The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [165]
The book describes a young man, M, undertaking a final journey before his death, but it does not recount Mapplethorpe’s art or life in a literal sense.
No, it’s encoded. It’s not really about Robert, who had AIDS, and how he battled it. It encodes his process as an artist and things I knew about him, his childhood. The uncle in the piece is [his patron and mentor] Sam Wagstaff. Robert was very into the surrealists, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst—the idea of objects in boxes, making altarpieces. So the passenger M is also much like that.
Was it hard for you, after Mapplethorpe’s death, to see him demonized by conservative politicians and right-wing activists who targeted the explicit sexuality in some of his work?
I thought it was ludicrous. If Robert was alive, he would have found it annoying. But he would also have been heartbroken by the idea of [Senator] Jesse Helms introducing Robert’s pictures of children—he photographed children beautifully and in no unnatural way—as examples of child pornography. He would have wept over that.
Robert didn’t like controversy. He didn’t do his work politically. He was a pure artist. When he photographed two men kissing or a man pissing in another man’s mouth, he was trying, as Jean Genet did, to portray a certain aspect of the human condition nobly, elegantly. I know the kind of man he was. If someone said, “This picture of a cock offends me,” he would have taken it down and put a flower up. Because to him they were the same photograph. And they were. Robert’s photographs of flowers were very evocative.
He had no problem with labeling his work. The small body of S&M photographs that he had, he put in a portfolio called X. He agreed with stickers that said one had to be over eighteen to walk into a room that had this work. It was not for everybody—he knew that.
You often use the word “work” when referring to your art. For someone who has been characterized as a bohemian poet and singer, you have a strong, focused work ethic.
I always have. I really developed a high work ethic through Robert. He had the strongest work ethic I’ve ever seen. Until practically the day he died, when he was almost paralyzed and half blind, he was still trying to draw. And my parents have strong work ethics. They both worked hard all their lives.
People think, “You romanticize all these indulgent, decadent French artists.” I never romanticized their lifestyle, their waste. What I truly loved about them is the work they do. If someone had a great, romantic, self-indulgent life but did crappy art, I wouldn’t be interested.
Do you miss rock & roll stardom at all—even just a little bit?
I didn’t really experience a lot of that. On our last tour of Europe [in 1979], we were extremely popular, so I did see all the fame and fortune and fawning that I needed to see in a lifetime: paparazzi, people cutting my hair and pulling my clothes off. I felt like Elvis Presley for a month or two.
Fred’s motto around the house—which I actually put in “Gone Again”—was “Fame is fleeting,” which he took from General Patton, which General Patton took from Alexander the Great. And to strip oneself of all that is quite interesting. It’s somewhat humiliating and painful at first, but once you do it, it’s very liberating.
I don’t look at all those things with contempt. I appreciate it when young bands say they were positively inspired by our work. And I’m proud that I can actually say,