he should be the one who should be recognised, | 0:40:56 | 0:41:03 | |
and so I agreed, as a friend, | 0:41:03 | 0:41:06 | |
to pose for him. | 0:41:06 | 0:41:08 | |
Then when the weekend was over, | 0:41:08 | 0:41:10 | |
Robert went back to New York City | 0:41:10 | 0:41:14 | |
to work on his career. | 0:41:14 | 0:41:17 | |
For me, the ambition was to get laid. | 0:41:17 | 0:41:19 | |
Robert's ambition was to be a great photographer, | 0:41:19 | 0:41:23 | |
and that's why he is, | 0:41:23 | 0:41:24 | |
because in order to be a Mapplethorpe, you had to work hard. | 0:41:24 | 0:41:29 | |
He walked into my office at Drummer - | 0:41:31 | 0:41:34 | |
a major gay magazine, where I was the editor, | 0:41:34 | 0:41:37 | |
wearing leather chaps and a leather jacket, | 0:41:37 | 0:41:40 | |
carrying a black leather portfolio, | 0:41:40 | 0:41:42 | |
and said | 0:41:42 | 0:41:43 | |
"Hello, I'm Robert Mapplethorpe, the pornographic photographer." | 0:41:43 | 0:41:47 | |
Well, everybody that came to my desk | 0:41:47 | 0:41:50 | |
was a pornographic photographer. | 0:41:50 | 0:41:51 | |
The problem in the '70s was everybody was having sex - | 0:41:51 | 0:41:54 | |
photographers weren't shooting, painters weren't painting, | 0:41:54 | 0:41:57 | |
writers weren't writing, but Robert was functioning. | 0:41:57 | 0:42:00 | |
We ended up in bed, then we became bicoastal lovers | 0:42:00 | 0:42:04 | |
for the next three years. | 0:42:04 | 0:42:06 | |
He knew that he needed to be written about, | 0:42:07 | 0:42:09 | |
which was one of the reasons he came to Drummer. | 0:42:09 | 0:42:11 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: Well, I think life is about using people, | 0:42:11 | 0:42:14 | |
and being used by people, and that's what a relationship is all about. | 0:42:14 | 0:42:17 | |
I was just one of many writers that he approached. | 0:42:17 | 0:42:20 | |
I mean, nearly all of his friends were writers. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:22 | |
He wanted to be a legend, he told me he wanted to be | 0:42:22 | 0:42:26 | |
a story told in beds at night around the world. | 0:42:26 | 0:42:28 | |
He had that kind of drive. | 0:42:28 | 0:42:30 | |
And in a way that's part of what makes geniuses, | 0:42:30 | 0:42:34 | |
this self-centredness and this ability to use people, | 0:42:34 | 0:42:38 | |
so I was someone who could help Robert. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:40 | |
I had that power of being, you know, editor of Interview, | 0:42:40 | 0:42:44 | |
but I don't think we used him that much, | 0:42:44 | 0:42:46 | |
because I was aware that Andy didn't like him. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:49 | |
He always said "Oh, he's so dirty-looking," | 0:42:49 | 0:42:51 | |
and, you know, "He's so creepy..." | 0:42:51 | 0:42:53 | |
Andy didn't like anybody who took Polaroids, he thought | 0:42:53 | 0:42:56 | |
he sort of was the only person who should be taking Polaroids. | 0:42:56 | 0:42:59 | |
But once Andy realised that Robert was with Sam Wagstaff, | 0:42:59 | 0:43:02 | |
he started to like him. | 0:43:02 | 0:43:04 | |
So, it was OK for me to then use him for Interview, | 0:43:04 | 0:43:08 | |
and we sent him to Mustique. | 0:43:08 | 0:43:10 | |
We met Robert, my husband and I, | 0:43:13 | 0:43:15 | |
on our way to Mustique, | 0:43:15 | 0:43:18 | |
in a private little plane. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:20 | |
I hadn't heard of him at all, | 0:43:21 | 0:43:23 | |
but I was fascinated by his mind and on top of that, | 0:43:23 | 0:43:26 | |
he was so good looking. | 0:43:26 | 0:43:29 | |
He said, at one point, "I want to photograph you," | 0:43:29 | 0:43:32 | |
and I said, "No way!" | 0:43:32 | 0:43:34 | |
And he said, "You know what, you might regret it later, | 0:43:34 | 0:43:39 | |
"because I'm going to be a fantastic great photographer | 0:43:39 | 0:43:43 | |
"and you're not going to have your photograph taken by me." | 0:43:43 | 0:43:46 | |
He was a big hit with the aristocracy | 0:43:48 | 0:43:50 | |
and he loved Mustique and Mustique loved him. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:54 | |
He was living this double kind of life where he would be uptown | 0:44:05 | 0:44:08 | |
at a fancy dinner, and then he would go to The Mine Shaft. | 0:44:08 | 0:44:13 | |
It looks well worn! | 0:44:13 | 0:44:15 | |
-I imagine it is. -Not just a souvenir. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:18 | |
Well, that was one of the key places he went to find his models - | 0:44:18 | 0:44:23 | |
The Mine Shaft. | 0:44:23 | 0:44:25 | |
What went on in The Mine Shaft, for all those years, | 0:44:29 | 0:44:33 | |
was two floors of the most outrageous sex | 0:44:33 | 0:44:40 | |
had this side of Ancient Rome. | 0:44:40 | 0:44:43 | |
All kinds of S&M sex, | 0:44:43 | 0:44:46 | |
scatological sex, fetish sex - from the sling, to the stocks, | 0:44:46 | 0:44:50 | |
to the whipping post. | 0:44:50 | 0:44:52 | |
People talk of the famous bathtub. | 0:44:52 | 0:44:54 | |
I mean, there was always somebody in it and a ring of men around it, | 0:44:54 | 0:44:58 | |
one, two, three layers deep. | 0:44:58 | 0:45:01 | |
Everybody jerking off, touching each other, | 0:45:01 | 0:45:03 | |
moving just like a scrum around that bathtub | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
and then the ones in the first line would piss all over | 0:45:06 | 0:45:09 | |
whoever was in the bathtub. | 0:45:09 | 0:45:11 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: The work dealing with | 0:45:13 | 0:45:15 | |
sexuality is very directly related | 0:45:15 | 0:45:17 | |
to my own experiences. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:19 | |
It was an area that hadn't been | 0:45:20 | 0:45:22 | |
explored in contemporary art | 0:45:22 | 0:45:26 | |
and so it was an area that interested me | 0:45:26 | 0:45:28 | |
in terms of making my statement. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:30 | |
I was in the perfect situation | 0:45:30 | 0:45:32 | |
in that most of the people in those | 0:45:32 | 0:45:34 | |
photographs were friends of mine. | 0:45:34 | 0:45:36 | |
And they trusted me. | 0:45:36 | 0:45:38 | |
And I felt like, | 0:45:38 | 0:45:40 | |
almost an obligation | 0:45:40 | 0:45:42 | |
to record those things. | 0:45:42 | 0:45:43 | |
Robert and I first met at The Mine Shaft. | 0:45:45 | 0:45:49 | |
He comes over, and I'm like, "Oh, here it goes... | 0:45:49 | 0:45:52 | |
"We're going to have an orgy | 0:45:52 | 0:45:54 | |
"or go down in the basement." | 0:45:54 | 0:45:56 | |
He was very good-looking. | 0:45:56 | 0:45:58 | |
You know, all in black leather, it was like... | 0:45:58 | 0:46:00 | |
It was hot, he said "Let's get out of here," | 0:46:00 | 0:46:04 | |
and we went home, | 0:46:04 | 0:46:07 | |
did a bit of coke, had some sex, | 0:46:07 | 0:46:09 | |
very, very vanilla sex, | 0:46:09 | 0:46:12 | |
he looked bored out of his mind. | 0:46:12 | 0:46:14 | |
And we were up in two hours. | 0:46:14 | 0:46:16 | |
Just as I was nodding off, | 0:46:16 | 0:46:19 | |
get up, to do the first shoot. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:22 | |
We did it like six-thirty, | 0:46:23 | 0:46:24 | |
seven in the morning. | 0:46:24 | 0:46:26 | |
He said he liked the light | 0:46:26 | 0:46:27 | |
coming in the window. | 0:46:27 | 0:46:29 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: It becomes a documentary, in a sense. | 0:46:29 | 0:46:32 | |
I like to see it more as an autobiography. | 0:46:32 | 0:46:35 | |
You know, it's what I'm involved with | 0:46:35 | 0:46:38 | |
at any given moment. | 0:46:38 | 0:46:41 | |
Leave that open. | 0:46:46 | 0:46:47 | |
I did this in a shop window. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:54 | |
This is Hockney. | 0:47:02 | 0:47:04 | |
And this is a young film directoress from LA. | 0:47:04 | 0:47:07 | |
I remember this one time we were at his studio | 0:47:08 | 0:47:11 | |
and he said, "Do you want to see my private stuff?" | 0:47:11 | 0:47:15 | |
At that point, all this stuff was really taboo, | 0:47:15 | 0:47:17 | |
none of this stuff was out in public when he was showing it to us. | 0:47:17 | 0:47:20 | |
-It wasn't. -Yeah. -It wasn't. | 0:47:20 | 0:47:22 | |
Robert lived, not too far east of my apartment, | 0:47:22 | 0:47:26 | |
so I just walked there. | 0:47:26 | 0:47:28 | |
I remember, as I got closer and closer, | 0:47:29 | 0:47:32 | |
that I felt increasingly more frightened. | 0:47:32 | 0:47:35 | |
I was a bit anxious. | 0:47:35 | 0:47:37 | |
I'd look up, and there's Robert, up on the fire escape, | 0:47:37 | 0:47:42 | |
smoking a cigarette and | 0:47:42 | 0:47:44 | |
I was like, "OK, here we go." | 0:47:44 | 0:47:47 | |
Hand-operated elevator. | 0:47:50 | 0:47:52 | |
Five flights. | 0:47:54 | 0:47:56 | |
Very low lit. | 0:47:59 | 0:48:00 | |
Devil figures. | 0:48:00 | 0:48:02 | |
Mysterious. Creepy. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:06 | |
The first thing that struck me about him, he was not at all... | 0:48:06 | 0:48:10 | |
..you know, the kind of person | 0:48:12 | 0:48:14 | |
that one might think might make these kind of photographs. | 0:48:14 | 0:48:18 | |
