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Warhol
& Mapplethorpe
Guise & Dolls
Edited by
Patricia Hickson
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015Hardcover. 184 p. ISBN 978-0300214338. $60.00
Reviewed by Georges-Claude
Guilbert Université François Rabelais (Tours)
This outstanding coffee table book contains stimulating essays by Patricia Hickson, Jonathan D. Katz, Tirza True Latimer, Vincent
Fremont, Eileen Myles, and Christopher Makos, as well as an interview with
Franco Farina by Maria Luisa Pacelli. It is published by the Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art (in Hartford, CT) in association with Yale University Press, and
is far more than an exhibition catalogue and beautiful Christmas gift—although
it is linked to the remarkable exhibition Warhol & Mapplethorpe : Guise & Dolls. The museum is located halfway
between New York and Boston, which in a way is oddly distant from New York,
considering how utterly New York the exhibition and the concerns it chronicles
are. Hickson reminds her readers of Warhol’s early involvement with drag queens
and transgendered individuals, notably in his cinematic endeavors, in the
context of the Factory, as famously reflected in the work of Lou Reed whose
song “Walk on the Wild Side” is reproduced in its entirety. It is cleverly entitled Guise & Dolls, which of course
alludes to all sorts of cultural practices and products, starting with the
circles, places and eras where and when people used “guys and dolls” in the
sense of “men and women,” and taking in the 1950 musical Guys and Dolls, by Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows
(itself based on stories by Damon Runyon). It was legendarily adapted for the
screen with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and Jean Simmons (Joseph L.
Mankiewicz, 1955). After Warhol’s photographs, films or paintings and Robert
Mapplethorpe’s photographs, guys and dolls could never be simply guys and dolls
any longer. The exhibition might just as well have been entitled “We’re born
naked, everything else is drag,” in the words of RuPaul. We’re all wearing
guises, especially Warhol, Mapplethorpe, and their models in that tremendous
selection of gender-bending images. What is masculinity? What is femininity?
And how artificially constructed is it all? That is what they are asking. Concentrating on the “artistic” New York of the 1970s and early
1980s, the book exemplifies the
pulsating and unrestrained milieu that Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe
frequented or indeed organized. The two men’s significant portraits and
self-portraits presented here are all ambiguous, to put it mildly. They
ceaselessly question gender identification, stretching the visual possibilities
of camp and playing with the meaning of butch, exploding habitual dichotomies.
As far as I know, this was the first exhibition that had featured the two
together. Notoriously, Mapplethorpe had an uneasy connection to Warhol, whom he
wanted to emulate while considering himself his equal (if not better) at the
same time. The exhibition favored Warhol’s “Ladies and Gentlemen” series of drag queen
portraits (1975), Christopher Makos’s “Altered Images” series of Warhol himself
in drag (1981), Mapplethorpe’s photographs of rock musician Patti Smith (1975-1986)
and his “Lady : Lisa Lyon” female
bodybuilder series (1983). Patti Smith’s book Just Kids (2011), which narrates her eventful years with
Mapplethorpe, is strongly recommended. There are highly interesting pictures of
Marsha P. Johnson [7, 64], African American drag queen extraordinaire, Stonewall riot vet, gay lib activist and muse. The subjects included Bob Colacello, transgendered actress Candy Darling
and Grace Jones [152-153]. The exhibition lasted from October 17, 2015 to
January 24, 2016, and boasted approximately 100 tremendous exhibits. There is a
portrait of Amanda Lear by Mapplethorpe dating back to 1976. Although she has
been known to lie about her age (among other things), I know she was 37 [99].
She is wearing a studded leather jacket, gypsy earrings and a gold chain with a
star (her own, no doubt). By then she had appeared in one television series,
one movie, and had released two singles. This was before her international
career as a singer, actress, television host, painter and writer. But she had
already made quite an impact as a supermodel in the 1960s and early 1970s,
turning up everywhere alongside people like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones,
David Bowie, or Roxy Music, as well as serving as Salvador Dalí’s muse. The
unsuspecting viewer / reader might wonder why she is featured in Guys & Dolls, but that would be
because the said viewer is not aware of the decades of international mystery
surrounding the possible original male sex of Lear (she spends a great deal of
time denying the “rumor” these days). As an ambiguous rock ‘n’ roll chick
(before she turned disco diva), she is right up there with Anita Pallenberg or
Marianne Faithfull, and her place here is as logical as the self-portraits of
Warhol and Mapplethorpe in drag (deliberately bad drag, often), or the
portraits of Grace Jones, logically photographed by both Warhol and
Mapplethorpe. Jones has long been the uber androgyne of pop culture
(as she herself discusses in her 2015 autobiography, I’ll Never Write my Memoirs). My favorite essay in the book is “Warhol’s Surfaces, Mapplethorpe’s
Depths,” by Tirza True Latimer, who teaches visual studies at the California
College of the Arts in San Francisco. In a few paragraphs, it usefully situates
Warhol and Mapplethorpe in the world’s history of portraiture, then reminds us
of a few simple but capital facts:
Warhol’s portraits oftenexplicitly acknowledge the artifice of identity. Portraits such as those in the
Drag Queen series challenge the photograph’s documentary status. Warhol’s
sitters use pose, makeup, and costume to raise questions about “realness.” Warhol
framed his sitters against neutral backdrops of the sort used for official ID
photos and shot them at close range. The artless frontal lighting reduces
relief, giving the faces the appearance of pressing against the picture plane
and contributing to the overall effect of flatness. The Polaroid Big Shot
camera Warhol used also flattened the field of the image. He submitted many of
the Polaroids to painterly interventions, using his trademark photo-silkscreen
technique to blow up and reproduce them in nonnaturalistic colors on linen
supports. The silkscreen process eliminates nuances to further minimize the
illusion of depth (and thus realism). [36]
The cover of the book is a perfect choice, it is a 1983 portrait of Mapplethorpe, black and red and historic, with the artist looking at us in the
eye as if to defy us to peruse the book and stumble upon the well-known Patti
Smith quote: “As far as I’m concerned, being any gender is a drag.” Strongly
recommended for gender studies scholars, art historians, and Warhol and / or
Mapplethorpe aficionados.
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