In 1995 I walked into the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and stood inside another person’s certainty for an hour. I was eighteen, maybe nineteen. The retrospective was Robert Mapplethorpe’s, and I had come for reasons I could not have named at the time, which is usually the sign of the reasons that matter.
I want to be precise about what happened in those rooms, because the imprecise version has been written many times. The imprecise version says the work was shocking, and stops there, as though shock were the whole event. The shock was real. The most provocative photographs, the leather and the restraint and the acts I had no frame for, landed with genuine force, and the force came from an unexpected direction: the detail. Nothing was blurred or hurried or grainy with excuse. The most extreme images in the building were the most exquisitely made, printed with a jeweller’s patience, every texture resolved, and the precision was what made them impossible to dismiss. You could not tell yourself this was accident or squalor. Someone had looked at this for a long time, on purpose, with total care.
And underneath the shock, arriving almost at the same moment and far more disorienting, was fascination. I will say it properly: there was an erotic charge in the intrigue itself, in being shown a world of desire operating by rules I did not know, rendered so beautifully that looking away felt like the dishonest option. I was frightened and I was leaning in, both at once, and the looking frightened me the way a roller coaster does. Fear you have queued for. Fear with a safety bar across your lap. Fear you chose, in a building with attendants and a gift shop, knowing you would walk out the other side into ordinary daylight.
The photographs of men were the centre of it. Men photographed with the same formal gravity other photographers reserved for cathedrals. Bodies lit like marble. Intimacy between men, tender in some rooms and unflinchingly explicit in others, presented not as confession or provocation but as composition, as though the question of whether it should be looked at had been settled long before I arrived and my discomfort was simply late to the discussion.
That was the deepest layer of it. Not the content. The certainty.
I had grown up between a valley in the New Guinea highlands and the Australian coast, and by eighteen I understood myself as someone who watched carefully from the edges of things. What I had not yet understood was that watching could be a life. That attention, applied without apology, was itself a position in the world. The photographs did not teach me this gently. They demonstrated it at full voltage. Here was a man who had decided that his eye was sufficient authority, and had then spent twenty years photographing exactly what he meant to photograph, at the highest technical standard he could reach, and had declined every invitation to flinch.
A flower and a body received the same treatment. That was the second thing I could not stop noticing. The calla lilies were photographed with an intensity most people would find excessive for a flower, and the men were photographed with a formality most people would find excessive for desire, and the effect of hanging them in the same rooms was to dissolve the category error the viewer had walked in with. Attention did not grade its subjects. Attention was the subject.
I did not belong to the world in the photographs. This is the part I have taken thirty years to say plainly. I was a teenage girl fresh from the Sunshine Coast standing in front of images made by and largely for a community I was not part of, documenting a scene that had already been devastated by the time I saw it, in a decade that had buried the photographer himself. The work was not addressed to me. And the discovery of that hour was that this did not matter, or rather that it mattered in an unexpected direction. Standing at the edge of a world you do not belong to, and looking anyway, and being changed by the looking. I did not have language for it then. I would later recognise it as the only method I have.
The permission the photographs gave was not permission to desire. It was permission to attend. To decide that the thing in front of you deserves your entire eye, whatever anyone thinks of the thing, whatever anyone thinks of you for looking. Most of what I have made since runs on that engine, and I found the engine in those rooms, frightened, holding the safety bar.
The famous photograph was there too. Patti Smith against a white wall, jacket over her shoulder, the picture that became the cover of Horses. I stood in front of it for a long time, though I did not yet know her story, the Chelsea Hotel, the shared meals, the two of them taking turns at becoming. That photograph would open a different door years later. On the day, it was almost a relief. A face I could rest in, halfway through the rooms that would not let me rest.
I left through the gift shop, the way you do. Ordinary daylight on the harbour. The ride was over and I was, as far as anyone could see, unchanged.
The exhibitions that matter do their work on a delay. Somewhere in the queue for that fear, without noticing, I had agreed to something.
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