-RECORDING: -Well, this, er... | 0:48:18 | 0:48:20 | |
-This will pick up. -Yes, this will pick up. | 0:48:20 | 0:48:22 | |
-OK. -Now.... | 0:48:22 | 0:48:25 | |
He said, "Oh, is that a Sony?" | 0:48:25 | 0:48:27 | |
And I said, "No, it's not." | 0:48:27 | 0:48:29 | |
And he said, "Oh, Panasonic. Well, Sony is better." | 0:48:29 | 0:48:33 | |
And you know, tease me about having the wrong tape recorder. | 0:48:33 | 0:48:37 | |
In his early work, Mapplethorpe signed with an X, | 0:48:39 | 0:48:43 | |
so there's a kind of double entendre here. | 0:48:43 | 0:48:45 | |
Each portfolio, | 0:48:47 | 0:48:48 | |
has 13 gelatine silver prints mounted on black board | 0:48:48 | 0:48:52 | |
and signed in graphite. | 0:48:52 | 0:48:54 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: Sex, is for me, | 0:48:59 | 0:49:00 | |
probably the most important thing in life. | 0:49:00 | 0:49:03 | |
You know, it's the one area that | 0:49:03 | 0:49:06 | |
offers a bit of magic, a bit of something we don't know about. | 0:49:06 | 0:49:10 | |
Just seeing how his little brother reacted, he just, he dug it. | 0:49:11 | 0:49:14 | |
He loved to get a jolt out of people | 0:49:14 | 0:49:18 | |
and...a reaction. | 0:49:18 | 0:49:22 | |
Because... | 0:49:22 | 0:49:25 | |
it was power. They were powerful. | 0:49:25 | 0:49:27 | |
RECORDING: Any sexuality, like I portray it, it's very much today, | 0:49:27 | 0:49:31 | |
but people will, you know, | 0:49:31 | 0:49:32 | |
it will take a few years for people to realise that. | 0:49:32 | 0:49:35 | |
You don't think that you're just existing in a specialised | 0:49:35 | 0:49:38 | |
-kind of subculture? -New York is specialised, | 0:49:38 | 0:49:41 | |
but what happens in New York is indicative of America, finally. | 0:49:41 | 0:49:45 | |
If I was going to pick an image that I thought was humorous, | 0:49:46 | 0:49:50 | |
I would pick the man in a rubber suit | 0:49:50 | 0:49:52 | |
-with a hose coming out of his mouth. -Mm-hmm. | 0:49:52 | 0:49:54 | |
That's really disgusting! | 0:50:02 | 0:50:04 | |
I'd grown up with abstract art and conceptualism and... | 0:50:13 | 0:50:18 | |
..you know, nude men in rubber suits were not part of my art education. | 0:50:21 | 0:50:27 | |
So... | 0:50:28 | 0:50:31 | |
it was hard to know how to talk about them. | 0:50:31 | 0:50:34 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: I was always amazed that it shocked. | 0:50:35 | 0:50:38 | |
I mean, just cos once I had a photograph and had taken it, | 0:50:38 | 0:50:41 | |
it wasn't shocking to me any more. | 0:50:41 | 0:50:43 | |
I'd been through the experience. | 0:50:43 | 0:50:45 | |
Just watching me. Even though I was perhaps being tested that day, | 0:50:46 | 0:50:50 | |
I wasn't going to fail. | 0:50:50 | 0:50:52 | |
I was like, you know, "This is cool." | 0:50:52 | 0:50:55 | |
"This is cool." | 0:50:57 | 0:50:58 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: Maybe they're the best or most important pictures | 0:51:02 | 0:51:04 | |
I've taken. When one sees something | 0:51:04 | 0:51:06 | |
you've never seen before, it's rather important. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:10 | |
I mean, still, I can show those to people and they will have never seen | 0:51:10 | 0:51:12 | |
that image before, so it opens something up | 0:51:12 | 0:51:15 | |
and I think that is what art is about, | 0:51:15 | 0:51:18 | |
it is opening something up. | 0:51:18 | 0:51:19 | |
A couple of times, he was like, | 0:51:21 | 0:51:22 | |
"So, what do you think Dad would say about that one?" | 0:51:22 | 0:51:25 | |
There were two that particularly, | 0:51:25 | 0:51:28 | |
you know, took my breath away. | 0:51:28 | 0:51:30 | |
One was a pinky inserted into a penis. | 0:51:30 | 0:51:32 | |
That was like, "Oh, my God." | 0:51:36 | 0:51:38 | |
And the other one was the fist. | 0:51:38 | 0:51:40 | |
"Oh, OK, Robert." | 0:51:44 | 0:51:47 | |
I guess you definitely found your voice. | 0:51:48 | 0:51:51 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: I wanted to do a great fist-fucking photograph, | 0:51:53 | 0:51:55 | |
so I did that picture, | 0:51:55 | 0:51:57 | |
and then he said, "Now it's your turn." | 0:51:57 | 0:51:59 | |
He sort of pinned me against the wall and said... | 0:51:59 | 0:52:02 | |
Anyway once I had the picture taken, | 0:52:07 | 0:52:09 | |
I thought it was a really good picture. | 0:52:09 | 0:52:11 | |
But most people would say that image was a horrible image of yourself. | 0:52:11 | 0:52:14 | |
It's a good one. | 0:52:17 | 0:52:19 | |
Robert, he said, | 0:52:20 | 0:52:21 | |
"I can't have you go home without giving mum and dad something." | 0:52:21 | 0:52:24 | |
So he just went... | 0:52:24 | 0:52:26 | |
And signed it "For mum and dad." | 0:52:26 | 0:52:28 | |
It was certainly better than anything else they had up on the wall. | 0:52:28 | 0:52:32 | |
Sorry! | 0:52:32 | 0:52:34 | |
It was an Easter lilies print. | 0:52:35 | 0:52:37 | |
Are you proud of your son? | 0:52:38 | 0:52:40 | |
The artwork he did, yes. | 0:52:40 | 0:52:42 | |
But for some of the photographs that he took, | 0:52:43 | 0:52:46 | |
I just could not accept them either. | 0:52:46 | 0:52:48 | |
He did a beautiful job on flowers. | 0:52:49 | 0:52:52 | |
There was tension, there's no doubt about it. | 0:52:52 | 0:52:55 | |
One time in particular, being very, very uncomfortable | 0:52:55 | 0:52:58 | |
because my father wouldn't look at Robert. | 0:52:58 | 0:53:00 | |
My father was an electrical engineer. | 0:53:02 | 0:53:05 | |
He wore one of those pen-holders. | 0:53:05 | 0:53:07 | |
Robert would make his attempts, he came with a Polaroid camera one time | 0:53:07 | 0:53:10 | |
and gave the camera to my father to... | 0:53:10 | 0:53:13 | |
He did a Polaroid of Robert. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:15 | |
After he left, my father making mention | 0:53:16 | 0:53:19 | |
of how Robert shook people's hands. | 0:53:19 | 0:53:21 | |
It wasn't a manly handshake, | 0:53:22 | 0:53:24 | |
it was a soft-set handshake. | 0:53:24 | 0:53:27 | |
Let me say this, that I thought he was for quite a length of time, | 0:53:29 | 0:53:35 | |
but I would never even mention it to my wife, | 0:53:35 | 0:53:38 | |
because as far as my wife is concerned, he was her favourite. | 0:53:38 | 0:53:42 | |
He and Patti told my parents they were married. | 0:53:42 | 0:53:45 | |
I remember sending her birthday cards as Patti whatever, | 0:53:45 | 0:53:49 | |
Mrs Robert Mapplethorpe. | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
You know? | 0:53:52 | 0:53:53 | |
I think my father always had his suspicions, though. | 0:53:53 | 0:53:56 | |
There's no pictures. | 0:53:56 | 0:53:58 | |
You know, there's no certificate. | 0:53:58 | 0:54:01 | |
Did you resent the fact that he was gay? | 0:54:01 | 0:54:03 | |
I did, yes. | 0:54:03 | 0:54:04 | |
I guess I did, yes. | 0:54:04 | 0:54:07 | |
He never spoke to me about it. | 0:54:07 | 0:54:09 | |
Cos he knew I would never accept it. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:13 | |
Admitting that he was gay or telling me that he was gay, | 0:54:14 | 0:54:17 | |
that wouldn't have helped matters at all... | 0:54:17 | 0:54:19 | |
..because, I probably would have had more resentment | 0:54:20 | 0:54:24 | |
to that fact if he had TOLD me. | 0:54:24 | 0:54:26 | |
So he was really not part of the family. | 0:54:30 | 0:54:33 | |
You know? And it's sad, it's sad. | 0:54:33 | 0:54:36 | |
I so wish I could talk to him now about it all, you know? | 0:54:36 | 0:54:41 | |
But... | 0:54:41 | 0:54:43 | |
yeah, Robert always wanted to be famous | 0:54:43 | 0:54:45 | |
and he became famous. | 0:54:45 | 0:54:47 | |
Dear Lloyd, I finally have a gallery in New York. | 0:54:47 | 0:54:51 | |
It's run by a woman named Holly Solomon | 0:54:51 | 0:54:53 | |
but you probably have never heard of it, | 0:54:53 | 0:54:56 | |
but it doesn't seem to be a bad place to be for the moment. | 0:54:56 | 0:54:59 | |
I said, "Before I show your work, | 0:55:00 | 0:55:04 | |
"I would like you to do my portrait." | 0:55:04 | 0:55:07 | |
And when he took my portrait, | 0:55:07 | 0:55:10 | |
I was convinced that he was an artist, | 0:55:10 | 0:55:13 | |
convinced that he could manipulate people extremely well - | 0:55:13 | 0:55:18 | |
and I use the word manipulate - | 0:55:18 | 0:55:21 | |
and so I said, "OK, let's do a show." | 0:55:21 | 0:55:24 | |
Sam Wagstaff was a great photography collector. | 0:55:24 | 0:55:27 | |
Holly Solomon said, "I wouldn't have touched Robert without Sam | 0:55:27 | 0:55:31 | |
"and there are others like me who felt the same way." | 0:55:31 | 0:55:33 | |
He had two shows in one day. | 0:55:38 | 0:55:40 | |
One was the S&M pictures | 0:55:40 | 0:55:43 | |
and then one were the pictures for, you know, the uptown trade. | 0:55:43 | 0:55:46 | |
And then there was a dinner that Sam gave, | 0:55:47 | 0:55:49 | |
a black tie dinner at One Fifth Avenue. | 0:55:49 | 0:55:51 | |
It was carefully thought out, it was like an ad campaign, and it worked. | 0:55:51 | 0:55:55 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: Sometimes I think it's better for the public | 0:55:55 | 0:55:58 | |
