Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

7) Hot Doc: Mansfield 66/67

The new documentary Mansfield 66/67 covers the last two years of Jayne Mansfield’s life- 1966 and 1967. It’s more about the gossip and legend of Jayne Mansfield – which is more fun anyway! Check the film’s website to see it is playing near you!

Resistor of the Week – Halloween Parade Marchers of NYC

The resistors of the week are the resilient New Yorkers who carried on with their Halloween in the face of terror.

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Do something this weekend that makes YOU go WOW!!!

November 4, 1946– Robert Mapplethorpe:

“When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist.”

My husband had said: “I have seen his work at museums in the USA, but, to experience Robert Mapplethorpe in Venice was just too perfect. You should mention this in your post today”.

We arrived via water taxi in Venice in October, 1992. Banners were hung all around this most amazing of cities announcing a retrospect of the American artist’s work. The exhibit was held at the Mariano Fortuny Museum, fabulous and a story in itself. How odd to consider this important Gay American artist in another city other than his own beloved NYC. Mapplethorpe”s work deserves a place with the great classic works of art. The Fortuny exhibit was, at the time, the largest retrospect of his work ever mounted.

In summer 2011, I spent time with the very readable Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of this artist/musician/writer’s friendship, romance and time spent with the Mapplethorpe. Smith and Mapplethorpe lived a particular New York dream: The Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, Andy Warhol, CBGB, superstardom, and they lived it to the fullest.

HarperCollins Publishers

W. W. Norton & Company

In 2014, I tackled the hefty (at nearly 500 pages) highly readable Wagstaff: Before And After Mapplethorpe, A Biography by Philip Gefter. Sam Wagstaff was a most memorable character. He was a handsome aesthete who had abandoned several careers, including stints as an important museum curator, before reinventing himself as the champion of Photography as a Fine Art instead of the long held premise that it was a practical, mechanical craft. Wagstaff was also Mapplethorpe’s champion, curator, mentor, lover and cocaine buddy.

Mapplethorpe’s photographs, ranging from graphic depictions of gay sex to exquisite portraits of flowers, are all over the artistic map. His work is magnificent in its scope, still frequently shocking, and ultimately very beautiful. Even his more extreme photographs have a certain tenderness about them, and the seemingly harmless pictures generate an edginess that’s difficult to dismiss.

Simultaneously devoted to a strict sense of formalism and composition and to bringing a new iconography of homosexuality, it was not a surprise that Mapplethorpe provoked so much controversy in his era.

Mapplethorpe has become the essential “Gay Photographer”. His homoerotic photographs continue to be disturbing to many people. He made no concessions to the closet. His works are not disingenuous or discombobulated. He brought a captivating and challenging version of his vision to the world and the fashion world bounced his message back to the mainstream.

Mapplethorpe’s photographs have the rare ability to give the most common subjects the status of icons. He didn’t use the camera as a documentary tool but more as an instrument of innovation and role playing. In companion self-portrait pieces he shows himself as a tough macho guy in a leather jacket and as a sizzling femme fatale.

Aside from being one of the planet’s most influential photographers, Mapplethorpe, together with his lover Wagstaff, amassed a world-class collection of photography on an enormous scale. Mapplethorpe also collected furniture, fabric and artifacts. An esthete of wide-ranging tastes, he also made sculptures and designed furniture. One of his own coffee tables was a centerpiece of Mapplethorpe’s exquisitely decorated apartment in Downtown Manhattan.

At the very apex of his career in 1987, he was diagnosed with HIV. Mapplethorpe became a symbol of bravery and defiance to the killer virus. His willingness not to hide his illness helped focus attention on HIV/AIDS when much of the world was ignoring the plague. Never shy of celebrity, his status as an art world icon infected with the virus changed how the public looked at his photographs. His passing in 1989, at just 42-years-old, gave his short life a special symbolic significance.

Before he left this existence, Mapplethorpe established The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, providing funding and focus for medical research, with an emphasis on HIV/AIDS, and also for the visual arts, with an emphasis on photography.

Mapplethorpe’s photographs are in the collections of the world’s greatest museums including The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Museum Of Modern Art, The Guggenheim, and The Pompidou Center in Paris.

I feel that Mapplethorpe needs to be noted in history as Mapplethorpe: The Artist, not just as a Gay Artist. History will place him in the great tradition of the best artists in World Classical Art, and like all of the greatest artists, he is both overrated and underrated.

Both the establishment art world’s view of photography and how the government funds the arts in America changed completely because of his work. His pictures continue to be accused of being obscene. So what? Mapplethorpe made art and porn the same thing. That is his greatest contribution to our culture.

