Robert Mapplethorpe is the subject of this interesting if flawed documentary study by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey; he was the brilliant photographer and artist whose genius was to absorb and transform the visual rhetoric of porn into stunning, provocative images. His Warholian career ran in parallel with the heyday of New York’s promiscuous gay scene, and his final Aids-related illness lent a crepuscular grandeur to the success of his last exhibitions. Maybe only Dominick Dunne or Tom Wolfe could do justice to it. Interestingly, controversy surrounding Mapplethorpe’s work took off only once his status as an artist had been fully established – the reactionary campaigns against his photography happened after his death in 1989.
There is food for thought here, although the movie is, for me, a little uncritical on the subject of Mapplethorpe’s weaknesses: his lucrative celebrity portraits now look, frankly, uninteresting. (Brooke Shields says he was the first person to photograph her in profile. Uh … really?) And for me, the problem with this film is that it doesn’t analyse Mapplethorpe’s much admired photographs of flowers. How seriously did the artist take these images – how seriously should we take them? Was it that pistels and stamens and petals resembled genitalia? Is that not the point? Or were the flowers simply there to deflect criticism, to underscore a spurious context and artistic good faith? It’s difficult to tell. This otherwise thorough study does justice to Mapplethorpe’s talent.