to be able to separate things, | 0:55:58 | 0:56:01 | |
because, when you mix them all up, | 0:56:01 | 0:56:04 | |
the sex thing overpowers it | 0:56:04 | 0:56:06 | |
and what happens is they just pick sex pictures out | 0:56:06 | 0:56:08 | |
and that becomes the show. | 0:56:08 | 0:56:10 | |
What would you say to those people | 0:56:10 | 0:56:12 | |
who accuse you of having a dirty mind? | 0:56:12 | 0:56:15 | |
Well, I don't know what that means exactly. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:19 | |
I mean, I think everybody, in one way or another, | 0:56:19 | 0:56:22 | |
is involved in sexuality, | 0:56:22 | 0:56:24 | |
so if you believe that sex is dirty, | 0:56:24 | 0:56:26 | |
everybody has a dirty mind, I suppose. | 0:56:26 | 0:56:29 | |
But I never consider sex being dirty. | 0:56:29 | 0:56:32 | |
The image that particularly riveted me was Mark Stevens, | 0:56:34 | 0:56:38 | |
Mr 10 1/2, | 0:56:38 | 0:56:40 | |
with his penis and balls laid out on the pedestal as if | 0:56:40 | 0:56:44 | |
they were a work of art, which, in his case, they were. | 0:56:44 | 0:56:49 | |
So... | 0:56:49 | 0:56:50 | |
Artistic photography is controlled by very civilised people | 0:56:50 | 0:56:55 | |
in New York City and | 0:56:55 | 0:56:58 | |
in essence, he was glamorising the penis, | 0:56:58 | 0:57:03 | |
which is a very uncivilized thing to do. | 0:57:03 | 0:57:07 | |
He sold one only. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:10 | |
So I bought the whole show from Robert, | 0:57:12 | 0:57:15 | |
figuring, "OK, stuck is stuck." | 0:57:15 | 0:57:18 | |
He said, "I want to go uptown," and he brought me a present. | 0:57:28 | 0:57:32 | |
The present was a self-portrait with the whip up his... | 0:57:32 | 0:57:36 | |
..tush. And my husband, he was quite insulted | 0:57:38 | 0:57:41 | |
and he said, "I'm going to rip it up!" And I said, "No, you're not. | 0:57:41 | 0:57:44 | |
"Someday I'm going to get handsomely paid for that photograph." | 0:57:44 | 0:57:47 | |
Is that making a statement about myself? | 0:57:47 | 0:57:49 | |
You know, it's one aspect of everybody, I suppose. | 0:57:49 | 0:57:52 | |
You know, the demon within. | 0:57:52 | 0:57:55 | |
There's a sense of humour in what I'm doing | 0:57:56 | 0:57:59 | |
which I hope people pick up on. | 0:57:59 | 0:58:01 | |
Sometimes they do and I'm always pleased when people see that. | 0:58:01 | 0:58:04 | |
I don't think he could have produced | 0:58:04 | 0:58:06 | |
the work he produced | 0:58:06 | 0:58:07 | |
if he hadn't been raised Catholic. | 0:58:07 | 0:58:09 | |
I think the way I arrange things is very Catholic. | 0:58:09 | 0:58:12 | |
Even though I was never a religious person, | 0:58:12 | 0:58:15 | |
I think it's rather important as an influence on my life. | 0:58:15 | 0:58:19 | |
The imagery was what was important to him, | 0:58:19 | 0:58:23 | |
not the dogma. | 0:58:23 | 0:58:25 | |
There's something very ritualistic about sadomasochism. | 0:58:25 | 0:58:29 | |
It's kind of a black mass basically, right. | 0:58:29 | 0:58:33 | |
His S&M work is based on the Catholic martyrology. | 0:58:35 | 0:58:39 | |
As grade schoolchildren, | 0:58:43 | 0:58:45 | |
we hear tales of Saint Agatha tied to a stake | 0:58:45 | 0:58:49 | |
and her tits torn off with a red-hot pinchers. | 0:58:49 | 0:58:52 | |
If you're a little kid and hear that, twisted in a certain way, | 0:58:52 | 0:58:55 | |
all of a sudden you're excited and not horrified. | 0:58:55 | 0:58:58 | |
I'm really not, you know, into sadomasochism. | 0:59:01 | 0:59:05 | |
You know, I don't encourage it with other people either, | 0:59:05 | 0:59:09 | |
but I really felt as though there was a struggle in Robert | 0:59:09 | 0:59:15 | |
between the crucifixes and devil images - | 0:59:15 | 0:59:20 | |
good, evil - | 0:59:20 | 0:59:23 | |
there is a great conflict there. | 0:59:23 | 0:59:25 | |
He liked the fact that I had been in the seminary for many years | 0:59:25 | 0:59:28 | |
and was an ordained exorcist in the Catholic church. | 0:59:28 | 0:59:31 | |
And because I was trained to be a priest, | 0:59:32 | 0:59:35 | |
he was very confessional to me. | 0:59:35 | 0:59:37 | |
"Dear Jack, it's midnight. | 0:59:37 | 0:59:39 | |
"MDA ingested, only the first signs now visible. | 0:59:39 | 0:59:43 | |
"I've been out nearly every night. | 0:59:43 | 0:59:45 | |
"Tonight is no different. | 0:59:45 | 0:59:47 | |
"The Mine Shaft is beckoning. | 0:59:47 | 0:59:50 | |
"Come, go, come, go, come with me. | 0:59:50 | 0:59:54 | |
"Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. | 0:59:54 | 0:59:56 | |
"I let some creep stick his hand up my ass. | 0:59:56 | 1:00:00 | |
"I've been fisted, even came, but I think I prefer being the giver. | 1:00:00 | 1:00:05 | |
"In fact, I can't help but give preferential treatment | 1:00:05 | 1:00:08 | |
"to the feeding process. | 1:00:08 | 1:00:10 | |
"I want to see the devil in us all. | 1:00:10 | 1:00:15 | |
"That's my real turn on. | 1:00:15 | 1:00:17 | |
"Love, Robert." | 1:00:17 | 1:00:19 | |
I have to say that because nobody WILL say it. | 1:00:21 | 1:00:24 | |
I have to say it and it's not to put him down, | 1:00:27 | 1:00:30 | |
but it's simply to reveal. | 1:00:30 | 1:00:32 | |
Robert... | 1:00:32 | 1:00:34 | |
Satan to him was not this evil monster. | 1:00:36 | 1:00:39 | |
Satan was like a convivial playmate, | 1:00:39 | 1:00:43 | |
having a jolly good time seducing the maidens. | 1:00:43 | 1:00:45 | |
To me it was a bridge too far. | 1:00:45 | 1:00:48 | |
RUMBLING | 1:00:48 | 1:00:49 | |
Go away! | 1:00:49 | 1:00:51 | |
Can we close the doors? I'm getting awfully cold in here now. | 1:00:51 | 1:00:54 | |
There's a draft. Mark! | 1:00:54 | 1:00:56 | |
San Francisco, 1978. | 1:00:56 | 1:01:00 | |
Robert was having a show. | 1:01:00 | 1:01:01 | |
It was a sex show. It was unusual, | 1:01:01 | 1:01:04 | |
I mean, you didn't see sex as art in galleries. | 1:01:04 | 1:01:08 | |
And then someone said, | 1:01:08 | 1:01:09 | |
"Well, you know, he did the album cover for Horses." | 1:01:09 | 1:01:11 | |
It was the only black and white album cover. | 1:01:11 | 1:01:14 | |
And to see an androgynous-looking woman with a jacket | 1:01:14 | 1:01:17 | |
over her shoulder. I just love, love, love that photograph. | 1:01:17 | 1:01:20 | |
Robert was holding court and he said | 1:01:20 | 1:01:22 | |
well, let's have dinner the following night. | 1:01:22 | 1:01:24 | |
And that's how I met him. | 1:01:25 | 1:01:27 | |
And then I guess you want to know what happened the following night, right? | 1:01:28 | 1:01:32 | |
He reminded me of a satyr. | 1:01:32 | 1:01:34 | |
He literally looked like a mythological creature. | 1:01:34 | 1:01:37 | |
Like half goat, half man. | 1:01:37 | 1:01:39 | |
To be in Robert's world, you either had to be rich, famous, | 1:01:40 | 1:01:45 | |
or sex. | 1:01:45 | 1:01:47 | |
I wasn't rich, I wasn't famous, | 1:01:47 | 1:01:50 | |
so it left that. | 1:01:50 | 1:01:51 | |
As he certainly wasn't monogamous, | 1:01:53 | 1:01:55 | |
he could have multiple relationships on a weekend, | 1:01:55 | 1:01:58 | |
but with me there was no S&M. | 1:01:58 | 1:02:00 | |
It was about being close and spooning, and, you know, | 1:02:00 | 1:02:03 | |
just the normal, the normal kind of intimate stuff | 1:02:03 | 1:02:07 | |
that he didn't have from picking up strangers. | 1:02:07 | 1:02:10 | |
He said I want to do a nude. | 1:02:10 | 1:02:12 | |
So I said why don't we do something like, you know, | 1:02:12 | 1:02:14 | |
those pictures of the hunt, you know, where you have like | 1:02:14 | 1:02:18 | |
the harvest with the dead rabbit | 1:02:18 | 1:02:19 | |
and the fruit and everything all and about. | 1:02:19 | 1:02:21 | |
So I thought it was going to be more like that | 1:02:21 | 1:02:23 | |
and he turned up with just this dead rabbit. | 1:02:23 | 1:02:25 | |
I said, "What am I going to do with this? | 1:02:27 | 1:02:29 | |
"Like a mink stole or something?" | 1:02:29 | 1:02:31 | |
I'm surprised you even know that picture because | 1:02:31 | 1:02:34 | |
you'll never see a picture of me in any book by Mapplethorpe. | 1:02:34 | 1:02:38 | |
You really won't. | 1:02:38 | 1:02:39 | |
The fact that I started getting a reputation | 1:02:39 | 1:02:42 | |
aside from just being Robert's, cute "with" | 1:02:42 | 1:02:46 | |
from San Francisco - | 1:02:46 | 1:02:48 | |
how dare I become a photographer that was well-known? | 1:02:48 | 1:02:50 | |
This infuriated him. | 1:02:50 | 1:02:52 | |
He couldn't deal with that. | 1:02:52 | 1:02:55 | |
"I've had a house guest here for much too long - | 1:02:55 | 1:02:57 | |
"a very cute boy that I met in San Francisco. | 1:02:57 | 1:03:00 | |
"He's sweet, intelligent, | 1:03:00 | 1:03:03 | |
"has a nice cock, but that ain't enough. | 1:03:03 | 1:03:06 | |
"I wish he'd find an apartment, as he's cramping my style." | 1:03:06 | 1:03:10 | |
That was probably me. | 1:03:10 | 1:03:12 | |
I mean, but I've never heard that. | 1:03:12 | 1:03:14 | |
I mean, I don't know who else he met in San Francisco. | 1:03:14 | 1:03:17 | |
That's the first time I'm hearing that. | 1:03:17 | 1:03:19 | |
Hmm. | 1:03:20 | 1:03:22 | |
Well, it finally isn't enough, is it? What he wanted. | 1:03:23 | 1:03:26 | |
It's never enough. | 1:03:26 | 1:03:29 | |
Everything was a means to an end to his career. | 1:03:29 | 1:03:32 | |
Everything. | 1:03:32 | 1:03:33 | |
Oh, my God! You guys are old school, I love that. | 1:03:40 | 1:03:43 | |
The Bond Street loft never changed. | 1:03:45 | 1:03:47 | |
In the front was sort of no man's land and that's where | 1:03:47 | 1:03:49 | |
-he used to photograph a lot. -Studio. | 1:03:49 | 1:03:51 | |
Then you moved back, and it's this little sitting area | 1:03:51 | 1:03:54 | |
which is where he would always hold court, | 1:03:54 | 1:03:56 | |
but across from that was the bedroom. | 1:03:56 | 1:03:58 | |
-Painted black. -Black. | 1:03:58 | 1:04:00 | |
High...gloss, with the handcuff holds above the bed. | 1:04:00 | 1:04:03 | |
-I never went in there. -Oh, I did! | 1:04:03 | 1:04:06 | |
First thing he said to me, | 1:04:06 | 1:04:08 | |
it's all you have to know is where the darkroom is. | 1:04:08 | 1:04:10 | |
You know? | 1:04:10 | 1:04:12 | |
OK, dude, whatever. You know, do your thing, I'll do mine. | 1:04:12 | 1:04:14 | |
And remember the first image I printed which was just | 1:04:16 | 1:04:19 | |
a nasty dirty picture. | 1:04:19 | 1:04:22 | |
It's a guy laying on his back pulling on his nipples. | 1:04:22 | 1:04:25 | |
It's not a well-known picture but it's a classic. | 1:04:25 | 1:04:29 | |
-And that's where we went to work every day. -That's where we went. | 1:04:30 | 1:04:33 | |
-Yeah, off to work. Here we go. -Little WASP-y blondes. | 1:04:33 | 1:04:35 | |
-Yeah, WASP-y blondes. -Going to the den of iniquity. | 1:04:35 | 1:04:37 | |
Going to the fist-fucking file. | 1:04:37 | 1:04:39 | |
Wasn't it funny how soon we became anaesthetised to the sex pictures? | 1:04:39 | 1:04:43 | |
-To the penis! -Yeah. I mean, cos it was just daily. | 1:04:43 | 1:04:46 | |
There would always be film in the morning from the night before, | 1:04:47 | 1:04:51 | |
so the first thing I'd do is process film. | 1:04:51 | 1:04:53 | |
He'd come in in his robe. | 1:04:53 | 1:04:55 | |
"How are the films, Tom?" | 1:04:55 | 1:04:57 | |
When he saw the image for the very first time, he teased me. | 1:04:57 | 1:05:02 | |
What do you think of that cock, Tom? | 1:05:02 | 1:05:04 | |
You know, "Get the fuck out of here." You know? | 1:05:04 | 1:05:07 | |
I was just out of school, looking for work | 1:05:07 | 1:05:10 | |
and Robert was like, I don't know how I really feel about this, | 1:05:10 | 1:05:14 | |
but I am looking for an assistant. | 1:05:14 | 1:05:17 | |
And I started the next day. | 1:05:17 | 1:05:20 | |
Because he didn't have a real photo background, | 1:05:20 | 1:05:23 | |
he was always insecure about, technically, did I get the picture? | 1:05:23 | 1:05:27 | |
You know, did it come out, did it come out? | 1:05:27 | 1:05:28 | |
If it had light on it and he'd get it to exposure he was happy | 1:05:28 | 1:05:32 | |
cos they were all fucked up in the middle of the night. | 1:05:32 | 1:05:34 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: I'm not a technician. | 1:05:35 | 1:05:37 | |
I never studied photography. | 1:05:37 | 1:05:39 | |
I don't particularly care to know it. | 1:05:39 | 1:05:41 | |
I know what a fine print is. | 1:05:41 | 1:05:43 | |
I would probably have less than half the number of photographs | 1:05:44 | 1:05:47 | |
if I did my own developing and printing. | 1:05:47 | 1:05:50 | |
But he always had coke. | 1:05:51 | 1:05:53 | |
I was the only guy he gave coke to cos he wanted me to keep going. | 1:05:53 | 1:05:56 | |
He wasn't generous. But, you know, | 1:05:56 | 1:05:58 | |
"If I give Tom a little coke he'll print faster." | 1:05:58 | 1:06:01 | |
You know? | 1:06:01 | 1:06:02 | |
Yeah, Tom, he'd go in the darkroom and get me a bump. | 1:06:02 | 1:06:05 | |
You know, my father said to me, | 1:06:07 | 1:06:09 | |
"How can Robert call himself a photographer | 1:06:09 | 1:06:12 | |
"if he doesn't even know how to process a roll of film?" | 1:06:12 | 1:06:14 | |
But Robert had vision. | 1:06:14 | 1:06:17 | |
He always had a certain way of seeing things, | 1:06:17 | 1:06:20 | |
so how you got there didn't really concern him so much. | 1:06:20 | 1:06:26 | |
He wanted everything to just be flawless. | 1:06:26 | 1:06:30 | |
You know, let's make this guy's arm meet this corner | 1:06:30 | 1:06:34 | |
and let's straighten it out a little bit. | 1:06:34 | 1:06:36 | |
"But it's a guy pissing in another guy's mouth, what the fuck's the difference?" | 1:06:36 | 1:06:40 | |
He wanted things as... | 1:06:40 | 1:06:43 | |
you know, unrealistically | 1:06:43 | 1:06:45 | |
perfect and smooth, | 1:06:45 | 1:06:47 | |
and taking all the flaws out of the skin. | 1:06:47 | 1:06:50 | |
You know, some days we'd just sit and retouch for a day, | 1:06:50 | 1:06:53 | |
until all of the blemishes were gone. | 1:06:53 | 1:06:56 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: I talked to Patti about doing a book | 1:07:01 | 1:07:04 | |
and having her transform herself | 1:07:04 | 1:07:07 | |
into all these different characters | 1:07:07 | 1:07:09 | |
that would have been Patti. | 1:07:09 | 1:07:11 | |
I mean, she would be this character one day and that character another. | 1:07:11 | 1:07:14 | |
And I think she had a certain range that | 1:07:14 | 1:07:17 | |
could have probably carried a whole book, | 1:07:17 | 1:07:20 | |
but I never did a book with her. | 1:07:20 | 1:07:22 | |
I met Lisa and I realised that she, in fact, had this range within her. | 1:07:29 | 1:07:33 | |
A very different range, but it was still worthy of a book. | 1:07:33 | 1:07:37 | |
I thought she was unique. | 1:07:39 | 1:07:41 | |
She had this form that I'd never seen before. | 1:07:41 | 1:07:44 | |
It was like a complete new animal. | 1:07:44 | 1:07:47 | |
She was particularly important to Mapplethorpe because he was trying | 1:07:49 | 1:07:52 | |
to balance out his sex pictures with pictures of women. | 1:07:52 | 1:07:55 | |
Mm-hm. It's so interesting to think about how the female body-building | 1:07:55 | 1:07:59 | |
idea then was really radical and kind of challenging. | 1:07:59 | 1:08:03 | |
-That kind of physique to us doesn't seem so shocking. -Right. | 1:08:03 | 1:08:07 | |
She's such a prominent subject. | 1:08:07 | 1:08:10 | |
Very '80s. | 1:08:11 | 1:08:13 | |
-The make-up, the hair, the ruffled blouse. -Oh, yeah. | 1:08:13 | 1:08:16 | |
-Mm-hm. -The shoulder pads. | 1:08:16 | 1:08:18 | |
It was prototype for a new species. | 1:08:18 | 1:08:20 | |
Sort of an animal perfection, | 1:08:20 | 1:08:22 | |
and I felt in him | 1:08:22 | 1:08:23 | |
a kind of male version of the same thing. | 1:08:23 | 1:08:26 | |
My ambition, that I discussed with him, was to explore | 1:08:26 | 1:08:28 | |
the range of possibilities of ways of being a woman - | 1:08:28 | 1:08:32 | |
historical ways, contemporary ways, | 1:08:32 | 1:08:34 | |
cliche ways, unheard-of ways, | 1:08:34 | 1:08:36 | |
tribal ways, the high fashion-type, | 1:08:36 | 1:08:39 | |
the sex goddess-type, | 1:08:39 | 1:08:40 | |
the lingerie-type, the bondage-type, | 1:08:40 | 1:08:43 | |
the virgin-type, the bridal-type, | 1:08:43 | 1:08:45 | |
the statue-type. | 1:08:45 | 1:08:46 | |
What had seemed very daring | 1:08:48 | 1:08:52 | |
when he did it with men... | 1:08:52 | 1:08:55 | |
..looked very retrograde when he did it with a woman | 1:08:58 | 1:09:02 | |
who was dressing up in different hats and garments. | 1:09:02 | 1:09:07 | |
And so I wrote about that and he was furious. | 1:09:10 | 1:09:14 | |
I think he called me and yelled at me. | 1:09:14 | 1:09:16 | |
I feel like | 1:09:16 | 1:09:18 | |
it may have been a bad idea to write that review. | 1:09:18 | 1:09:21 | |
I mean, that is sculpture to me. | 1:09:23 | 1:09:25 | |
You know, that's sort of one of the points I'm making | 1:09:25 | 1:09:27 | |
in photography, is being a sculptor, | 1:09:27 | 1:09:31 | |
without actually having to spend all the time sort of | 1:09:31 | 1:09:33 | |
modelling with your hands. | 1:09:33 | 1:09:35 | |
You know, that's much too archaic for me. | 1:09:35 | 1:09:37 | |
It's like inventing sculpture myself with a camera. | 1:09:37 | 1:09:40 | |
It really is like bronze, you know? | 1:09:40 | 1:09:42 | |
I often say that photographing black men is like | 1:09:42 | 1:09:44 | |
photographing bronzes, you know? | 1:09:44 | 1:09:46 | |
I was the last white intimate person in his life. | 1:09:49 | 1:09:54 | |
After that he was only sleeping with black people, | 1:09:54 | 1:09:57 | |
photographing black people. | 1:09:57 | 1:09:59 | |
He became obsessed with black people. | 1:09:59 | 1:10:01 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: All I know is that | 1:10:08 | 1:10:10 | |
it's physically attractive to me. | 1:10:10 | 1:10:13 | |
Visually it's also attractive, | 1:10:13 | 1:10:15 | |
and so it became an obsession with me, | 1:10:15 | 1:10:18 | |
taking these pictures of blacks. | 1:10:18 | 1:10:22 | |
People would accuse him of exploiting these people, | 1:10:22 | 1:10:25 | |
and... | 1:10:25 | 1:10:29 | |
He told me he photographed what he loved to do | 1:10:29 | 1:10:32 | |
and the people he loved to be with, | 1:10:32 | 1:10:34 | |
and to me that's not exploitation. | 1:10:34 | 1:10:37 | |
That's just living your life, and using a camera to document it. | 1:10:37 | 1:10:43 | |
For the most part, when whites have photographed blacks, | 1:10:43 | 1:10:47 | |
they've sort of shown them from a certain social point of view. | 1:10:47 | 1:10:52 | |
I'm photographing them as form, | 1:10:52 | 1:10:54 | |
in the same way that I'm reading the flowers | 1:10:54 | 1:10:56 | |
or anything else that are photographed. | 1:10:56 | 1:10:57 | |
I'm not attempting to make a social statement about their plight. | 1:10:57 | 1:11:02 | |
Robert was looking for God in a black man, | 1:11:02 | 1:11:07 | |
and he found him in Milton Moore. | 1:11:07 | 1:11:12 | |
And fell in love with him. | 1:11:12 | 1:11:15 | |
Now, I think he fell in love - | 1:11:16 | 1:11:20 | |
and this sounds ridiculous - | 1:11:20 | 1:11:22 | |
with Milton's penis. | 1:11:22 | 1:11:24 | |
Robert was looking for the absolute perfect black penis, | 1:11:27 | 1:11:32 | |
and he had it, I mean, the exact measurements down. | 1:11:32 | 1:11:36 | |
I mean, it had to be just so, | 1:11:36 | 1:11:38 | |
and he'd discuss it with others, | 1:11:38 | 1:11:40 | |
and, you know, the ratio to this and that. | 1:11:40 | 1:11:43 | |
The thing the world is most afraid of is penis... | 1:11:43 | 1:11:46 | |
..and Robert dared show penis, but he dared show black penis, | 1:11:47 | 1:11:51 | |
and there's nothing more scary, because behind | 1:11:51 | 1:11:53 | |
all of sexual prejudice is the sex envy, | 1:11:53 | 1:11:57 | |
this penis envy, that drives people insane, | 1:11:57 | 1:12:02 | |
either with lust or with fear. | 1:12:02 | 1:12:05 | |
Milton did say to him as one condition of taking the pictures, | 1:12:05 | 1:12:09 | |
that he could not show his head in the frame. | 1:12:09 | 1:12:14 | |
Picture Of Man In Polyester Suit was really one of his most famous. | 1:12:26 | 1:12:30 | |
Milton had picked up that suit in Hong Kong and was very proud of it, | 1:12:30 | 1:12:36 | |
and Robert purposely lined up his thumb | 1:12:36 | 1:12:40 | |
so that it would show off the cheap seams. | 1:12:40 | 1:12:42 | |
I'd never seen it and then we went to the framers | 1:12:46 | 1:12:48 | |
and I saw it laying on the floor as it was going to be put into | 1:12:48 | 1:12:51 | |
the frame, and I said, | 1:12:51 | 1:12:53 | |
"Robert, this is a show that the whole world will see." | 1:12:53 | 1:12:58 | |
He said to me, | 1:12:58 | 1:13:00 | |
"Will anyone write about it?" | 1:13:00 | 1:13:03 | |
That was his comment. | 1:13:03 | 1:13:05 | |
And they did. | 1:13:05 | 1:13:06 | |
"Main picture here is a big black dude seen in an expensive | 1:13:06 | 1:13:10 | |
"vested gabardine suit | 1:13:10 | 1:13:12 | |
"with his fly open and his elephant cock sticking out. | 1:13:12 | 1:13:15 | |
"This picture is ugly, degrading, obscene, | 1:13:15 | 1:13:17 | |
"but typical of the artist's work, which appeal largely | 1:13:17 | 1:13:21 | |
"to drooling, lascivious collectors, | 1:13:21 | 1:13:23 | |
"who buy them and return to their furnished rooms to jerk off." | 1:13:23 | 1:13:27 | |
We actually did sell that picture, | 1:13:30 | 1:13:35 | |
during the exhibition, | 1:13:35 | 1:13:36 | |
to a collector in New York for 2,500. | 1:13:36 | 1:13:40 | |
It was a reach. | 1:13:40 | 1:13:42 | |
It was a big price for a photograph | 1:13:42 | 1:13:45 | |
and especially by a living photographer. | 1:13:45 | 1:13:49 | |
There were 20 works in the show and we placed all of them | 1:13:49 | 1:13:53 | |
with very strong collectors, which was very important for Robert. | 1:13:53 | 1:13:56 | |
This was the first show that had ever happened to him, | 1:13:56 | 1:14:00 | |
and it was a kind of lightning rod, | 1:14:00 | 1:14:03 | |
and it was notorious. | 1:14:03 | 1:14:05 | |
Lot 144, Robert Mapplethorpe's Man In Polyester Suit, | 1:14:06 | 1:14:10 | |
and I'm going to start the bidding here at 180,000. | 1:14:10 | 1:14:13 | |
It's possibly one of the top ten most recognisable images | 1:14:13 | 1:14:17 | |
in photographic history. | 1:14:17 | 1:14:19 | |
-210. -220. | 1:14:19 | 1:14:21 | |
It's an iconic image. | 1:14:21 | 1:14:23 | |
You know, it's like Andy's Marilyn. | 1:14:23 | 1:14:26 | |
360. 380. | 1:14:26 | 1:14:29 | |
390,000. | 1:14:29 | 1:14:31 | |
None of us realised that photography at its | 1:14:39 | 1:14:43 | |
beginning was just considered commercial reproduction, | 1:14:43 | 1:14:46 | |
commercial reproduction. | 1:14:46 | 1:14:48 | |
Many collectors would never dream of collecting, | 1:14:48 | 1:14:51 | |
and I think Mapplethorpe is one of the artists | 1:14:51 | 1:14:56 | |
responsible for photography being considered on an equal basis | 1:14:56 | 1:15:00 | |
with sculpture and painting. | 1:15:00 | 1:15:02 | |
I never for a second doubted that photography was a very real art. | 1:15:02 | 1:15:07 | |
There was something about his photography immediately attracted me. | 1:15:07 | 1:15:11 | |
I was shocked by his absolute brutal honesty about everything, | 1:15:11 | 1:15:17 | |
from sexual organs to relationships between people. | 1:15:17 | 1:15:21 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: You know, the people that have influenced me the most | 1:15:21 | 1:15:25 | |
are the relationships I've had, | 1:15:25 | 1:15:27 | |
you know, the lovers I've had in my life, | 1:15:27 | 1:15:30 | |
and of course I've photographed every one of them. | 1:15:30 | 1:15:34 | |
The only time that Robert ever cried was talking about | 1:15:34 | 1:15:36 | |
how much he loved Milton. | 1:15:36 | 1:15:38 | |
Not Patti, Milton. | 1:15:38 | 1:15:40 | |
Milton. | 1:15:40 | 1:15:42 | |
He had just did that show called Black Males | 1:15:57 | 1:16:00 | |
at the Robert Miller Gallery, | 1:16:00 | 1:16:02 | |
so I went to go see that show. | 1:16:02 | 1:16:06 | |
I said, "That's going to be my boyfriend." | 1:16:06 | 1:16:08 | |
We lived together for the better part of a decade. | 1:16:09 | 1:16:13 | |
We rarely fought. | 1:16:13 | 1:16:15 | |
You know, because he was too self-absorbed | 1:16:16 | 1:16:19 | |
to really care. | 1:16:19 | 1:16:21 | |
It was so easy to be around him because he was so busy | 1:16:21 | 1:16:25 | |
being Robert Mapplethorpe. | 1:16:25 | 1:16:27 | |
When we started seeing each other, he started taking pictures. | 1:16:29 | 1:16:34 | |
Right? | 1:16:34 | 1:16:35 | |
And I was kind of shy, so I didn't want to take nude pictures. | 1:16:35 | 1:16:40 | |
And Robert goes, "Just don't look at your dick. | 1:16:40 | 1:16:43 | |
He goes, "It's just a picture." | 1:16:43 | 1:16:45 | |
There is no picture of Ken Moody's dick. | 1:16:49 | 1:16:52 | |
There just isn't. And I'm sorry. | 1:16:54 | 1:16:57 | |
As soon as I stepped in front of the seamless, it was magic. | 1:16:59 | 1:17:03 | |
It was absolute magic. | 1:17:03 | 1:17:06 | |
There's no way you can describe it other than making love. | 1:17:08 | 1:17:13 | |
And as soon as we stepped away from that backdrop... | 1:17:15 | 1:17:19 | |
..nothing, absolutely nothing. | 1:17:20 | 1:17:24 | |
We had nothing in common, we had nothing to say to each other. | 1:17:24 | 1:17:27 | |
There was a ghetto element to the men that he had the strongest attraction to. | 1:17:27 | 1:17:33 | |
I had none of that. | 1:17:33 | 1:17:35 | |
He's quoted in an article as saying that I was too white for him. | 1:17:35 | 1:17:39 | |
Too white. | 1:17:41 | 1:17:43 | |
HE CHUCKLES | 1:17:43 | 1:17:45 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: I brought them together. | 1:17:45 | 1:17:47 | |
It was interesting because they'd never met and never had | 1:17:47 | 1:17:50 | |
a conversation with somebody else that had lost all of their hair | 1:17:50 | 1:17:53 | |
as a child, and it was interesting to watch them react | 1:17:53 | 1:17:57 | |
and relate to each other. | 1:17:57 | 1:17:59 | |
The more time goes by, the bigger that photograph gets. | 1:17:59 | 1:18:04 | |
When it was in Times Square on the Nasdaq billboard, | 1:18:04 | 1:18:07 | |
that was like...wow! | 1:18:07 | 1:18:09 | |
Where's my mother? | 1:18:09 | 1:18:11 | |
I've read several things on the shot of Ken and I. | 1:18:15 | 1:18:19 | |
It's like they've tried to read all of this philosophy into it. | 1:18:19 | 1:18:24 | |
Black Ken, eyes closed, | 1:18:24 | 1:18:27 | |
meaning the subconscious white Robert, eyes open, | 1:18:27 | 1:18:31 | |
afraid of the unconscious. | 1:18:31 | 1:18:34 | |
I'm like, "What?" | 1:18:34 | 1:18:36 | |
The black man was in the background | 1:18:36 | 1:18:39 | |
because the black man's neck wasn't long enough | 1:18:39 | 1:18:43 | |
to reach over the white man's shoulder. | 1:18:43 | 1:18:47 | |
We tried it, and my neck wasn't long enough! | 1:18:47 | 1:18:50 | |
I think that's why he did every position... | 1:18:50 | 1:18:53 | |
-Exactly. -..to find out what worked best. | 1:18:53 | 1:18:55 | |
There was no philosophical anything. | 1:18:55 | 1:18:58 | |
Robert was so not like that. | 1:18:58 | 1:19:01 | |
No, totally not. | 1:19:01 | 1:19:03 | |
Take your shirt off. | 1:19:03 | 1:19:05 | |
Sounds silly, I guess, using the word magic. | 1:19:05 | 1:19:07 | |
