The Reappropriation of Mythology to Represent Pain: Falling Silent in the Work of Kathy Acker and Robert Mapplethorpe

Abstract

In July 2005 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York exhibited the show ‘Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints’. The project was organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in collaboration with the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. The show’s comparative exploration of the dialogue between the photographer’s work and classical art, specifically the late-sixteenth-century Flemish Mannerist prints, foregrounded Mapplethorpe’s complex engagement with the classical body. This major exhibition gave breadth and emphasis to the longstanding critical observation of the importance of the relationship between Mapplethorpe’s body of work and classical mythology. Born in 1946 in Floral Park, Queens, Mapplethorpe enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1963 where he studied drawing, painting and sculpture. In 1970 he began producing Polaroid images in order to incorporate them into the collages he was making. He changed his Polaroid for a Hasselbladmedium-format camera in 1976 and re-focussed his attention on portraiture. Despite its subject matter of homosexual sexual practices and sadomasochism, which was labelled obscene by the cultural norms of American society in the period, whilst at the same time gaining the young photographer instant notoriety, Mapplethorpe’s work became critically acclaimed throughout the art world. Germano Celant, a prominent art critic and Senior Curator of the Guggenheim Museum, was the first to comment on the ‘linguistic specificity’ of what he termed Mapplethorpe’s ‘Neo-Classical Photography’.1 Ascribing a material role to the image and viewing the photographer’s lens as the artist’s clay, Mapplethorpe described photography as ‘the perfect way to make a sculpture’.2 His sculptural photographic depictions of the