CAPSULE: Mapplethorpe - Look at the Pictures (2016, Dirs. Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato)

The scramble to document the mounting of significant exhibitions and retrospectives on the big screen has highlighted to me a curious lack of curatorial rigour in some of the world's most respected institutions. Or at least a failure on the part of film makers to focus on what rigour there is. Funny, the take-aways one takes away.

I briefly commented recently on the cultural deafness of The Met's 'China: Through the Looking Glass' (in Andrew Rossi's enjoyable but frustrating The First Monday in May). A similar disconnect (between content and consumption) is apparent in the collaboration between Getty Centre and Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the first significant retrospective of the works of Robert Mapplethorpe since his personally mounted final show. In fact, it is even more pronounced.

As foregrounded by the opening of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbarto's film, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, Robert Mapplethorpe was a magnet for controversy. It is baffling therefore that the curators' take on the artist's life and work is so inexcusably middle-brow (a lusty S+M shot draws comment on how the work captures the love in the men's look FFS), or how unimaginative the curatorial stance is (two curators almost fall over themselves with glee when one suggests a mind-numbingly obvious juxtaposition).

Bailey and Barbato's directorial decisions are no more distinguished. The onslaught of talking heads are either ill considered or openly chosen to draw Mapplethorpe back to the middle of the road... I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have been all that interested in being memorialised by his sister giggling quaintly about how she had to distract his mother from setting eyes on a fisting pic. Or similarly tittery anecdotes from his former assistants.

To the film's credit (or to the credit of HBO who funded and will air), there's no reticence in showing the actual pictures in unobscured glory and, with the little critical engagement that some of the more relevant interviewees muster, the portrait of Mapplethorpe as attention hungry opportunist provides a stereotype-reinforcing view of the cult of personality that overran the art world post-Warhol.

Attempts to draw together the deeper threads of Mapplethorpe's life (his family, his sexuality, his sex life and ultimately his death) are clumsily handled and often overreach - potentially because the complexity of Mapplethorpe's existence is already presented as clearly and as honestly as possible in his photographs. Bailey and Barbato add little. Ultimately, I'd suggest you take their advice. Forego the film and just look at the pictures.

★★☆

Trailer: