A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage. It was then that I experienced the weight of sin, even a sin as small as a stolen skater pin. We contained opposing principles, light and dark. I mean, my band lost its practice space and had to move out of town. There were all kinds of thingsspeed, mixing pills. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. SMITH: Yep. Perhaps to satisfy my curiosity, my mother enrolled me in Sunday school. They can almost gauge it as its happening, by how many hits they have on their websites. 'Patti Smith', Robert Mapplethorpe, 1979 | Tate Collection. I didn't have much to say to her and was perhaps little comfort, yet she seemed to delight in my presence. The rebellious pair met on the eve of the 1970s and lived together in New York's Chelsea Hotel. I could scale the Himalayas and live in a cave spinning a prayer wheel, keeping the earth turning. Ill tell you how to break it. But the artist has to struggle beneath that canopy, just as we struggled beneath a different canopythough ours wasnt as overwhelming. I finally had to put it down to attend a cocktail party at a friends house, and when I got there, I saw Patti Smith across the room. I wished nothing more than to say my prayers, yet these words troubled me and I plagued her with questions. BOLLEN: He shot really beautiful photos of you. We were sort of a bridge from our historical roots and the great masters. But also, I hated peer pressure. He gave me slivers of ice wrapped in brown paper. I could scale the Himalayas and live in a cave spinning a prayer wheel, keeping the earth turning. And then he got hurt by fame, crushed by it. And today an artist like myself could be rendered obsolete, except I refuse. They bonded quickly, largely due to their similar upbringings and countercultural views on art, and it wasn't long before they were spending considerable time together. Its devastating. Would either of you have made the work you did without each other? But it took a while, because the idea of writing a memoir about a departed friend while also having to navigate widowhood was too painful. It is a myth of New York City as it once was, a place where misfits magically gravitated toward one another at the chance crossroads of a creative revolution. Some people said that was hypocritical. Mapplethorpe's 1989 solo exhibition "The Perfect Moment" led to a widespread debate about the boundaries of free speech and tax-funded arts programs. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. That's why I called the book Just Kids," Smith says. Robert was an artist. Stephanie had taken a turn for the worse and my father and mother went to a hospital to give blood. I had promised to visit her on Valentine 's Day, but I didn't. And it took me a long time to appreciate the present. As an artist, you kind of have to buy into your own romance a bit when you are making work. In the evenings we collected fireflies in mason jars, extracting their lights and making rings for our fingers. Im also too ambitious. The swan became one with the sky. In her old cigar box were all the talismanic charms of 1953: a roulette wheel, a typewriter, an ice skater, the red Mobil winged horse, the Eiffel Tower, a ballet slipper, and charms in the shape of all forty-eight states. It was just that the greatness in their work was undeniable, and their arrogance or indulgences were more palatable. Its a dark period now because everyone is beguiled by fame. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. I feel the Bloomberg administration has reinvented the city as the new hip suburbia. Look at William Blake. But it wasnt just luck that you arrived when you did. To me, being hungry and messy and being free to live in a mess and not have to worry if I bathed for a week, that was enough. You can never enjoy. Her mother brought me her stacks of comic books and her cigar box of charms. When they returned my father was crying and my mother knelt down beside me to tell me Stephanie had died. Not contented with my child's prayer, I soon petitioned my mother to let me make my own. My duties as general to my troop of siblings and neighboring boys were very taxing and there was heavy snow to negotiate. I didnt want to leave New York. Thus freed, I would lie in my bed by the coal stove vigorously mouthing long letters to God. I mean, he took acid sometimes. 02 Jun 2023 20:33:11 We just agreed to put all that behind us and start over again as human beings and find out what it meant to be human. The rest was just me and him. They werent years, in the end, that I had a choice to play with. How? We made daisy chains to adorn our necks and crown our heads. If he smoked a joint every day, it was like some skinny little joint. The book, she says, is the story of Smith and Mapplethorpe, together, becoming the artists that the world knew. So a day in New York was half my weeks pay. BOLLEN: When you arrived in New York in the late 60s, you were coming to the city at the peak of an incredibly creative, revolutionary moment. He could access sculpture through photography. But it is her friendship with Mapplethorpe where her legend beginsand like most beginnings, this one has been romanticized to the point of fantasy. