APOTHEKE
Robert Mapplethorpe: Porftolio X Jean Genet: Un chant d' amour
Robert Mapplethorpe: Porftolio X
Jean Genet: Un chant d' amour
8 - 11 October
Robert Mapllethorpe's infamous Portfolio X and Jean Genet's only film Un chant d' amour wil be on show at APOTHEKE for just four days, from the 8th to the 11th October, a first installment of APOTHEKE's international co-operation and exchange program with private collections, galleries and museums.
When asked why he had never written a political text on prison institutions, Jean Genet, writer of (homo)sexualized delinquency answered: People told me that it was hell. I answered: Ill turn it into a paradise. The blossoms of gay love bloom in jail. The sadistic jail keeper as voyeur can hardly cope, or then again, he cannot get enough. Therefore, he beats up the prisoner and then sticks a pistol in his mouth. The prisoners eyes, however, taste no metal but drift into a dream about a meadow, the fellow prisoner of his desires, and lust. Un chant d amour (A Song of Love) (1950) is Genets only film, which caused a scandal and was partly forbidden until well into the 1990s. It was written during his long stay in prison and the film was made over three months in Nico Papatakis nightclub La Rose Rouge in Saint- Germain-des-Prés. The silent film is a desperate ode of love, which embraces the architecture of power and eroticizes repression. It celebrates an unmanageable eroticism without fleeing into the Utopia of a freed, un-alienated and ostensibly authentic sexuality.
On the contrary: Genets film affirms fetishism and tells of a desiring excess which knows no bounds ofstandardization and subservience, and which despite years of ostracism as a pornographic work does not limit itself to the logic of taboo and transgression. Genet crisscrosses the confusion and coexistence of despair and desire, frustration and hope in a debauched, bacchanal and yet also sad and oppressive kaleidoscope of images. He achieves this with only an unadorned, hard prison wall separating the prisoners and their desire for each other, and the smoke from a cigarette that connects them. Genet is in love with fragmented objects. Jean Cocteaus equally brilliant camera feels its way, as tenderly as obsessively, through the flaming source of this paradisiacal hell: arms, hands, toenails, tattoos and facial stubble. There can be no deliverance from this hell, as it is our own.
The scandal of sexual difference is despite the liberal affirmations made to the contrary since the 1960s not so easy to dispose of once and for all. The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989, stages his own partially sadomasochistic desires. The 10 exhibition copies (1988) are an assembly of self-portraits and black and white images of transgressive poses with sexual accessories such as whips, which despite their careful composition cannot deny their calculated social provocation. The photographs achieve their suspense via the contrast between their dense referencing, their polished, rather classicist language of light and form, and the obscenity of their content. In 1990, one year after Mapplethorpes death, an exhibition of seven of his sadomasochistic portraits in Cincinatti under the title The Perfect Moment led to controversy over their presentation. During the exhibition, there was a failed attempt to convict the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, for exhibiting offensive material. In the year 2000, these events were filmed under the title Dirty Pictures with James Woods playing the role of the museum director.
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