The Gothic Sensibility of Robert Mapplethorpe

This is the preface to a longer piece.

The late Robert Mapplethorpe once said of his work as a photojournalist that the best picture he took was of Bianca Jagger whispering in Mick Jagger's ear. "I caught them telling a secret, which is sort of rude," he said. "That's what that kind of photographer is .....it's stealing secrets.''

But, to all appearances, Mapplethorpe only spent a small part of his career "stealing secrets". He spent the larger part trying to get people to confess. He put them in front of a camera and tried to draw out their obsessions and fascinations, while he posed and positioned them to convert their image into something that expressed his vision and sensibility.

What he was trying to get at with these photographs were his own fascinations -- with danger and desire, penance, darkness and transgression. What is perhaps more difficult to deal with is that he was also expressing a disturbed fascination with death. Where other artists have celebrated life, Mapplethorpe offered scenes of torture and a cold and emotionless classicism that made life seem lifeless. He was the artist as postmodern vampire, using his camera to create something undead.

In the essay that follows, an effort is made to understand what he was up to. Hopefully, the essay doesn't steal his secrets, at least not in the sadistic and exploitive way the predators of politics and the news media are now doing to many people in public life. But the essay does go very deep, not only into Mapplethorpe's life but into his psyche. It does so because he played an important role in shaping contemporary culture, but also because he shares many of contemporary culture characteristics. He was one of a growing number of "deliverers of darkness" and crafters of fantasy who have challenged traditions based on social control and censorship, and given us a new kind of society that is more open but that also has a disturbing degree of morbidity. His fascinations -- with violence, transgressive sex, and the revelation of secrets -- are now our society's fascinations. The image he showed the world -- of the devil reveling in the dark side in a universe of media representations -- is now, in many ways, our image.

His effort to chronicle his own and other people's sexual fixations has also, to say the least, proved prophetic. It is one of the precursors of our emerging culture of "reality programming" in which everything from Jerry Springer to web cams now converts people's private lives and problems into forms of entertainment.

The essay that follows tries to tease some of this out although it isn't close to a final statement on Mapplethorpe's significance. By making his life and art more transparent to readers, it seeks to answer fundamental questions about human nature and about whether the new culture of fantasy and desire he helped bring about is ushering in an age of freedom or giving us a new form of unfreedom masquerading as liberation.

Hopefully, the yield this effort offers, and the fact that it recognizes Mapplethorpe's common humanity with the rest of us, will justify the effort to get at the secrets that were at the heart of his life and work. In any case, his ashes are under the earth and his secrets, while still in some sense his own, are also now history's.

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