NAPLES.- Madre · museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina of Campania Region is presenting Robert Mapplethorpe. Choreography for an Exhibition,, curated by Laura Valente and Andrea Viliani in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
The exhibition coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the traveling solo exhibition The Perfect Moment, opened in December 1988, just a few months before the artist's death on March 9, 1989, at the age of 43.
More than 160 works, including those from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte and from Reggia di Caserta (Terrae motus collection), thanks to a virtuous collaboration among the institutions.
An hypothetical dialogue between ancient times and modernity, between photography and dance, that at the Madre Museum goes on stage not only in the exhibition section, but also through a live performance program commissioned for the exhibition to some of the most important choreographers of the international scene.
Olivier Dubois, director of the Compagnie Olivier Dubois, and former director of Ballet du Nord from 2014 to 2017, opens the performative section. He is mentioned in the list of the twenty-five best dancers in the world in 2011. He will be the author of an original creation commissioned and produced for the Madre Museum, In Dialogue with Bob, on the occasion of the opening (December the 14th), with a second staging the next day. The new creation of Dubois will see the participation of performers chosen in public auditions in Naples by the choreographer in the past weeks. This experience brings for the first time to the Museum of Contemporary Art The format Abballamm '! , created by Laura Valente with the coordination of Gennaro Cimmino and the collaboration of Susanna Sastro- a project through which the Ravello Festival Dance artistic direction involves the best talents from Campania to whom is given the opportunity to take part in special projects that have involved so far artists such as Dimitris Papaioannou, Marie Chouinard, Bill T. Jones.
"Until now the works of the American photographer had never been placed in a direct confrontation with that obvious performative component that seems to animate them - as the editors Laura Valente and Andrea Viliani explain - The Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee thus affirms its vocation as a collector between different creative expressions that come together to rethink and re-formulate experimentally the fruition and nature of a museum. A "dance" between works and choreographic actions, which offers a new interpretation for the works of the New York photographer, reinterpreted under the light of the dynamic force that springs from the bodies portrayed, from the various references to the history of art, from the continuous search for a possible formal perfection. These characteristics are in harmony with the rigorous physical discipline and with the evolutions of dance. It is no coincidence, in fact, that the bodies of Bill T. Jones, Gregory Hines, Molissa Fenley and Lucinda Childs embody the “dancing alter-egos” of the most significant works by Mapplethorpe. For this reason, the exhibition foresees a program of site-specific performance, commissioned by the museum to famous international choreographers, in order to reread the main motives of the Mapplethorpe’s photographic works: the reference to the canons of neoclassical art; the fading borders between sexual genders and identities; the continuous focus on the black-white contrast; the fragility (if not the inexistence) of the border between pain and pleasure; the seductive glamour of the New York artistic and cultural scene, mingled with a game of evocations to a Naples in constant swing between life and death.”
THE CONCEPT OF THE EXHIBITION
The exhibition at Madre museum focuses in a completely new way around the intimate performative matrix of Mapplethorpe's photographic practice, retracing and staging the intrinsic need to represent the erotic and intellectual vibration of the subjects, refusing the impersonal and documentary static nature of the photographic shot. This performative matrix is developed in the concept and in the structure of this exhibition, as a possible comparison between the actions of "photographing" in the studio (in the implication of the author / subject / spectator) and of "performing" on the scene (in the similar implication performer / choreographer / audience).
This exhibition’s "choreography" is then developed into three sections, intimately connected to each other. In the entrance hall and in the two adjoining rooms, as in an Ouverture, that redesigns the space-time dimension of the museum, infusing it with a theatrical inspiration based in the exchange of glances between the two Mapplethorpian muses, one feminine and one masculine, Patti Smith and Samuel Wagstaff Jr. To follow, in the five opening rooms and in the six final rooms of the exhibition, the audience is introduced directly on the stage of this mise-en-scène for images – among dancers, athletes, body-builders, and models – exploring the performativity of the subject photographed by Mapplethorpe, which the artist captured with meticulous preparation in his studio. The two rooms that precede and follow the central hall lead the visitors into potential stalls, in which the dynamic of the gaze of dozens of portraits not only gives us an extraordinary personal diary of the life, affections, friendships, meetings, collaborations and commissions of the artist, but at the same time reconstructs, between a private dimension and public sphere, a collective portrait of the society and jet-set of the Seventies and the Eighties. Among the faces of this "living" audience: John Mc Kendry (1975); Arnold Schwarzenegger, Philip Glass with Robert Wilson and David Hockney with Henry Geldzalher (1976); Deborah Harry (1978); Carolina Herrera (1979); Francesca Thyssen (1981); Louise Bourgeois and the Pop Art gallerist Leo Castelli (1982); Doris Saatchi, Andy Warhol, Francesco Clemente and Lucio Amelio (1983); Susan Sontag (1984); Norman Mailer (1985), Louise Nevelson (1986), Laurie Anderson (1987); In addition to the images of dancers and choreographers such as Lucinda Childs, Gregory Hines, Bill T. Jones, Molissa Fenley and the dancers of the NYC Ballet.
The Central room (third section) – dominated by a red carpet for dancers and a sequence of self-portraits of Mapplethorpe – is transformed into a real three-dimensional theatre, in which, joining all the themes of the exhibition, the performance becomes contemporary and current choreography, in which the artist is protagonist.
To integrate this section, like two retro-scene spaces, two adjoining rooms to the central room: the (Un) Dressing room, a real set up dressing room, where the performers warm up before the performance, which hosts some images that introduce us to vision of the artist, and the X (Dark) Room (forbidden to minors), in which the most "secret and extreme" works of erotic subjects are exhibited, including a selection of the famous Portfolio X.
The various subjects of Mapplethorpe, even the most controversial ones like the S&M images of Portfolio X, are the protagonists of a staging that reveals continuous and sophisticated references to the history of art, in which archetypes and universal subjects are evoked. The photographic activity occured mainly in the intimacy of the studio of Mapplethorpe, where the artist carefully prepared backgrounds and scenographic elements, along with a rigorous drawing of the lights, to abstract in a "timeless time" the photographed subject.