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins. Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper. My sister Linda followed during yet another blizzard in 1948. That was very important to him. We lost many a battle in my absence and my weary troops would gather around my bed and I would offer a benediction from the child soldier's bible, A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. There was a little bit of bartering but no credit. But, honestly, I just didnt think about it, because we were struggling. How is it that two such beautifully feral-looking young people with no money or connections, who later would go on to achieve such extreme successSmith with her music and Mapplethorpe with his photographyfound each other? Im from the Philadelphia area. Something told me I shouldn't take presents from a sick girl, but I did and hid them away, somewhat ashamed. A lot of it is purely habitual. Her absorption intrigued me. Flower Images. As I began reading Just Kids, Smith hadnt yet officially agreed to an interview, but I continued to move through it, spending an entire Sunday in my apartment unable to let go of the book. Before Just Kids: The First Photos of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe Robert was not an accidental photographer. I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection. Without sounding conceited, I was at the height of my fame. Part of it was his Catholicism andhow he was brought upgood versus evil, being straight versus being homosexual. SMITH: I have some. I was a pretty speedy person, but I never noticed. Stephanie would lie back on a mound of pillows and I would tell tall tales and read her comics. It was difficult to leave Robert and my band. Even when we were apart, I always knew that if I needed or wanted something, I just had to ask him. And if you believe it, youll have that your whole life, through the worst times. Also, a person who was really fucked up on drugs and couldnt handle it actually repelled him. I promised Robert on his deathbed that I would write it. We were a bridge from Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan and Bo Diddley and all the people in the history of rock n roll. She was convalescing from an illness I didn't really understand, a form of leukemia. No matter what people say or what exaggerated stories they tell, I could count on my hand the number of times I drank too much tequila with Sam [Shepard] or something. I have precious things. So I would have cigarettes and just light em and take a couple puffs, but mostly hold them. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chicken pox, and mumps. Medium. I would slip one in my pocket for my baby sister, but when I later reached for it, I discovered it was gone. ". SMITH: I know that if he was taking pictures, he would have to involve himself somehow. I hid in the world of the artistfirst the 19th-century artists, then the Beats. I believe that what really drew me to her was not my good heart, but a fascination with her belongings. But the urge to express myself was my strongest desire, and my siblings were my first eager coconspirators in the harvesting of my imagination. I have Roberts letters to me. So my first thought stepping out on New York soil was to find a job. That was too intense for me. I came along a day too soon, as babies born on New Year's Eve left the hospital with a new refrigerator. It was pink and when you opened it a ballerina turned like a sugarplum fairy. I marveled at her comic-book collection, stacks of them earned from a childhood spent in bed, every issue of Superman, Little Lulu, Classic Comics, and House of Mystery. We just loved each other. I grew up in the 50s, when the girls wore really bright red lipstick and nail polish, and they smelled like Eau de Paris. I was a little different. The pose looks very informal, but Mapplethorpe has taken care to align the verticals of the tie and the side of Smiths face and has set up a series of diagonals with her arms and the other half of the tie. But a lot of these people kept pushing, pushing, pushing.Patti Smith. SMITH: I can look at that table and see everybody there and see only two survivors in all of those people who were iconic of those times. Pinterest. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. You had a camera if you were a photographer. ", "As it says in the book," Smith says, "we woke up knowing that we were no longer alone.". His voice was not heard in his own time because everything became very material. Thats part of New Yorks tragedy and beauty. Its a place where you have all races and all walks of life, and that has always been its beauty. I mean, a lot of these things dont matter with somebody like Robert, because he was a true artist. Something told me I shouldn't take presents from a sick girl, but I did and hid them away, somewhat ashamed. My mother taught me to pray; she taught me the prayer her mother taught her. We called the field The Patch, and in summertime the grown-ups would sit and talk, smoke cigarettes, and pass around jars of dandelion