Robert Mapplethorpe: Sexual Terrorist
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
September 2010
Dominick and Elliot pose looking at the camera, in a photograph taken by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1979. One of them is crucifying the other upside-down. Elliot – or is it Dominick? – is suspended by his ankles, with his arms pulled outward and chained in the position of a crucified body, in a picture that ambitiously and convincingly quotes a 17th-century painting by Caravaggio of the martyrdom of St Peter. Just as Caravaggio showed the strain of the men doing the tough work of turning the cross upside-down with a man nailed to it, Mapplethorpe captures the insouciant way this man’s torturer, bare-chested and looking at us from a massive bearded head, holds a cigarette in front of his crotch. It’s the little human details that make a scene real. […]