Exhibit on Mapplethorpe, curated by Hockney

Thanks, KP, we'd be interested.

Hmm, I wonder if critics are reviewing the show..

Thanks for the invitation, osso.

I confess, I've never been a big fan of Maplethorpe. His work seems very clinical to me - no warmth. As documents they are wonderful, technically perfect; as portraits I don't find them very human.

I get the same feeling from his flowers - that nothing there is alive. Again, clinical is really my best word to describe them.

Hmmm, iconic blossoms. Brings to mind the static images of Georgia O'Keeffe. Consider her "Two Calla lillies on Pink"--with stamens galore.

Look at me: I suggested "blossoms" as a nice euphemism and then I use the most inflammatory "galore."

Yep.

I've never been that much of an O'Keefe fan; heresy, I know!

Yes, I find much of Georgia O'Keeffe static. I admire some of her cityscapes, but, with the blossom series, she seems to have seized it, mounted it, and ridden it off into the sunset. There's, to my eye, an obsessive quality to the group; with a few exceptions, these blossoms seem repetitious in form and theme.

Boomerang, I think your word "clinical" applies very well to most of the works in the exhibition under discussion. I wish Hockney had chosen--if he had the opportunity--more of the live Mapplethorpes, for they do exist.

I've been following and very interested - I don't know Mapplethorpe's work well but did find it more interesting than I'd expected - Boomerang's 'Clinical' does sum it up for me too.

Suffering with the dreaded lurgy (flu) and very sorry for self so head won't think of anything more intelligent.

I just read quickly a review of the show in today's Guardian; heh, it seems to concur with some of our concerns. I'll give a link later, but I'm still at work and have to go do some...

Hope you feel better, Vivien!




Edit, Edit, I was typing too fast. It seems to not concur...

Hot toddies, Vivien.

I was thinking today -- Wasn't it Hockney that recently published the book about his theory that the Renaisance masters used a camera obscura to "trace" their images --

When I got home I checked it out - sure enough it WAS Hockney.

And now I'm wondering if Hockney's recent obsessions with the camera obscura might have influenced his choices -- the static, almost inhuman quality of so much of the work.

Could the stripped down nature of these images be what attracted him? Is he mentally filling in the blanks?

And what happens when I fill in the blanks......

Like I look at the protrait of de Kooning and I think "what a mug shot - you get the chance to photograph de Kooning and that's all you can come up with?"

Like I said, I've never been a big fan of Maplethorpe but I MIGHT be beginning to understand the exhibit.

Or maybe I just need a hot toddy too!

I'm still a coughing fool, I'm sure I need a hot toddy soon.

Back home after work. I'll go look up some reviews, or maybe just the one, and post at least a bit of it with a link.

I'm feeling fine, but I think I'll have a hot toddy anyway. All this talk has me motivated.

Here's the Guardian Article -

Jonathan Jones
Monday January 17, 2005
The Guardian

It might seem an unlikely partnership. The American artist Robert Mapplethorpe was portrayed as a deathly, Satanic, sexual predator - and that was just in his own photographs. The Republican "moral right" went further, trying to remove his work from American museums and using him as a whipping boy (which he would probably have enjoyed) against the National Endowment for the Arts. David Hockney is a far cosier character in British culture - the most articulate and personable artist we have, who if anything suffers from his own projection of niceness and common sense.

Recently Hockney has been conducting a polemic against photography, arguing that digital cameras finally expose the naive nature of its claim to truth. So, having expressed his doubts about photography, he curates a photography exhibition.

Far from a retraction, however, it is a subtle argument about art and the camera. Mapplethorpe was a real artist who ruthlessly imposed his own vision on the world - as much of a stylist as any painter. Hockney's selection of Mapplethorpe's work, from cock shots to portraits of celebrities, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Louise Bourgeois, makes certain painters look, well, photographic.

The point is well taken. Great photographs - and Mapplethorpe's look greater and greater - function in the same way as other kinds of art: they are poetic and personal and subjective, like a drawing or painting. Seen through Hockney's eyes, the warmth and humanity of Mapplethorpe becomes visible - even, or especially, in the powerful selection of erotica. At the same time, anyone who thought Hockney was cuddly is disabused.


What I really like about this show is its intimate insight into who Hockney is and the world he has inhabited - one that was never that far from the decadent New York of Robert Mapplethorpe. Hockney and Mapplethorpe were both friends of the art god whose portrait is inevitably here - Andy Warhol. Other friends of Hockney who appear include the bearded curator Henry Geldzahler. Most of all we are reminded that sex and death, Mapplethorpe's subjects, are Hockney's subjects too.

Source - http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/reviews/story/0,11712,1392053,00.html

And, there's a quote by Hockney in this link - http://towleroad.typepad.com/towleroad/2005/01/hockney_does_ma.html

interesting stuff <cough, sniffle, poor me>

Thank you for The Guardian article, Ossobuco. I must say that I don't see much "warmth and humanity" in Hockney's selection of Mapplethorpe photographs. Although I generally like Mapplethorpe's work, in these images I see a coolness--and a style that is distancing, rather than human.
Andy Warhol an "art god"? Perhaps, in a small part of Manhattan Island. However, I will admit that, in this confined but hyperactive arena, his fame did last for a good deal more than 15 minutes!
I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that David Hockney has tried out a digital camera. He was a talented and highly-committed photographer, so it seems only natural that he'd want to give the new medium a careful exploration. Also, he seems too sensible a guy to dismiss digital photography without any hands-on. I must track down what he has said about the "truth" of photography.
Again, thank you Ossobuco, for posting this article--which raises even more issues than we had on the table already!

I suspect his comment on digital photography addressed how you can change an image, and therefore.. truth flees.

Osso, OR (and this is a wild guess) by being able to make artistic modifications of the picture truth is enhanced.

Well, I'd agree with that, JL; not sure that's what Hockney meant though.

Off to work, see you later.

JLN, Truth may definitely be enhanced by making artistic modifications of an image--and this positive change is sometimes a byproduct of inspired hard work in a darkroom. Hockney seems to be worrying about a severe diminution of a very literal sort of truth that can be arranged through the destruction of pixels, followed by their replacement with others that were nowhere in the original image. I do wonder if--and, if so, how--Hockney used the word "truth." In an artistic context, a literal, objective, exact reproduction via photograph (even if that could be done!), would likely be a boring and flat kind of truth to the subject. In genuine art, I like to think that the truth is alive and changing. I have seen digital work--both photographs and mixed media--that is full of life. In this Mapplethorpe exhibition, I see a number of film-based images that are sadly static--to the point at which I cannot sense much of even a literal truth. Of couse, studying a 3-by-5-inch reproduction of a picture on my computer screen is not giving a work the best chance to express itself. I may well be missing something important that would be obvious were I present in the gallery.

Miklos, it seems to me that the static composition and flavor of the photos MIGHT be a "manipulation" of Mapplethorp (and, perhaps, their selection by Hockney) to make a "truth statement" about the subjects.
The word, truth, is, of course a complex matter. I like to make the distinction (as I've done on other threads) between reality and truth. Reality is what is, whatever the case may be, the condiitons of things, including us. Truth refers to the goal of our efforts to make propositions about reality. Truth is always human in the sense that knowledge is a function of the knower. Reality, on the other, includes us but is independent of our will and of our attempts at understanding.
So, when a photographer manipulates a photo I think he is attempting to make an artistic truth statement. When he does nothing to the film, when he attempts to be "naturalistic" and let the photo speak for itself as it simply reports what it has "seen" that, too, is a statement by the photographer, one of benign artistic neglect.

-edited