Collection of Quotes and Photographs of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe

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P A T T I

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P H O T O G R A P H S

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P A T T I

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NÂş 1

I M P R E S SAO q ualq u e r i d e ia

t i po g raf ia love lo b lac k f u t u ra st d m e d i u m

E STU D O S D E D E S I G N 2 0 1 3 M ar ian a an d r ĂŠ S i lva

c o lle ct i o n o f q u ot e s an d p h oto g rap h s Patt i s m i t h / r o b e r t m ap p le t h o r p e

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE

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PATT I SMITH

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PATTI SMITH is a singer, writer and artist who became a highly influential figure in the New York City punk rock scene. After working on a factory assembly line, she began performing spoken word and

later

formed

the

Patti

Smith

Group

(1974-1979). Her most famous album is Horses. In 2010, she won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids about her relationship with Robert Mapplethrope.

Profile Singer, poet. Patricia Lee Smith was born on December 30, 1946 in Chicago, Illinois. She was the eldest of four children born to Beverly Smith, a jazz singer turned waitress, and Grant Smith, a machinist at a Honeywell plant. After spending the first four years of her life on the south side of Chicago, Smith's family moved to Philadelphia in 1950 and then to Woodbury, New Jersey, in 1956, when she was 9 years old. A tall, gangly and sickly child with a lazy left eye, Smith's outward appearance and shy demeanor gave no hint of the groundbreaking rock star she would become.

However, Smith says she always knew that she was destined for greatness.

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B i o g r a p h y

"When I was a little kid, I always knew that I had some special kind of thing inside me," she remembered. "I mean, I wasn't attractive, I wasn't very verbal, I wasn't very smart in school. I wasn't anything that showed the world I was something special, but I had this tremendous hope all the time. I had this tremendous spirit that kept me going ... I was a happy child, because I had this feeling that I was going to go beyond my body physical ...

I just knew it."

As a child, Smith also experienced gender confusion. Described as a tomboy, she shunned "girly" activities and instead preferred roughhousing with her predominantly male friends. Her tall, lean and somewhat masculine body defied the images of femininity she saw around her. It was not until a high school art teacher showed her depictions of women by some of the world's great artists that she came to terms with her own body.

"Art totally freed me," Smith recalled. "I found Modigliani, I discovered Picasso's blue period, and I thought, 'Look at this, these are great masters, and the women are all built like I am.' I started ripping pictures out of the books and taking them home to pose in front of the mirror." Smith attended Deptford High School, a racially integrated high school, where she recalls both befriending and dating her black classmates. While in high school, Smith developed an intense interest in music and performance. She fell in love with the music of John Coltrane, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones and performed in many of the school's plays and musicals.

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So in 1967, with vague aspirations of becoming an artist, Smith moved to New York City and took a job working at a Manhattan bookstore. She took up with a young photographer named Robert Mapplethorpe, and although their romantic involvement ended when he discovered his homosexuality, Smith and Mapplethorpe maintained a close friendship and artistic partnership for many years to come. Choosing performance poetry as her favored artistic medium, Smith gave her first public reading on February 10, 1971, at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. The now legendary reading, with guitar accompaniment from Lenny Kaye, introduced Smith as an up-and-coming figure in the New York arts circle. Later the same year, she further raised her profile by co-authoring and co-starring with Sam Shepard in his semiautobiographical play Cowboy Mouth.

One of the pioneers of punk rock music, a trailblazer who redefined the role of female rock stars, a poet who unleashed her lyrical talent over powerful guitars, Patti Smith stands out as one of the greatest figures in the history of rock 'n' roll. After four decades, Smith finds her continued motivation to write and make music in the unfairly shortened lives of her loved ones and the needs of her children. "The people I lost all believed in me and my children needed me, so that's a lot of reasons to continue, let alone that life is great," she says. "It's difficult but it's great and every day some new, wonderful thing is revealed. Whether it's a new book, or the sky is beautiful, or another full moon, or you meet a new friend—life is interesting."

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ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE was born in 1946 in Floral Park, Queens. Of his childhood he said, "I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave."

In 1963, Mapplethorpe enrolled at Pratt Institute in nearby Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. Influenced by artists such as Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, he also experimented with various materials in mixed-media collages, including images cut from books and magazines. He acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970 and began producing his own photographs to incorporate into the collages, saying he felt "it was more honest." That same year he and Patti Smith, whom he had met three years earlier, moved into the Chelsea Hotel.

Mapplethorpe quickly found satisfaction taking Polaroid photographs in their own right and indeed few Polaroids actually appear in his mixed-media works. In 1973, the Light Gallery in New York City mounted his first solo gallery exhibition, "Polaroids." Two years later he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began shooting his circle of friends and acquaintances—artists, musicians, socialites, pornographic film stars, and members of the S & M underground. He also worked on commercial projects, creating album cover art for Patti Smith and Television and a series of portraits and party pictures for Interview Magazine.