wine while we children played. Her older sister would hang up my wet garments and bring us cocoa and graham crackers on a tray. At least for him. For some reason my mind expanded on its own, and he understood that. At nightfall, I knelt before my little bed as she stood, with her ever-present cigarette, listening as I recited after her. Richard Marshall, Robert Mapplethorpe, London 1988.Joan Didion, Some Women: By Robert Mapplethorpe, London 1992, pp.13.Patti Smith, Just Kids, London 2010. I could mourn the birth of the credit card, but I also know that because of the credit card, a lot of people are able to do their work. It was in 1967, on her first day in New York, that 20-year-old aspiring poet Patti Smith met fellow artist Robert Mapplethorpe. It wasn't always that way. Do you think that split between you and Robert geographically was necessary? I was completely smitten by the book. When I came to New York in the late 60s, you could find an apartment for $50 or $60 a month. The whole history of rock n roll is sacred. Robert Mapplethorpe | MoMA Thats been rendered impossible. Its really safe for tourists. Because, one day, all the people who have driven out the artists and have only these fancy condos left are going to turn around and say, Why do I live here? And I think for Robert it was a struggle, because at a certain point it meant that he had to make a choice.". By the eighth one he said, 'I got it.' I know what we did, and I know what were doing, and the most important thing is the maintenance of the cultural voice. He wasnt intimidated by technology or the lack of it. With them in my corner, anything seemed possible. We gave each other what the other didnt have. There were no such things as credit cards. I mean, my look back then was too weird for modeling. A lot is just aesthetic. In the winter, we built snow forts and I led our campaign, serving as general, making maps and drawing out strategies as we attacked and retreated. The swan became one with the sky. He was churning out his hand-colored books while down the road there was a mill churning out thousands of books at a time. Places like Union Square, as if we were in Paris. Its a tourist city. I was performing before 80,000 people, as big an audience as one could imagine. But hunger is hunger, no matter what decade you live in. Its not really possible to answer that question. The question for me wasnt if art got us. SMITH: I used to drink like 14 cups a day. I think the way things are going now is good for commerce, bad for art. And he also knew me. Or I liked it when it was safer for artists. Copyright 2010 by Patti Smith. SMITH: Yeah. [8] [10] [11] hide caption. By my father's account, I arrived a long skinny thing with bronchial pneumonia, and he kept me alive by holding me over a steaming washtub. It is the cover of Patti Smith's debut album Horses, taken in a Greenwich Village apartment sometime in 1975 by Smith's longtime friend, Robert Mapplethorpe. It was part of the deal. I would sit at my mother's feet watching her drink coffee and smoke cigarettes with a book on her lap. But he wasnt so interested in the darkroom process. I would later make large detailed drawings of these humorously humiliating moments for Robert. It was just that I had found the person I loved, and that was how we decided to conduct our lives. SMITH: Yes. I also would never receive Stephanie 's forgiveness. Even now, its an opportunity to have a universal voice because everybody, all over the world, loves rock n roll. The way I dress certainly hasnt changed. Thats why he did what he did. You could get a job in a bookstore or be a waitress and still live as an artist. SMITH: I liked being photographed back then. Also, peoples concept of material things changed very swiftly. BOLLEN: Do you think that limited contact with cameras allowed Robert, when your neighbor first lent him her Polaroid, to see photography as some sort of special privilege? He was completely drowned out by the Industrial Revolution. I never stood in judgment of Robert. I wantedif I couldto capture that without irony or sarcasm. Patti Smith Robert Mapplethorpe. Patti Smith And Robert Mapplethorpe: Kindred Spirits : NPR It had nothing to do with Robert. (37.9 35.6 cm) Sheet: 19 1/4 in. Or if you had money. I buried the pin amongst my stash. I went up to her, and we made a date for the interview. SMITH: We didnt know. Once he started taking pictures, he just fell in love with photography." They will be found. Our apartment was quarantined. Then he was seduced by photography in generalbut, again, because of its speed. I wrote copious notes. My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was a harsh winter that year. Artist Robert Mapplethorpe 1946-1989 Medium Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper Dimensions Support: 341 341 mm frame: 613 587 38 mm Collection ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland Acquisition What he did later in life or beyond our sphere I cant speak of, but I knew him for a long time as a person who had control of himself. "Really, when I met Robert, we were unformed.
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