By Christiana Spens.
The following is an extract from Christiana Spens‘s The Fear (Repeater Books, 2023)
The day before my father died, I went to see an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe at the Grand Palais in Paris with my boyfriend. At that time, I had been living in Paris, subletting short-term from my old landlord, and we were in a long-distance relationship. I was also going back and forth to Scotland a lot, for my course, and also to see my dad. We’d spend time in museums and cafes, when my boyfriend was around, stretching out our free tickets and expensive espressos, to fill the frozen, bright days.
We went to the exhibition in the morning, which I was reviewing for a magazine. I knew my father was ill, but I didn’t know quite how bad things were. There had been so many scares before that I had begun to not really believe it could ever happen. I was waiting to find out whether I needed to book flights back, though, whether it could really be that bad, when we went.
We walked around, trying to be normal, but death loomed anyway; a stark crow in the otherwise green and pristine Luxembourg Gardens; window displays of eerie candles and flower arrangements. I tried to concentrate on work — I was trying to get as much finished as I could in case I had to leave Paris — but even my work was all about death, it turned out.
We took the Metro from Montmartre to the Grand Palais, an imposing building surrounded by decorative gardens and busy roads, and random police marching around. It was eerie and dark inside, like a mausoleum. Women in veils and latex, dying flowers and bowed heads. Fur and lipstick and Irish hair, props and faces lit to seem as blank as sculptures from Ancient Greece. A large white, minimal cross on the wall, next to all the other crucifixes and dying roses. A figure in a blank hood.
There were Polaroids that Mapplethorpe had taken in the 1970s and formal black-and-white portraits of the artist and his friends. He had created a system of iconography that embraced S&M and Catholicism at once, in this pursuit of true beauty. There were classical, sculptural nudes and arrangements of flowers. “I am looking for perfection in form”, he was quoted as having said, his words on the wall of the museum. “I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers.”1 He lined up Saints and rent-boys, celebrities and Michelangelo. Striving for transcendence, perfection and immortality, he had developed an aesthetic, spiritual code in these figures, flowers and icons. He had re-appropriated religious iconography to show how art and sex were his own religion. He had written a letter to Patti Smith: “I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together” (1). There was Robert and a skull, Robert in drag. Robert with a cigarette. Robert living with/dying from AIDS.
But his photographs betrayed none of these struggles. Instead, they were an altar to his idols and ideals, beyond good and evil, beauty and ugliness, success and failure. He had used art to transcend, to go beyond struggle and fear, to assert his own ideals in spite of the doubt he must have felt or experienced from other people, and the fear of his own they betrayed. By transforming images of death, sex and himself so that he triumphed, transcendent and by turning what seemed pornographic into a form in the language of Michelangelo, he sought redemption not only from personal, spiritual dilemmas, but from life itself, and the fear of death that implied.
The nudes are so still, I wrote down, sitting on a bench in front of them, that they cannot be alive and, of course, frozen in time and a photograph, they are not. The flowers seem to be placed as carefully as funeral arrangements. The little altar, with images of Jesus’ crucifixion, together with the lines and lines of photographs of Mapplethorpe’s friends and idols, complete the reconstruction of a fantastical funeral. He has reconciled with doubt, pain and death; he has created his own meticulously executed send-off.
We walked out of the exhibition, out of the darkness. Outside, the pond shone turquoise and shallow, with statues and tourists in the distance, and a froth of fine algae at the bottom. I sat on a chair by the pond and smiled and smiled, and my boyfriend took a picture of me. We were both wearing black, and my skull scarf flickered against my skin in the breeze. I had not picked out these things intentionally.
After being in such dim light before, I was surprised by the brightness of the sun outside, the fresh green of the gardens and trees we walked through, after the soft tones of marble and spot-lit flesh and bone. We walked on to the Jardins du Luxembourg, where the pathways were covered in fine cream gravel. I heard a strange noise as we walked that I couldn’t quite place — a lone cry — and looked around to see what it was. I saw a single black crow, seeming oblivious to the people straying around, standing still on a spot of the lawn, continuing to make its odd, eerie cry, beak open, towards the sky. “Isn’t that creepy?” I said, and my boyfriend nodded and we kept walking. It had seemed so incongruous there, in the green and the sun, as tourists in neutral travel clothes wandered around nearby.
We had just come back from the Mapplethorpe exhibition when my mother phoned and told me how bad things were. “He’s not getting better”, she said. I had been so used to being told he was dying that it didn’t seem fully possible as a reality. But I booked flights to Scotland for the next day, anyway, in a daze. By the time we got home, he was gone.
***
There was a nervous atmosphere at home, with people sitting around, waiting for the funeral to happen. Death seemed unexpectedly public; everyone knew about it. He had been ill for such a long time, during which we had often been ignored or looked down on as a family, mainly because financial problems had followed illness so swiftly.
He had, to me, died very slowly and gradually, and detached from the outside world. The grief was therefore dispersed over the years, but no one had seemed very involved until this point, in which he had physically gone, which seemed in some ways quite arbitrary. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it entirely, but at times it felt good that I was finally allowed to be proud of him, to tell people what he was like, to be allowed the ritual of death. The illness had become a strange spectre, before — haunting us all with the imminence of death, the Fear — but now that tension faded, and in a strange way it brought him back to me, more fully, in essence. A spirit distilled, managed, sort of. As if grief can be bottled, memories saved, legacies controlled.
In the week or so before the funeral, so many flowers were delivered that they took up every surface: lilies, their scent pervading over every other, white roses of various shapes and arrangements. They covered everything: a large dinner table, side tables, sideboards, a dresser, two desks. They arrived in cellophane and paper, with sad notes from friends. So much white, but occasionally some purple, from a thistle, the dark green stalks and long, winding leaves. When all the vases were used up, I found other things, jugs and glasses, to put them in. We bought a couple more vases as well. I took most of the leaves off the stems, cut them down, arranged them between the vases.
As the days went on, I plucked out the dead ones as they wilted, rearranged the bouquets with those flowers missing, merging them together. Cutting stalks, refilling water, bundling all of the cellophane and ribbons into rubbish bins. There was so much clearing up, cutting things away. I thought of Mapplethorpe, the flowers he had photographed. I imagined the actual process that had gone into them. How many flowers had he bought, for a photograph of one? What did all the waste look like, scattered around his studio? What did he do with the leftover flowers, and the flowers he’d finished photographing, when he was done with them? Or did he just discard them, decadently, or busily, efficiently, entirely focused on the art at the end? Why had he not photographed more dead flowers, decaying things, why this stark purity?
I thought of those flowers again — his entwined white tulips and star-like orchids and sensual, begging lilies. The dark and light, the harmony and yet the desire, pushing through. I thought of them over and over, as they flickered in my mind, and somehow, it quietened my despair.
Robert Mapplethorpe took me by the hand, and perhaps my father did too — gave me lilies and roses, morbid confetti. I tried to capture the flowers before they died. I photographed each one, recording their gradual wilting, as they flopped and fell. After I had taken so many, I put the photographs away, hid them, and tried to live.
(1) Patti Smith, Just Kids, Ecco Press, 2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christiana Spens is an academic, writer and artist based in London. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews, and before that read Philosophy at Cambridge. She is the author of The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media: Playing the Villain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and several other books. She writes regularly for publications such as Prospect, The Irish Times, Byline Times, Art Quarterly and Studio International on politics and culture, and is a founding member of Truth Tellers, based at Kings College London.