Now fold your arms. | 1:19:07 | 1:19:09 | |
Stay right there. Lift your head up a little bit. | 1:19:09 | 1:19:12 | |
I was able to pick up the magic of the moment and work with it. | 1:19:12 | 1:19:15 | |
You know, that's my rush in doing photography. | 1:19:15 | 1:19:18 | |
Hold that! Hold that. | 1:19:18 | 1:19:20 | |
Tilt a little right and turn a little right. | 1:19:20 | 1:19:22 | |
Turn your head to the right. | 1:19:22 | 1:19:24 | |
Now bring your eyes back to me. | 1:19:24 | 1:19:26 | |
Look back here. Lean right, turn right. | 1:19:28 | 1:19:31 | |
Put your head down. Now bring your eyes up. | 1:19:31 | 1:19:34 | |
Click, click, click, click. Eyes to me. | 1:19:34 | 1:19:37 | |
Click. Chin up. | 1:19:37 | 1:19:39 | |
Turn this way. | 1:19:39 | 1:19:40 | |
Turn your head this way. | 1:19:41 | 1:19:43 | |
Yeah. More. More. More. | 1:19:43 | 1:19:46 | |
And gently, instead of looking to the side, look straight out. | 1:19:46 | 1:19:49 | |
Often I'm dealing with fractions of inches. | 1:19:49 | 1:19:51 | |
Now turn. | 1:19:51 | 1:19:53 | |
Just, yeah, from the neck. Stay there. | 1:19:53 | 1:19:55 | |
I'm looking for that perfect position | 1:19:55 | 1:19:57 | |
where the head sort of somehow makes sense to me. | 1:19:57 | 1:20:01 | |
Actually, I should take it with all of the things coming in at you. | 1:20:01 | 1:20:04 | |
Look this way. | 1:20:04 | 1:20:05 | |
That's rather good, actually. | 1:20:07 | 1:20:09 | |
I'm going to start showing a series of portraits. | 1:20:13 | 1:20:16 | |
I'll stop at any point but I don't want to comment | 1:20:16 | 1:20:20 | |
too much about the pictures cos I want my vision to come across, | 1:20:20 | 1:20:23 | |
the way I see things. | 1:20:23 | 1:20:25 | |
That's William Burroughs. | 1:20:25 | 1:20:27 | |
Philip Glass on the left, Robert Wilson on the right. | 1:20:27 | 1:20:30 | |
Donald Sutherland, one of the best subjects I've ever photographed. | 1:20:30 | 1:20:34 | |
Annie Leibovitz, | 1:20:34 | 1:20:35 | |
one of the most difficult subjects I've ever photographed. | 1:20:35 | 1:20:38 | |
LAUGHTER | 1:20:38 | 1:20:40 | |
That's Debbie Harry. | 1:20:40 | 1:20:41 | |
I sat for him a couple of times, | 1:20:41 | 1:20:43 | |
which was pretty scary for me the first time. | 1:20:43 | 1:20:46 | |
Smiling wasn't his thing. | 1:20:46 | 1:20:48 | |
You know, the way that he saw people, | 1:20:48 | 1:20:50 | |
was like he was seeing into them or something, or through them. | 1:20:50 | 1:20:55 | |
I don't think it's necessary to tell you | 1:20:56 | 1:20:59 | |
who is in each photograph because | 1:20:59 | 1:21:00 | |
if the pictures are good then they'll transcend who they are | 1:21:00 | 1:21:03 | |
and it doesn't matter. | 1:21:03 | 1:21:04 | |
-He became known for the elegance of his portraits. -Mm-hm. | 1:21:04 | 1:21:07 | |
And any photographer who takes | 1:21:07 | 1:21:09 | |
pictures of celebrities is making | 1:21:09 | 1:21:11 | |
a smart business move because | 1:21:11 | 1:21:13 | |
those people and their friends have | 1:21:13 | 1:21:15 | |
lots of money and they buy pictures. | 1:21:15 | 1:21:17 | |
Yeah. Well, and his social life was a part of his artistic life. | 1:21:17 | 1:21:20 | |
-That's right. -It was very interconnected. | 1:21:20 | 1:21:23 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: Ideally, you get the subject to a point | 1:21:31 | 1:21:35 | |
where they direct themselves. | 1:21:35 | 1:21:37 | |
They say, "This is really what I want to be photographed doing." | 1:21:37 | 1:21:40 | |
I thought it was going to be a catastrophe, and I prepared for it, | 1:21:40 | 1:21:44 | |
so I did take a piece of mine. | 1:21:44 | 1:21:47 | |
It was a good collaboration, right, because he's famous | 1:21:47 | 1:21:50 | |
not for his flower pictures. | 1:21:50 | 1:21:52 | |
He's famous for his objectionable sexual representation. | 1:21:52 | 1:21:57 | |
You know, taking pictures of sex is no different than | 1:21:57 | 1:22:00 | |
photographing a flower, really. I mean, it's the same thing. | 1:22:00 | 1:22:03 | |
It's just submitting to whatever's going on and trying to get | 1:22:03 | 1:22:07 | |
the best possible view of it. | 1:22:07 | 1:22:10 | |
Nobody else can photograph flowers the way I do. | 1:22:10 | 1:22:14 | |
It's just the way I see. | 1:22:14 | 1:22:16 | |
Even Robert said that the pictures started getting very, very slick. | 1:22:17 | 1:22:20 | |
That was the word. | 1:22:20 | 1:22:21 | |
So slick, so perfect. | 1:22:21 | 1:22:23 | |
But perfection, that's a Mapplethorpe characteristic. | 1:22:24 | 1:22:28 | |
Perfection. | 1:22:28 | 1:22:30 | |
Anybody who was involved in that studio will agree with me | 1:22:34 | 1:22:39 | |
that you just got sucked into Robert's world. | 1:22:39 | 1:22:43 | |
You wanted to. | 1:22:43 | 1:22:45 | |
I mean, you just did. | 1:22:45 | 1:22:46 | |
It was an interesting world, it was a lot of excitement, | 1:22:46 | 1:22:49 | |
it was a lot of fun, but I wanted to do something else. | 1:22:49 | 1:22:52 | |
I can't just be Robert's assistant for the rest of my life. | 1:22:54 | 1:22:57 | |
So then the invitation gets sent out. | 1:23:02 | 1:23:05 | |
Nice group of artists. | 1:23:05 | 1:23:07 | |
All alphabetical. | 1:23:07 | 1:23:08 | |
And lo and behold, | 1:23:08 | 1:23:10 | |
Edward Mapplethorpe comes before Robert Mapplethorpe. | 1:23:10 | 1:23:14 | |
And he was... | 1:23:14 | 1:23:16 | |
ruthless. | 1:23:16 | 1:23:17 | |
He was...nasty, | 1:23:17 | 1:23:20 | |
and said, | 1:23:20 | 1:23:23 | |
"I'm not going to have any kid brother, | 1:23:23 | 1:23:25 | |
"I've worked really hard to get where I've gotten, | 1:23:25 | 1:23:29 | |
"and if you think you're going to come and ride on my coat-tails..." | 1:23:29 | 1:23:33 | |
And I was like, "Fuck, man," I was like... | 1:23:41 | 1:23:44 | |
Wow! | 1:23:47 | 1:23:48 | |
And Robert asked him to change his name, | 1:23:48 | 1:23:51 | |
which he struggled with, I think, for a while, but then did. | 1:23:51 | 1:23:55 | |
-He changed it to Maxi. -Right. | 1:23:55 | 1:23:57 | |
But... | 1:23:57 | 1:23:59 | |
It was all about Robert, it was ALL about Robert. | 1:23:59 | 1:24:04 | |
You know, they were brothers. | 1:24:04 | 1:24:05 | |
I can't imagine what all that was like. | 1:24:05 | 1:24:08 | |
You know, it was a futile attempt because everyone would go, | 1:24:08 | 1:24:13 | |
"This is Edward Maxi, he's Robert Mapplethorpe's brother." | 1:24:13 | 1:24:17 | |
I was like what good is this doing? This is ridiculous. | 1:24:17 | 1:24:19 | |
But, yeah, it sucked. | 1:24:21 | 1:24:23 | |
That day sucked. | 1:24:24 | 1:24:26 | |
Just like the day that he got angry at me for deciding | 1:24:27 | 1:24:31 | |
that I was going to leave the studio. | 1:24:31 | 1:24:33 | |
This is somebody who two years earlier didn't know whether | 1:24:33 | 1:24:35 | |
he wanted me in the studio with him. Two years later, | 1:24:35 | 1:24:39 | |
I guess he learned to rely on me quite a bit, | 1:24:39 | 1:24:43 | |
and was angry, very angry. | 1:24:43 | 1:24:47 | |
-NEWSREEL: -The lifestyle of some male homosexuals | 1:24:52 | 1:24:56 | |
has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer. | 1:24:56 | 1:24:58 | |
He would go to the bar in the afternoon, pick up someone, | 1:24:58 | 1:25:02 | |
have sex with them. | 1:25:02 | 1:25:05 | |
Then go back later that night, | 1:25:05 | 1:25:08 | |
maybe again pick up someone else, | 1:25:08 | 1:25:11 | |
and then, towards the end of the night, like a night cap. | 1:25:11 | 1:25:14 | |
Last weekend, Mayor Koch predicted that The Mine Shaft would close. | 1:25:14 | 1:25:18 | |
They are selling death. | 1:25:18 | 1:25:20 | |
Places where death can be distributed. | 1:25:20 | 1:25:23 | |
They're making love in the street on top of cars and everything. | 1:25:23 | 1:25:26 | |
This is men, grown men. I mean, that's not normal. | 1:25:26 | 1:25:29 | |
Most of these people, they're not fit, they're not human beings. | 1:25:29 | 1:25:32 | |
They have emotional problems. | 1:25:32 | 1:25:34 | |
Cos I was sleeping with him for all of those years, | 1:25:57 | 1:26:00 | |
I thought I was going to die. | 1:26:00 | 1:26:02 | |
I had came back from an appointment to get my results, | 1:26:02 | 1:26:05 | |
he was laying in the bed when I walked in, | 1:26:05 | 1:26:08 | |
and then he looked at me and said, "You got it, right?" | 1:26:08 | 1:26:12 | |
I said, "No, no, no, no, no," I said, "I'm negative." | 1:26:12 | 1:26:15 | |
I remember he got really upset and he goes, | 1:26:15 | 1:26:17 | |
"Then why do I have it? Why do I have it?" | 1:26:17 | 1:26:19 | |
And he started like pounding the bed. | 1:26:19 | 1:26:21 | |
AIDS at the time was pretty much a death sentence, right? | 1:26:27 | 1:26:30 | |
And he, on the one hand was upset, but on the other hand | 1:26:30 | 1:26:33 | |
he was fascinated by the demand for his work. | 1:26:33 | 1:26:37 | |
Like, his market took off when people heard that he was about to die. | 1:26:37 | 1:26:41 | |
It really took off. | 1:26:43 | 1:26:45 | |
We were very busy. | 1:26:45 | 1:26:47 | |
We didn't stop working and he didn't stop shooting | 1:26:47 | 1:26:49 | |
