In 1975, Arista Record released Horses, the first rock album by New York
bohemian poet Patti Smith. The stark cover photo, taken by someone named
Robert Mapplethorpe, was devastatingly original. It was the most
electrifying image I had ever seen of a woman of my generation. Now, two
decades later, I think that it ranks in art history among a half-dozen
supreme images of modern woman since the French Revolution.
I was then teaching at my first job in Vermont and turning my Yale
doctoral dissertation, "Sexual Personae," into a book. The Horses album
cover immediately went up on my living-room wall, as if it were a holy
icon. Mapplethorpe's portrait of Patti Smith symbolized for me not only
woman's new liberation but the fusion of high art and popular culture
that I was searching for in my own work.
From its rebirth in the late 1960s, the organized woman's movement has
been overwelmingly hostile to rock music, which it called sexist. Patti
Smith's sudden national debut galvanized me with the hope (later proved
futile) that hard rock, the revolutionary voice of the counterculture,
would also be endorsed by feminism. Smith herself emerged not from the
woman's movement but from the artistic avant-garde as well as the
decadent sexual underground, into which her friend and lover Robert
Mapplethorpe would plunge ever more deeply after their breakup.
Unlike many feminists, the bisexual Smith did not base her rebellion on a
wholesale rejection of men. As an artist, she paid due homage to major
male progenitors; she wasn't interested in neglected foremothers or a
second-rate female canon. In Mapplethorpe's half-transvestite picture,
she invokes her primary influences, from Charles Baudelaire and Frank
Sinatra to Boy Dylan and Keith Richards, the tormented genius of the
Rolling Stones who was her idol and mine.
Before Patti Smith, women in rock had presented themselves in
conventional formulas of folk singer, blues shouter or motorcycle chick.
As this photo shows, Smith's persona was brand-new. She was the first to
claim both *vision* and *authority*, in the dangerously Dionysian style
of another poet, Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors. Furthermore, in
the competitive field of album-cover design inaugurated in 1964 with Meet
the Beatles (the musicians' dramatically shaded faces are recalled here),
no female rocker had ever dominated an image in this aggressive,
uncompromising way.
The Mapplethorpe photo synthesizes my passions and world-view. Shot in
steely high contrast against an icy white wall, it unites austere
European art films with the glamorous, ever-maligned high-fashion
magazines. Rumpled, tattered, unkempt, hirsute, Smith defies the rules
of femininity. Soulful, haggard and emaciated yet raffish, swaggering
and seductive, she is mad saint, ephebe, dandy and troubador, a complex
woman alone and outward bound for culture war.
The photo, which accompanies the one page
back-page essay, is indeed striking. Smith is standing alone, against a
white wall, with a black jacket thrown over her shoulder. She's looking
up, curious and a little defiant, her wavy black hair swept back. The
hand not holding the jacket is perched on her bosom, right where the
first buttons on her shirt are fastened. She's slouching a bit, and
wearing suspenders, and pants, and she's a bit of a mess.
Copyright © Camille Paglia 1996
From Civilization, Dec. 96 /Jan 97.