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Art

London,

Robert Mapplethorpe: Still Moving & Lady

Description: A rare chance to see the artist's film work and portraits of Patti Smith, also featuring photographs by Judy Linn.



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Alison Jacques Berners Street, W1T 3LN

Phone: 0207631 4720

Website: www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Email: info@alisonjacquesgallery.com

Transport: Tube: Piccadilly Circus Transport for London , Tube / Bus: 3, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 29, 38, 55, 73, 88, 98, 113, 176, 189, 390, 453, Transport for London

Shock tactics falter

Robert Mapplethorpe picture of Lisa Lyon
Stardom: Robert Mapplethorpe's pictures of Lisa Lyon look more like a pop video than technically brilliant art

Fisun Güner, Evening Standard 12 Sep 2006


The Robert Mapplethorpe industry has been sustained by three factors: the quality of the artist's work, his vast output and, not least, his notoriety as a maker of shocking images. Mapplethorpe died in 1989, and during a career that lasted little more than a decade he stoked up a lot of controversy.

His thrilling, technically brilliant and coolly beautiful photographs effectively took homoerotica - with a penchant for sadomasochism - out of the sex shop and into the art gallery.

These, his glacial portraits of glamorous New York art world types and his icily erotic flowers have sealed Mapplethorpe's reputation as the real deal. But if you root around long enough in the archives, you're bound to come up with a turkey or two. And boy, what turkeys this show dredges up.

Mapplethorpe only made two films in his life, so even he must have known that was not his natural mÈtier. Nonetheless, these rarely seen shorts form the nucleus of this exhibition - and they show how easily Mapplethorpe was seduced by kitsch and how the 'arty' and the 'classy' easily descends into the kind of clumsy, adolescentspiked nonsense we have here.

Made in 1978, Still Moving features a zoned-out Patti Smith intoning fragments of inaudible poetry while stumbling about in a muslin-draped room for 13 minutes. It's achingly pretentious, of course, but one can almost forgive it as the product of its time.

Much worse is Lady, made six years later. Featuring female bodybuilding champ Lisa Lyon as she walks through a huge Gothic mansion wearing hooded robes, or flexing her body in revealing leather gear, this too is a product of its time - which is why it looks and sounds like a very crass and very camp 1980s pop video which just aches to be Fellini. Think Ultravox without the production values.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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I left this exhibition with a huge smile on my face, it's so cool! I'm not into Patti Smith so I wasn't in love with the photos of her, but I adored the Lisa Lyon stuff, brilliant brilliant brilliant. It is camp, absolutely, but there's serious stuff underneath.

- Lucy White, Hamstead, 26/09/2006 16:48
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Camp, kitch and all for free! It's exhibitions like this that constantly remind me how great this city really is. Peftectly of-its-time, this pop art is genuinely weird in parts and stunningly fabulous in others. I didn't see the videos but from what I hear I didn't miss out. Definitely pop in if you are in the area!

- Cindi, Northfields, 13/09/2006 06:35
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