until he physically couldn't get out of bed. | 1:26:49 | 1:26:52 | |
He was like, "What am I shooting next? | 1:26:52 | 1:26:54 | |
"Get me some flowers. Let's do that." | 1:26:54 | 1:26:55 | |
You know, and the flowers got done, the statues got done, | 1:26:55 | 1:27:00 | |
the commissioned portraits got done. | 1:27:00 | 1:27:02 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: One day I'll photograph flowers, | 1:27:02 | 1:27:04 | |
the next day I'll do some fashion work, | 1:27:04 | 1:27:06 | |
the next day I'll do some pornography, | 1:27:06 | 1:27:08 | |
the next day I will do a portrait. You know, I don't really care. | 1:27:08 | 1:27:11 | |
I sort of thought I should be keeping a journal. | 1:27:13 | 1:27:15 | |
"I did watch him shoot today. | 1:27:15 | 1:27:17 | |
"It's so amazing to see how he musters the energy to do the pictures. | 1:27:17 | 1:27:20 | |
"It absolutely keeps him going. | 1:27:20 | 1:27:23 | |
"And the money. Funny money." | 1:27:24 | 1:27:26 | |
Natrel Plus. | 1:27:27 | 1:27:28 | |
Long-lasting Natrel protection. | 1:27:28 | 1:27:31 | |
He was never interested in talking about his health. | 1:27:31 | 1:27:34 | |
All he wanted to talk about were sales and who was looking | 1:27:34 | 1:27:36 | |
at his work, and when are we going to have a million-dollar month? | 1:27:36 | 1:27:39 | |
He was interested in making as much money as possible | 1:27:39 | 1:27:43 | |
and he resented the fact that his contemporaries', like Brice Marden, | 1:27:43 | 1:27:47 | |
work started selling for several hundred thousand dollars, | 1:27:47 | 1:27:50 | |
and Robert's works are selling for 1,100. | 1:27:50 | 1:27:53 | |
Mapplethorpe had a sort of jealous | 1:27:55 | 1:27:57 | |
or competitive relationship with Warhol. | 1:27:57 | 1:28:00 | |
He would say to me, weekly, "If I die, | 1:28:01 | 1:28:05 | |
"will I have died with as much money as Andy Warhol had?" | 1:28:05 | 1:28:08 | |
And I'd say "No, not nearly." | 1:28:08 | 1:28:11 | |
Not nearly. | 1:28:11 | 1:28:12 | |
I remember him saying to me once how frustrated he was | 1:28:12 | 1:28:15 | |
about being ill because he was getting all this money now, | 1:28:15 | 1:28:19 | |
and he actually said "I won't be able to enjoy it." | 1:28:19 | 1:28:23 | |
He was not very interested in leaving money to people, | 1:28:23 | 1:28:27 | |
so the foundation idea really began to appeal to | 1:28:27 | 1:28:31 | |
him because his money, his assets, his real estate, | 1:28:31 | 1:28:34 | |
his art collection would support his foundation, | 1:28:34 | 1:28:38 | |
so it would automatically promote him. | 1:28:38 | 1:28:40 | |
Robert sent for me for his birthday, his 40th birthday party. | 1:28:43 | 1:28:47 | |
That's when I was like, whoa. | 1:28:47 | 1:28:49 | |
This is not good. | 1:28:49 | 1:28:51 | |
Robert Mapplethorpe's way to interpret me | 1:28:53 | 1:28:57 | |
was totally different than any other photographer. | 1:28:57 | 1:29:01 | |
He wanted my hair back, so that was unusual to me. | 1:29:02 | 1:29:06 | |
Everybody else had always wanted me to do a hairdo. | 1:29:06 | 1:29:09 | |
He wanted a very, very natural feel. | 1:29:09 | 1:29:13 | |
I look like an angel on that picture, | 1:29:13 | 1:29:15 | |
so how can I not be pleased? | 1:29:15 | 1:29:17 | |
He was the first photographer to | 1:29:17 | 1:29:20 | |
photograph me completely in profile. | 1:29:20 | 1:29:23 | |
It's never, he was the only one. | 1:29:24 | 1:29:26 | |
The profile was just so much more soul-baring. | 1:29:27 | 1:29:32 | |
I got to sort of study him. | 1:29:33 | 1:29:35 | |
He didn't seem happy. | 1:29:35 | 1:29:37 | |
Everything seemed precious and I think there was no sense | 1:29:37 | 1:29:40 | |
of wanting to waste time or be frivolous. | 1:29:40 | 1:29:43 | |
In German, you say, there's this word, "getrieben", | 1:29:43 | 1:29:47 | |
which means as if something is chasing you constantly. | 1:29:47 | 1:29:51 | |
I used to go and visit him. | 1:29:53 | 1:29:56 | |
We both sensed that he was dying, | 1:29:56 | 1:29:58 | |
but we didn't talk about it. | 1:29:58 | 1:30:00 | |
And he had that very sad expression because he didn't want to leave. | 1:30:00 | 1:30:04 | |
He wanted to stay. | 1:30:04 | 1:30:06 | |
You know? | 1:30:06 | 1:30:07 | |
And one day he said, "I need to take a photograph of you | 1:30:07 | 1:30:10 | |
"and you need this one because it's going to be the last one." | 1:30:10 | 1:30:14 | |
That's what he said. I said, "Don't be silly!" | 1:30:14 | 1:30:17 | |
And it was. | 1:30:18 | 1:30:19 | |
It was just sort of business as usual until things progressed | 1:30:22 | 1:30:26 | |
and he was having a harder and harder time getting out of his seat. | 1:30:26 | 1:30:29 | |
And he had a horrible, horrible cough, | 1:30:29 | 1:30:31 | |
which I guess was typical. | 1:30:31 | 1:30:33 | |
Six o'clock would roll around and then he'd sort of be like, | 1:30:33 | 1:30:36 | |
"Can you come keep me company?" | 1:30:36 | 1:30:38 | |
You know, it was this little boy. "Don't leave!" | 1:30:38 | 1:30:41 | |
Little baby voice. | 1:30:41 | 1:30:43 | |
Robert was in his bedroom, | 1:30:43 | 1:30:45 | |
not feeling particularly well, | 1:30:45 | 1:30:47 | |
and he was like, you know, he was like, | 1:30:47 | 1:30:49 | |
"I'd like to do a picture with my hand holding the skull cane." | 1:30:49 | 1:30:54 | |
And I said to Brian, I said, | 1:30:54 | 1:30:55 | |
"Listen, this has got to be a self-portrait." | 1:30:55 | 1:30:57 | |
And it wasn't often that he'd wanted to take his own picture, | 1:30:57 | 1:31:01 | |
but he had been trying. | 1:31:01 | 1:31:02 | |
I took the skull cane and I held it like this and I said, | 1:31:02 | 1:31:06 | |
"Do a Polaroid." | 1:31:06 | 1:31:07 | |
So I brought it to Robert and he was like, "Wow! | 1:31:08 | 1:31:10 | |
"That's good." And his knees started to hurt, | 1:31:10 | 1:31:13 | |
so we put a chair in for him to sit on. | 1:31:13 | 1:31:16 | |
That's the classic masterpiece picture. | 1:31:18 | 1:31:21 | |
It's a tremendous photograph. | 1:31:21 | 1:31:23 | |
One of the greatest self-portraits of all time. | 1:31:23 | 1:31:26 | |
-RADIO: -It is 2:38. Here's the WNBC weather - cloudy, breezy, | 1:31:33 | 1:31:37 | |
chance of showers and thunderstorms right through the evening. | 1:31:37 | 1:31:40 | |
The low tonight in low 60s. Right now, 74 degrees. | 1:31:40 | 1:31:43 | |
There was something electric that day. | 1:32:07 | 1:32:12 | |
It wasn't just an opening. | 1:32:12 | 1:32:13 | |
It was a... | 1:32:13 | 1:32:15 | |
..a memorial with a living corpse. | 1:32:15 | 1:32:20 | |
Your heart just went out to him because here he was having | 1:32:22 | 1:32:24 | |
the success that he dreamed of from those days | 1:32:24 | 1:32:26 | |
in coffee shops in the village, | 1:32:26 | 1:32:29 | |
and, you know, we could tell he was dying. | 1:32:29 | 1:32:33 | |
This is... Someone took this picture of me... | 1:32:39 | 1:32:41 | |
..taking a picture of him. | 1:32:43 | 1:32:45 | |
He knew what I was doing there. | 1:32:45 | 1:32:47 | |
I think he understood the whole thing. | 1:32:49 | 1:32:51 | |
He didn't like it, but he understood it. | 1:32:51 | 1:32:54 | |
I think that was his proudest day. | 1:32:54 | 1:32:55 | |
I really do. | 1:32:55 | 1:32:57 | |
He looked like the king sitting there. | 1:32:57 | 1:33:00 | |
Had everything from flowers to fist fucking... | 1:33:04 | 1:33:08 | |
..and I had to go around the room with my mother in a wheelchair. | 1:33:09 | 1:33:12 | |
Wow! Yeah. | 1:33:15 | 1:33:16 | |
When I saw the one with the whip, I thought, "Oh, my God!" | 1:33:16 | 1:33:19 | |
And I remember going to my kids and I went, | 1:33:19 | 1:33:23 | |
"That's him?!" It was a self portrait! | 1:33:23 | 1:33:26 | |
He loved attention. | 1:33:27 | 1:33:29 | |
Even though it had to do with the fact that he was a dying man, | 1:33:29 | 1:33:33 | |
it didn't matter. | 1:33:33 | 1:33:34 | |
He was one picture. | 1:33:34 | 1:33:36 | |
I mean, it stunned people. | 1:33:36 | 1:33:38 | |
We all sort of were under the impression it was going to be | 1:33:38 | 1:33:41 | |
this glorious article, when in fact... | 1:33:41 | 1:33:45 | |
-That was sad. -Yeah. | 1:33:45 | 1:33:47 | |
-I'm sure he saw his own mortality. -Yeah. | 1:33:47 | 1:33:50 | |
Very clearly at that moment. | 1:33:50 | 1:33:52 | |
His image out there was this handsome, vain, | 1:33:52 | 1:33:55 | |
elegant creature, and... | 1:33:55 | 1:33:57 | |
..people really... | 1:33:58 | 1:34:00 | |
..were shocked. | 1:34:01 | 1:34:03 | |
I mean, come on! It was like... | 1:34:03 | 1:34:05 | |
he was alive! | 1:34:05 | 1:34:07 | |
Working with Robert Mapplethorpe has been my most enlightening | 1:34:15 | 1:34:19 | |
and rewarding curatorial experience. | 1:34:19 | 1:34:23 | |
I felt that Robert Mapplethorpe's work was so important, | 1:34:23 | 1:34:27 | |
so I went to New York and visited him at his studio. | 1:34:27 | 1:34:31 | |
We started to talk. | 1:34:31 | 1:34:33 | |
He was very easy to talk to. | 1:34:33 | 1:34:35 | |
I felt after five minutes that I'd known him a long time. | 1:34:35 | 1:34:39 | |
MAPPLETHORPE: Have you ever seen the X, Y, Z Portfolios? | 1:34:39 | 1:34:42 | |
