“Night Work”
Some twenty years after his death, Robert Mapplethorpe’s incandescent legacy remains far from diminished. Among the latest to carry his torch, New York based glam band Scissor Sisters has curated a group show that is part retrospective, part survey, showcasing Mapplethorpe’s diverse output alongside works of a generation for whom he still is an agent provocateur.
A curatorial dialogue between past and present, “Night Work” touches on many of the most important themes of Mapplethorpe’s work, including sexuality, desire, and mortality. His infamous Self-Portrait with bullwhip, 1978, is shown here paired with Matthew Barney’s A Raiz da Lâmina (The Root of the Blade), 2004, a photographic depiction of machinic autoeroticism. Seen together, these works draw into focus rituals of gratification, self-inflicted or otherwise. There is a preponderance of reflective surfaces in the show—a fractured star with mirrored panels in Marc Swanson’s installation Psychic Studies II, 2007; Tom Burr’s indigo Plexiglas screen, Black Folding Screen (or Blue Movie, 1969 aka Fuck), 2010; and Mapplethorpe’s mesh-covered looking-glass assemblage Mirror, 1971—all calling attention to the participation of the viewer by reflecting his or her gaze. In contrast, playing off themes of subversion and obfuscation, Scott Treleaven’s collage-cum-palimpsest, Cimitero Drawing 3, 2010, and Glenn Ligon’s text-based Red Portfolio, 1993, present absence in place of the body—here viewers are left to populate the images with figures culled from our own fantasies.
Perched between Mapplethorpe’s morbid motif Skull and Crossbones, 1983, and the late Self-Portrait, 1988, Banks Violette’s backlit installation Not Yet Titled (The End Edition), 2010, is an inverted sign proclaiming THE END. When read literally, and metaphorically, from the “other side,” the resulting symbolic trinity of the installation and flanking photographs is one where the viewer, confronting death in art, realizes the potential for an eternal existence through it—a choreographed danse macabre of which danseur and Mapplethorpe muse Peter Reed would have been proud.
