The Edge Online - Reviews: Patricia Morrisoe - Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe: A Biography
Patricia Morrisroe
MacMillan hardback, 461 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)

Patricia Morrisroe’s book is about as close to autobiography as we get. And as autobiography, Mapplethorpe paints an astonishingly unsympathetic portrait of its subject.

He grew up part of a working class family in conservative Floral Park, Queens, struggling from an early age with a sexuality that divided him between unsuccessful liaisons with women and a passion for gay pornography. In college he joined the Pershing Rifles, one of the toughest military fraternities in the country, and even there found echoes of the gay S&M that would consume him. (He later claimed initiation rites including a rifle barrel pushed up his arse, and being forced to eat ‛shit’ from a toilet bowl.)

Although obsessive about men, Morrisroe makes clear that the only real emotional relationship in Mapplethorpe’s life was with singer/poet Patti Smith. As struggling artists the pair settled together in the infamous Chelsea Hotel. Part married couple, part partners, part room-mates, Morrisroe never quite gets to grips with a complex affiliation that would sustain in one form or another right up until his death. What is clear, though, is the sheer desperation on both sides to succeed at something, anything.

Mapplethorpe was not originally a photographer – much of his early work was sculptural – but the invention of the Polaroid freed his artistic mind sufficiently to eventually take over. And it was only natural that his art should reflect the life of a man that haunted the heaviest gay clubs New York in the 70s had to offer. He was a leather boy, deeply into S&M, often picking up several men a night to indulge his sexual and photographic arts. It was all about satisfaction and work: fuck ’em, photograph ’em, forget ’em.

The man Morrisroe gives us is one without a private life, where everything – even bedroom and bathroom – were up for public grabs.

But not so where his family were concerned. Mapplethorpe didn’t come out to his parents until he was already dying, and only then through the auspices of his siblings. (The younger Ed was by now working as his brother’s assistant in New York.)

Celebrity portraitist, brilliant photographer, S&M artist (he was adamant that he was never a ‛gay artist’ or an ‛AIDS artist’) Mapplethorpe’s life is a mass of contradictions. His reputation is built on the work, a canny combination of controversy, sharp business sense, and technical expertise (his pictures were printed – although by others – using a platinum process on watercolour paper and, later, canvas). His celebrity was altogether darker, more driven. By the end, the picture that emerges from the book is of Warhol’s evil twin. In contrast to the consciously blank canvas the Pop Artist presented to the world, Mapplethorpe cluttered his 15 minutes with a lifetime of extremity.

Morrisroe’s book is lucid, enthralling and periodically horrifying. She was clearly in awe of the work, and on occasion seems loathe to really examine the monsterousness that underlies much of it. The depth of the man’s ambiguity was known only to himself and possibly Smith, and in the end, for all we know about him, we end up knowing very little actually of him.

For whatever reason, though, you do have to question why this substantial tome cheats so on its illustrations. It’s one thing to talk about Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with a whip stuck up his arse, quite another to see it. Anyone approaching the work for the first time from these pages can be forgiven for wondering at just what it was that provoked the wife of right wing US Senator Jesse Helms to exclaim on seeing the late photographer’s pictures, ‛Lord have mercy, Jesse, I’m not believing this . . .’