There's an X portfolio, which is sex pictures. | 1:34:42 | 1:34:46 | |
There's 13 of them. | 1:34:46 | 1:34:48 | |
Then there's Y, which is flowers. | 1:34:48 | 1:34:50 | |
And there's Z, which is blacks. | 1:34:50 | 1:34:52 | |
He was particularly interested in showing the X, Y, Z series, | 1:34:52 | 1:34:57 | |
which had not been shown before in its entirety. | 1:34:57 | 1:35:01 | |
Maybe interesting to have a wall where you have a row | 1:35:01 | 1:35:04 | |
of X, Y and Z all in one mass, or in three rows or something. | 1:35:04 | 1:35:09 | |
We devised a way of displaying them | 1:35:09 | 1:35:11 | |
in a case that would be so high | 1:35:11 | 1:35:15 | |
that a child could not see into it. | 1:35:15 | 1:35:17 | |
But an adult could look down upon it. | 1:35:18 | 1:35:20 | |
I remember showing my husband some of the pictures | 1:35:20 | 1:35:23 | |
before the exhibition opened. | 1:35:23 | 1:35:27 | |
He said, "Janet, do you know what you're doing?" | 1:35:27 | 1:35:29 | |
But I didn't listen to him. | 1:35:29 | 1:35:31 | |
Maybe I was crazy! | 1:35:31 | 1:35:33 | |
Hi, Robert. Here we are. | 1:35:39 | 1:35:41 | |
You are with us. | 1:35:41 | 1:35:44 | |
You're with us and we're with you. | 1:35:44 | 1:35:46 | |
I think you can tell whether a show is successful | 1:35:47 | 1:35:52 | |
by the sound in the gallery. | 1:35:52 | 1:35:54 | |
If people are talking a lot, | 1:35:54 | 1:35:56 | |
you know somehow the show just doesn't have it. | 1:35:56 | 1:35:59 | |
In the Mapplethorpe show there was silence. | 1:36:02 | 1:36:06 | |
You could hear a pin drop. | 1:36:08 | 1:36:10 | |
This one time, it was a terrible night for Robert and he was almost | 1:36:29 | 1:36:34 | |
hallucinating a bit and he ended up pulling out some of the IVs | 1:36:34 | 1:36:38 | |
so I had blood dripping out of his arm, in IVs, | 1:36:38 | 1:36:42 | |
and I had to, he... I know I had to clean him up. | 1:36:42 | 1:36:44 | |
He'd shat in the bed. | 1:36:44 | 1:36:46 | |
And I'm like, "Oh, my God." | 1:36:46 | 1:36:48 | |
That night Robert looked at me teary eyed, crying, | 1:36:48 | 1:36:52 | |
and said, "Oh, my God," he's like, "I'm dying." | 1:36:52 | 1:36:54 | |
I'm dying. And... | 1:36:58 | 1:37:01 | |
I had to say, "Yeah." | 1:37:01 | 1:37:02 | |
What can I... I couldn't... I mean, yes. | 1:37:07 | 1:37:10 | |
Robert gave a going away party for himself. | 1:37:20 | 1:37:24 | |
A lavish cocktail party at his loft. | 1:37:24 | 1:37:28 | |
Waiters walking around with silver trays | 1:37:28 | 1:37:31 | |
with little tiny blini and caviar and champagne. | 1:37:31 | 1:37:36 | |
It was very elegant. | 1:37:36 | 1:37:37 | |
And Robert was sitting in the middle of the room. | 1:37:49 | 1:37:52 | |
I walked up to him and kneeled down at his feet | 1:37:52 | 1:37:55 | |
and came face-to-face with him. | 1:37:55 | 1:37:57 | |
He said, "You still look so beautiful," and I said, "Thank you." | 1:37:57 | 1:38:01 | |
I said, "Well, what do want me to do?" | 1:38:03 | 1:38:06 | |
He said, "I want you to tell her everything. | 1:38:06 | 1:38:09 | |
"Keep me alive." | 1:38:09 | 1:38:11 | |
"March 8th. Well, this is it. | 1:38:17 | 1:38:20 | |
"The last two days have been hell. | 1:38:20 | 1:38:23 | |
"The funny part is not knowing how to say goodbye. | 1:38:23 | 1:38:26 | |
"Letting go. Are words enough?" | 1:38:26 | 1:38:28 | |
I was just like, come on, Robert, | 1:38:30 | 1:38:32 | |
just like have a conversation with me and just say, you know, | 1:38:32 | 1:38:35 | |
"I'm proud of you and keep it going," And, "just do good work." | 1:38:35 | 1:38:39 | |
I never got it. | 1:38:41 | 1:38:43 | |
Never got it. | 1:38:43 | 1:38:44 | |
Some days yes, and some days no. | 1:38:49 | 1:38:52 | |
You know, on a daily basis, | 1:38:52 | 1:38:54 | |
I would say in any given day I'm happy part of the time | 1:38:54 | 1:38:57 | |
and not the rest, you know. | 1:38:57 | 1:38:58 | |
I think I'm a perfectionist and I think it's hard to be happy | 1:38:58 | 1:39:02 | |
if you like things to be perfect cos things are not perfect. | 1:39:02 | 1:39:05 | |
I don't know whether the television cameras can see it or not. | 1:39:20 | 1:39:23 | |
I'm going to be fast enough with it that you can't. | 1:39:23 | 1:39:25 | |
But I want senators to come over | 1:39:25 | 1:39:27 | |
here, if they have any doubt, | 1:39:27 | 1:39:29 | |
and look at the pictures. | 1:39:29 | 1:39:31 | |
I don't even acknowledge that it's art. | 1:39:32 | 1:39:35 | |
I don't even acknowledge that the fellow who did it was an artist. | 1:39:37 | 1:39:40 | |
I think he was a jerk. | 1:39:40 | 1:39:41 | |
-CHANTING: -Keep your hands off! Keep your hands off. | 1:39:41 | 1:39:43 | |
This line is for two o'clock only. | 1:39:50 | 1:39:52 | |
You need a pass to get in to see the exhibition. | 1:39:52 | 1:39:55 | |
..it happened. What you're watching now is the Cincinnati police | 1:40:07 | 1:40:10 | |
as they made their move today | 1:40:10 | 1:40:11 | |
against the Contemporary Arts Center. | 1:40:11 | 1:40:13 | |
They temporarily closed the controversial Robert Mapplethorpe | 1:40:13 | 1:40:16 | |
exhibit that resulted in charges today against | 1:40:16 | 1:40:18 | |
the Contemporary Arts Center and its director. | 1:40:18 | 1:40:21 | |
It's an important exhibition, | 1:40:21 | 1:40:23 | |
it's important for the city that it be seen here. | 1:40:23 | 1:40:25 | |
It was suggested that I wear a bulletproof vest. | 1:40:29 | 1:40:32 | |
There were the calls to the home or the calls to my office, | 1:40:32 | 1:40:34 | |
saying we're going to kill your children. | 1:40:34 | 1:40:36 | |
The art gallery and its director are charged with obscenity | 1:41:12 | 1:41:15 | |
for exhibiting photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe. | 1:41:15 | 1:41:19 | |
The jury took about two hours to come up with its decision. | 1:41:22 | 1:41:25 | |
We the jury in this case find the defendant | 1:41:25 | 1:41:27 | |
-not guilty of obscenity... -SPEECH DROWNED BY CHEERING | 1:41:27 | 1:41:30 | |
Next up is the Robert Mapplethorpe flag, | 1:41:40 | 1:41:43 | |
the great Star-Spangled Banner, gelatine silver print. | 1:41:43 | 1:41:46 | |
48,000 now gets us going. | 1:41:46 | 1:41:48 | |
48,000, 48,000. 55,000. | 1:41:48 | 1:41:51 | |
60, 65,000. Thank you, ma'am. | 1:41:51 | 1:41:53 | |
He was always giving me his work. | 1:41:53 | 1:41:55 | |
70,000, with Caroline... | 1:41:55 | 1:41:56 | |
I had at least half a dozen photographs and a collage. | 1:41:56 | 1:41:59 | |
70,000... | 1:41:59 | 1:42:01 | |
Don't ask me what I did with this, please, | 1:42:01 | 1:42:03 | |
because if I kept it I wouldn't be here, | 1:42:03 | 1:42:05 | |
I'd be in my villa in Tuscany. | 1:42:05 | 1:42:07 | |
I can't discuss it. Too upsetting. | 1:42:08 | 1:42:10 | |
Sold. | 1:42:10 | 1:42:12 | |
I threw it away. | 1:42:12 | 1:42:13 | |
-Sold. -When I moved. -Sold. | 1:42:13 | 1:42:15 | |
I told this once to an art dealer and he said, | 1:42:15 | 1:42:19 | |
"I can't believe that you didn't know that someone as ambitious | 1:42:19 | 1:42:22 | |
"as Robert, as clearly as ambitious, wouldn't become famous. | 1:42:22 | 1:42:25 | |
And I said that no-one could have imagined that photographs | 1:42:25 | 1:42:28 | |
would be so valuable financially. Cos they weren't. | 1:42:28 | 1:42:31 | |
No photographs were. | 1:42:31 | 1:42:33 | |
It wasn't just that I couldn't imagine it, no-one could imagine it. | 1:42:33 | 1:42:36 | |
Whatever it took... | 1:42:41 | 1:42:42 | |
..to become Robert Mapplethorpe | 1:42:45 | 1:42:48 | |
is what it was going to take, and it took his life to do it. | 1:42:48 | 1:42:54 | |
Literally. | 1:42:57 | 1:42:59 | |
Mapplethorpe by himself, the name is really great. | 1:43:39 | 1:43:42 | |
-It's like Titian or... -Yeah. You know where to go. | 1:43:42 | 1:43:45 | |
Just the name, that's all you need is the last name | 1:43:45 | 1:43:48 | |
to recognise the artist. It's so clear and simple. | 1:43:48 | 1:43:50 | |
What if you stacked three images into the... | 1:43:50 | 1:43:53 | |
We can't have nudity on the street banners because of city regulations. | 1:43:54 | 1:43:57 | |
So that's one point of discussion. | 1:43:57 | 1:43:59 | |
Second is the colour. | 1:43:59 | 1:44:01 | |
This is a mock-up of the invitation for our opening reception. | 1:44:01 | 1:44:04 | |
The self portrait on the front, | 1:44:04 | 1:44:06 | |
then the inside message. | 1:44:06 | 1:44:07 | |
Then the RSVP card. | 1:44:07 | 1:44:10 | |
It's just an innocuous flower, | 1:44:10 | 1:44:12 | |
not anything that the Post Office would object to. | 1:44:12 | 1:44:14 | |
I'm not planning to put a curtain, but I'm sure | 1:44:14 | 1:44:16 | |
there will be some kind of warning on the gallery as people go in. | 1:44:16 | 1:44:20 | |
Well, and with her holding her sculpture. | 1:44:20 | 1:44:22 | |
-That was purposeful. -Yeah, so great. | 1:44:22 | 1:44:25 | |
I wanted to put Louise Bourgeois holding her sculpture, Lafayette, | 1:44:25 | 1:44:28 | |
which looks like a phallus, | 1:44:28 | 1:44:30 | |
next to the picture of The Man In The Polyester Suit. | 1:44:30 | 1:44:33 | |
Yes, with his actual phallus. | 1:44:33 | 1:44:35 | |
It's a curatorial pun. | 1:44:35 | 1:44:37 |