Robert Mapplethorpe

As writer Philip Gefter has put it, gay life in New York in the 1970s was ‘downtown, out of sight and after hours’.

Mapplethorpe was not the first artist to photograph the male nude in homoerotic ways – the art-historically well informed Mapplethorpe knew of the work of Thomas Eakins, George Platt Lynes and Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, indeed often directly quoting their work in his compositions – but he was perhaps the first to consistently put the homoerotic up front and centre in galleries and museums. When Mapplethorpe exhibited photographs of the men from the West Village gay bars he regularly cruised, he exposed a hidden underground world to wider straight society.

Mapplethorpe would invite men back home both for pleasure and to act as his models. At his loft, the encounters often slipped between sex and photo session. The resulting images brought Mapplethorpe notoriety in the late 1970s and early 80s, and his continuing engagement with such provocative subject matter risked his being labelled a pornographer. But times were changing – and he helped them change: those he photographed as once ‘outsiders’, would soon become an established part of the social circle of artists, performers and musicians making a name for themselves in New York.

Mapplethorpe’s on-off lover and partner, curator Sam Wagstaff, was part of an artworld that, in 1972 when they first met, was still well and truly in the closet. It included artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, all of whom only spoke openly about their sexuality amongst themselves.

Having had his first homosexual experiences during a trip to San Francisco in 1968, Mapplethorpe once said: ‘My life began [that] summer … Before that I didn’t exist.’ And from that point on, he seemed driven by a desire to make visible the hidden history of gay male sexuality and erotics.

In an era when the terms pervert and homosexual were often interchangeable, Mapplethorpe didn’t consider his sexual activities deviant; rather he saw them as central to his emerging creative identity.

Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe would themselves go on to become one of the most celebrated couples of 20th century New York; the glamorous pair also becoming part of the growing visibility of a gay identity. As Mapplethorpe would later say: ‘Sam really respected the way I was honest about being gay. I helped Sam be more open about his sexuality.’

Whether cross-dressing with his close friend Patti Smith, or presenting himself as a ‘lipsticked waif’ complete with smudged mascara eyes, Mapplethorpe had long been drawn to androgyny. His long-running series of self-portraits were a way of exploring and critiquing masculinities and the slippery zone between genders.

Exploring gender formed the basis of a significant collaborative project Mapplethorpe undertook with Lisa Lyon, the first World Women’s Bodybuilding Champion, in 1979. Drawn to her powerful physique that confused conventional gender lines, Mapplethorpe began a near obsessive six-year project to photograph Lyon.

Though the definition of ‘femininity’ has widened considerably in the past three decades, at the time Lyon’s muscular body was viewed as decidedly masculine. In more than 200 photographs, Mapplethorpe worked with Lyon as she masqueraded in the roles of showgirl, Hollywood screen goddess, haute couture model or gym bunny … the different guises that Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe’s partner, called ‘her revised femininity’.

Over a hundred of their images – there was no ‘model and photographer’, these were true collaborations – were published in Mapplethorpe’s 1983 single volume book, 'Lady: Lisa Lyon’.

When Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS-related conditions in March 1989, he was a prolific and respected artist. But his work – which had long provoked questions about censorship and freedom of expression – soon set off one of the fiercest episodes in what came to be known as the ‘Culture Wars’.

In 1989, at the height of the HIV and AIDS crisis, Mapplethorpe’s retrospective exhibition, 'The Perfect Moment’, emphasized Mapplethorpe’s career achievements, integrating themes of sexuality and the male nude alongside portraits and floral still lifes. After a controversy-free start to the tour, one venue, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, cancelled the show before its opening. The reaction of the artistic community was swift: students installed an 8ft papier-mâché penis on the grounds; several artists boycotted the institution, and activists projected slides of Mapplethorpe’s images – those not allowed to be shown inside – on the façade of the Corcoran.

After this initial reaction, the tour continued until it opened at Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. Cincinnati’s Director, Dennis Barrie, was arrested on obscenity charges, with Mapplethorpe cast as a pervert by conservative politicians, who monopolised the incident to fuel fear-mongering in light of the AIDS crisis. While Barrie was later acquitted, the incident sparked mass protests by those defending personal and artistic freedoms in the face of an onslaught of attempts to cut National Endowment for the Arts funding.

The Culture Wars came to dominate the 1990s, as artists like Andres Serrano, performer Karen Finley and writer Kathy Acker were all pulled into public debates about freedom of expression.

By the start of 1980, Mapplethorpe had begun to make African American men the primary subjects of his nude studies. Here, as was consistent with his broader practice, Mapplethorpe’s own personal sexual desires infiltrated his practice. Mapplethorpe did not disguise his fascination with the sexual allure of his models, who were selected for their physiques. He was also unapologetic about his interest in the tonal effects of black skin, in effect conflating racial type with purely aesthetic concerns.

Mapplethorpe’s obsession with the ‘form’ and ‘colour’ of black men has subsequently (and justifiably) invited conversations around the racial objectification of black masculinity. Debates about Mapplethorpe’s racial fetishism still linger today, but writers like Jonathan D. Katz point out that, while problematic, Mapplethorpe’s work always also includes an element of irony and critique, and that Mapplethorpe consistently photographed – and drew attention to – the very stereotypes he sought to challenge.

[The sex pictures] have a perfectly natural frankness, couched in elegance even, which looks quite different than any dirty pictures you have ever seen … some part of freedom is always outrageous to somebody and that’s not to say that [a] certain outrage isn’t a necessity to art’s health.

— Sam Wagstaff

He was coming out, not only as a person, but as an artist, as well – taking a risk and using this language in the very conservative art world of the seventies.

— Germano Celant

In the 1970s and 80s, Australian artists also sought to make visible their queer identities through art. During the Mapplethorpe exhibition, you can visit a rotating display of works by Sydney artists David McDiarmid (on display from October – December) and William Yang (on display from December – March) in the Australian Collection Galleries on the Ground Level.

David McDiarmid was an active participant in the gay liberation movement from the 1970s onwards, protesting the legal restrictions on the public expression of homosexuality, and his personal politics were inseparable from his art.

McDiarmid was the first Australian gay man to be arrested during a gay rights demonstration and would continue to campaign actively (and artistically) throughout his life. he was the artistic director of the Mardi Gras street parades and parties between 1988 and 1990, and designed posters and promotional material for World AIDS day 1993 and 1994, as well as safe sex and safe injecting campaigns sponsored by the AIDS Council of NSW.

McDiarmid lived in New York in the 1980s and, like Mapplethorpe, it was the city’s increasingly open gay community that fed and fuelled his practice. McDiarmid was diagnosed HIV+ in 1986, the same year as Mapplethorpe. Upon his return to Australia for treatment, McDiarmid continued to produce the radical and celebratory work he was then known for with an increased sense of urgency and political charge. Until his death in 1995, McDiarmid produced an important body of directly political work that employed witty text and spectacular visuals, avoiding sentimentalism and boldly declaring his queer rainbow manifesto.

William Yang considers himself ‘a diarist’, and says ‘it is my own personal stories that my work comes out of, from my own life’. Like McDiarmid, he also documented the gay scene in Sydney from the 1970s, when he and his friends were celebrating new-found freedoms and greater acceptance. His ‘stories’ tell of his experience, his childhood and family – and his friendships. In the 1990s, Yang investigated the impact of AIDS on his community, as well as the broader social implications of the disease, making memorial images that declare the importance of public displays of recognition and remembrance.