THE CLINICIAN OF EXCESS

By Richard Stengel

Oscar Wilde once remarked that he had given his genius to his life but only his talent to his art. The same might be said of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, only his life turned out to be a sad and sordid affair and his art was often no more than slapdash. As Patricia Morrisroe makes clear in her smart and readable biography Mapplethorpe (Random House; 461 pages; $27.50), the photographer's brief life-like his most notorious images-was not a pretty picture.

The artist, who died of AIDS in 1989, was a creature of painful contradictions. Heralded as the premier technical photographer of his generation, he never printed his own pictures. Cited as a pivotal figure in elevating photography's status as an art, he seemed less concerned with placing his images in museums than in overseeing the opening-night guest lists. Yet it was oddly appropriate that Mapplethorpe became a posthumous symbol of artistic freedom in 1990, when Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center was prosecuted on obscenity charges for showing his photographs. While Mapplethorpe probably could not recite the First Amendment, his work was an extreme form of self-expression meant to shock people into seeing his dark world in a new light.

Raised in a Roman Catholic household in Queens, New York, Mapplethorpe repudiated his parents and his religious upbringing. From an early age he felt "magic" in his fingers but struggled for a way to use it. He attended Pratt Institute in New York City and eventually fell into photography, even though it was the lifelong hobby of his father, whom he detested.

Uncomfortable with his homosexuality, he was attracted to the emotionally detached style of Andy Warhol, whose impersonal images captivated the New York art scene in the 1970s. In Mapplethorpe's work and career, sex and art were inescapably intertwined. Much of his photographic work functioned as a kind of visual diary of his sexual trysts and the downtown S&M scene of which he was a denizen. In a sense, Mapplethorpe was a society photographer of a shadowy and often depraved society. Critics have suggested that Mapplethorpe, in his images of naked men in S&M poses, was attempting to turn pornography into art. In fact what he did was to treat the poses of a macabre sexuality with the dry, symmetrical formalism of a technical manual.

Mapplethorpe's obsessive promiscuity seemed joyless. He believed in Blake's notion that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, but in Mapplethorpe's case it seems to have led only to more excess. The one human relationship that comes alive in the book is his lifelong friendship with the rock singer and poet Patti Smith. Her tortured soulfulness, however, contrasts with Mapplethorpe's relentless superficiality; his photographs of her are the only ones that do not seem oppressively clinical. (Even his images of flowers look denatured.)

Mapplethorpe's career was an emblem of the 1980s art scene, when bohemianism was banished and artists became media stars. Photography was the perfect medium for the times: fast, mechanical and endlessly reproducible. Mapplethorpe, as Morrisroe notes, divided his work between his X-rated sex pictures and his PG-rated portraits and flowers. He merchandised both shrewdly. Mapplethorpe's talent was given to his work, but his genius was devoted to marketing himself.