For me, his most erotic pieces are his photographs of the sex organs of flowers. The work is startling. Considered to be too tough to see 30 years ago, you can now simply Google the word “Mapplethorpe” and view any of the the photographs that caused Conservatives to convulse back in the day. These Right Wingers know nothing of art, but somehow seem to know what is moral. They have been able to successfully end much of the public funding for the arts and now that they have all the power, they continue to point their fingers at Mapplethorpe. The controversy seems a bit overblown for our own 21st century. Aren’t we done with this sort of thing? They need to spend time looking, really looking, at Mapplethorpe’s photographs. They will offer proof that he continues to be cutting edge, controversial and original.

The budget submitted by POTUS in March to Congress would eliminate all funding for The National Endowment For The Arts, because if it ain’t gold-plated, Trump says it ain’t art.

His life and art still matter so much that in 2015, The J. Paul Getty Museum in partnership with the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art along with the David Geffen Foundation presented Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, a mammoth showing of his work that took two museums to highlight the different aspects of Mapplethorpe’s complex oeuvre, and is now on view at Art Gallery Of New South Wales in Sydney through March 4, 2018. In the USA, catch shows of his photographs at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, January 6 – February 17, 2018, and Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, January 19 – March 3, 2018.

Self Portrait, © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

In January 2016, the astonishingly good documentary film Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures, directed by World Of Wonder’s Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, was shown at the major film festivals and released on HBO in February. It is an artfully intriguing, insightful work of biographical criticism that places Mapplethrope in the context of his life and artistic vision. Mapplethorpe dared people to turn away from his explicit photographs and Bailey and Barbato’s stunning documentary does the same. It makes us consider his most controversial pictures, proving that he still has the power to provoke, persuade and perturb. I give it an A+, and not because Bailey and Barbato are my bosses. Catch it on HBO On Demand.

Photograph: © John Rasimus, PacificCoastNews.

November 5, 1960– Tilda Swinton:

“I was going through the airport security and I was searched by a male security guard. I’m very often referred to as ‘Sir’ in elevators and such. I think it has to do with being this tall and not wearing much lipstick. I think people just can’t imagine I’d be a woman if I look like this.”

There are only a small handful of actors that compel me to watch a film just because they appear in it, but Katherine Mathilda Swinton Of Kimmerghame is certainly one of them. Swinton shifts effortlessly between ages, sexes, and aesthetics. Every performance has been a marvel, even playing a corpse in my favorite film of 2014, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Fox Searchlight Pictures, via YouTube

She possesses a look and disposition that are rather unworldly, or if she is from Earth it must be that she is from another century. With her aquiline face, ghostly light blue eyes, haughty manner and uncommon self-assurance, she looks to me to have stepped out of a formal 19th century portrait of a noblewoman… or man. Indeed, Swinton’s famous family’s lineage can be traced back to the 9th Century. Her great-grandmother was a beautiful society lady whose portrait was painted by John Singer Sargent. Her father is Major General Sir John Swinton, a WW II hero and former head of the Queen Elizabeth II’s household staff. She was in the same class as Princess Diana at boarding school and, according to her, was expected to marry some duke. Her life turned out a little differently.

She lives in an actual castle with views of the Moray Firth in the small city Nairn in the North Highlands of Scotland. Swinton:

“There’s something about being Scottish. You can’t find a Scottish person who won’t burst into tears when they hear the bagpipes. Even if they’re in Beverly Hills. I live in the far north of Scotland, which is so beautiful. We Scots love nature. I think we’re wired for the hills and sea. Where my family lives is a very beautiful sort of semi-wilderness that really suits us. It’s so green. Sometimes, when I’ve been in America and I go home, it’s so green that I have to literally rub my eyes as I look out of the aeroplane window.”

Swinton claims that although she and her family live in a castle, she actually renounces consumerism and doesn’t even own a television.

“I’m not much of one for looking in the mirror. If I look good, it’s to do with good genes, living in the Highlands of Scotland, not wearing make-up when I don’t have to, and just the luck of the draw. I wear what I want to wear, and I am lucky to have friends who are designers who make me beautiful clothes to wear in public. But I turn into a pumpkin when I go home.”

From that home in remote Highlands, Swinton managed to start an annual film festival, Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Of Dreams, using an old ballroom in Nairn to screen art-house and independent films. The festival also brings films to the most remote parts of Scotland with a mobile movie screen on a truck.

Swinton began her film career in gay filmmaker Derek Jarman’s gorgeous, demanding Caravaggio (1985). Since then, she has moved effortlessly between Indie films, arty fare and box-office hits.

Swinton won an Academy Award playing a buttoned-up, ruthless lawyer opposite George Clooney in Michael Clayton (2007). She is already one more of that fine tradition of especially talented, strong British female actors like Dame Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Dame Helen Mirren and Dame Maggie Smith who win awards and accolades working on stage and screen.