His vast, provocative, and powerful body of work has established him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Today Mapplethorpe is represented by galleries in North and South America and Europe and his work can be found in the collections of major museums around the world. Beyond the art historical and social significance of his work, his legacy lives on through the work of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

He established the Foundation in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection.

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B i o g r a y p h

P OE TIC TRIBUTE TO RO BERT BY PAT TI SMITH

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“Blessedness is within us all It lies upon the long scaffold Patrols the vaporous hall In our pursuits, though still, we venture forth Hoping to grasp a handful of cloud and return Offering spleen to the wolves of the forest.

Unscathed, cloud in hand. We encounter Space, fist, violin, or this — an immaculate face

He races across the tiles, the human board.

Of a boy, somewhat wild, smiling in the sun.

Virility, coquetry all a game — well played.

He raises his hand, as if in carefree salute

Immersed in luminous disgrace, he lifts

Shading eyes that contain the thread of God.

As a slave, a nymph, a fabulous hood

Soon they will gather power, disenchantment

As a rose, a thief of life, he will parade Nude crowned with leaves, immortal.

They will reflect enlightenment, agony They will reveal the process of love

He will sing of the body, his truth

They will, in an hour alone, shed tears.

He will increase the shining neck Pluck airs toward our delight

His mouth a circlet, a baptismal font

Of the waning

Opening wide as the lips of a damsel

The blossoming

Sounding the dizzying extremes.

The relativity of vein, the hip of unrest

The violent charade

For the sake of wing there is shoulder.

But who will sing of him?

Who will sing of his blessedness?

For symmetry there is blade.

The blameless eye, the radiant grin

He kneels, humiliates, he pierces her side.

For he, his own messenger, is gone He has leapt through the orphic glass To wander eternally In search of perfection His blue ankles tattooed with stars.”

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“ Actually, the only time I ever tried to cultivate being sexy was when I read Peyton Place. I was about sixteen and I read that this guy's watching this woman walk and he can tell she's a good fuck by the way she walks. It's a whole passage. He's telling Allison McKenzie, "I know you're a virgin." And she says, "Well, how?" And he says, "I can tell by the way you walk." And I thought,

Uh-oh,

everybody

knows!

I

was

ashamed to be a virgin, so I tried to cultivate a fucked walk. I tried to figure out what it looked like. I figured I'd watch any hot woman I could. I mean, look at Jeanne Moreau. You watch her walk across the street on the screen and you know she's had at least a hundred men.�

Patti Smith 17

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"I stand naked when I draw.

God holds my hand and we sing together."

Robert Mapplethorpe

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DRAWINGS

BY PATTI SMITH

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“I don't think," he insisted.

"I feel.�

Patti Smith

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“I have loved books all my life.

There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.�

Patti Smith

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Do it for Satan.

You 26

“There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immoble.

We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other's arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.�

Patti Smith

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“Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.�

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“ We n eve r had h e sai d " Ou r wor k was

any c h i ldr e n ," r u e fu lly. ou r c h i ldr e n .�

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“We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. "oh, take their picture," said the woman to her husband, "I think they're artists."

"Oh, go on," he shrugged.

"They're just kids.�

Patti Smith

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know you're dirty.� robert mapplethorpe

“Do it for Satan.

You

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"I don't use recreational drugs, except for cocaine, hallucinogens, and nitrates."

"My approach to photographing a flower is not much different than photographing a cock.

Basically, it's the same thing."

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“In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom?

Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves?

photographs BY robert

And what was the ultimate goal?

To have one's work caged in art's great zoos the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?�

41

40

“In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom?

Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves?

And what was the ultimate goal?

To have one's work caged in art's great zoos the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?�

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you're dirty.

40

“In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom?

Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves?

And what was the ultimate goal?

To have one's work caged in art's great zoos the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?�

41

40

“In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom?

Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves?

And what was the ultimate goal?

To have one's work caged in art's great zoos the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?�

41

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“What will happen to us?"

I asked.

"There will always be us," he answered.

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“Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to universe.

He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil.�

Patti Smith

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“I immersed myself in books and rock 'n' roll, the adolescent salvation ...�

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“I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those

things

you

absorb

come

out

subconsciously one way or another.

You'll

be

taking

photographs

and

suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this.

But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one.

In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.�

Robert Mapplethorpe

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“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.�

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“He wasn't certain whether he was a good or bad person.

Whether he was altruistic.

Whether he was demonic.

But he was certain of one thing.

He was an artist. And for that he would never apologize.�

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“To be an artist is to enter into competition with god.�

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"I'm looking for the unexpected.

I'm looking for things I've never seen before."

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