So here I am at Robert Mapplethorpe’s grave. A copy of Patti Smith’s great Just Kids is pressed into the earth by other elements and almost overgrown. Is this some kind of Bruce Chatwin fantasy for me or what? Packing in the meat in the meatpacking district: one US beast and one mild-mannered Briton, both paying for it dearly. There was a resonance of aesthetic sensitivity (and sensibility) between them that transcended petty projects like the Lisa Lyon book. Chatwin’s writing (like Robert Byron’s before him) and “Maxey’s” images take you on a (literal) drive towards patterns, light, shadows, reflections, bodies in movement. Chatwin: Walking. Mapplethorpe: Fucking, flexing. There is restraint. Restraint is a common denominator in these expressions. Economy of language in Chatwin’s case; visual, visceral economy in Mapplethorpe’s. The body is the key to experience these new (or perhaps eternal?) aesthetic dimensions. You have to walk there according to Chatwin. You have to have sex to get there according to Mapplethorpe. A submission to the road and the elements according to Chatwin. A submission to physical force according to Mapplethorpe. Eventually they’re all the same: paths to beauty or at least an apprehension of beauty. No matter what, I now invoke this sense of aesthetic sensitivity-sensibility-perfection and the ability to express it. Thank you, Bruce. Thank you, Robert.
August 20, 2017, St. John’s, Queens, NY. Photo by Vanessa Sinclair.