She has had a string of original and most unusual performances in films: Vanilla Sky (2001), Adaptation (2002), I Am Love (2009), The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008), We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) and the surprisingly delightful and moving Trainwreck (2015). She even has a franchise job giving strong performances as the White Witch in the Chronicles Of Narnia flicks (2005, 2008, 2010). My own personal favorite Swinton performances include her Golden Globe nominated work in the overlooked, gay themed The Deep End (2001), or possibly the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading (2008).

Her most arresting work might just be playing someone of both sexes in director Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) based on Virginia Woolf’s novel, and featuring a delightful Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I.

But it is not just her screen acting that attracts attention. Swinton is also a big star on the Red Carpet with her unconventional looks. She appears at premiers and benefits wearing a wide range of fashion ideas from Chanel to Bowie to Hepburn (Audrey and Katharine).

Her look is not just about angular alien and androgyny, but with her porcelain skin, short white-blonde hair, and rangy 6 foot frame, Swinton can also come across as Golden Era Hollywood glamorous. Avant-garde art is often the inspiration for fashions, but she can be just as much Lauren Bacall and Bjork. I am always blown away by her presentation. Of course, the camera loves Swinton’s unusual appearance.

“I’m not sure I know what people mean when they say I look different. Different from what? And if I do look different, so what? Vive la difference.”

Swinton says that she has been mistaken for a man on many occasions:

“I think I should probably wear more lipstick.”

In spring 2013, Swinton slept inside a box as part of an art exhibit called The Maybe at the Museum Of Modern Art in NYC. She first did this performance piece in 1995 at London’s Serpentine Gallery and again in 1996 at Museo Barracco in Rome, always generating long lines and large crowds.

I thought she could not possibly have been cooler than when she appeared with her doppelgänger David Bowie in The Stars, a supporting video for his 2013 album The Next Day. Swinton has been candid about how Bowie gave her the strength to overcome her insecurities about looking different when she was a teenager.

“When I was 13-years-old, I bought a copy of Aladdin Sane, even though I didn’t even own a record player. I had it for a year before I even heard it because I hadn’t bought it for the music but because of the cover. It was the image I was attracted to. He looked so like me, he could have been my cousin. He looked like he came from the same planet as me. It was a great comfort to me, looking as I did. It gave me great comfort at the time that not only did someone else look like this, but felt proud enough to stick themselves on the front of an album with a lightning zig-zag across their face. So he’s always felt like a cousin even though I’d never met him. Then, the phone rings one day and it’s someone who calls themselves David Bowie and you can’t stop pinching yourself.”

In 1984, fresh out of Cambridge, Swinton became a member The Royal Shakespeare Company. It was there that she met playwright John Byrne, who is 20-years older than Swinton. They became a couple, and then the parents of twins. They remain very close, but they no longer live together.

In 2008, she met German artist Sandro Kopp, who is 18 years younger. For a few years Byrne, Kopp and Swinton all lived together in that castle in Nair, with Byrne staying at home with the kids when she traveled with Sandro for her career. Swinton insists she never thought this arrangement to be unconventional:

“It’s all quite boring really. The father of my children and I are close friends and I’m now in a very happy other relationship. We’re all really good friends. It’s a very happy situation. Life doesn’t have to be complicated. You just have to have compassion with yourself and stop blaming yourself when things do get complicated.”

To prepare for today’s post, I wanted to watch Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) the vampire flick written by Jim Jarmusch and starring Swinton and my boo, Tom Hiddleston. But, I couldn’t find it on any of the 700 channels offered by the Evil Comcast or on Netflix. This film comes highly recommended from my many friends with discriminating tastes. Have you seen this one?

“Trainwreck” (2015), Universal Pictures, via YouTube

You can find her in several other films on Netflix: Okja a fantasy film directed by her friend Bong Joon-ho who did the insane Snowpiercer (2013) with Swinton; as twin sister gossip columnists in the underrated comedy Hail, Caesar! (2016); Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck; plus The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom from Anderson. In fact, her next project is Isle Of Dogs, a stop-action animated movie from Anderson, along with Suspiria a horror film directed by Luca Guadagnino. Openly gay Guadagnino has used Swinton in four other projects. His latest, the gay-themed Call Me By Your Name opens November 24 in the USA.

A year ago, she appeared in Doctor Strange, one more of those Marvel Comics films. It opened to rave reviews and some strong controversy. In it, Swinton plays an Asian male character, The Ancient One. The Media Action Network For Asians, releasing a statement that said in part:

“While actresses deserve the kinds of bold roles usually reserved for men, white actresses are seen onscreen more than Asians of any gender. And Tilda Swinton can afford to turn down roles.”

I’d like to imagine that today for her birthday, Swinton will be dressed in Edwardian garb, sipping tea and eating cake at her castle, but she could just as easily be in a metallic space suit holding forth on another planet with David Bowie.