Just Kids: IV

At the beginning of Just Kids Patti Smith described how she first learned of Robert’s death. She had just got out of bed and was listening to the television arts channel playing Tosca’s aria ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore, -I have lived for art and love.‘  At the same time she was looking at a reproduction of Odilon Redon’s funerary image of a figure with closed eyes when the phone rang.  The variety of these interests may come as a surprise to those who know her primarily through such works as Horses but even her activities as a musician were just one aspect of her output.  By 1974 she had become a published poet, a theatre actor and a visual artist. Such eclecticism coincided with the shift from modernism’s interrogation of a single medium to postmodernism’s adoption of multimedia projects in which more than one artist took part. Typical of this was Patti’s creation with Mapplethorpe of Still Moving, a film, which she hoped could be ‘a type of music video that could stand on its own as art.’  Even more significant is that in her collaborations with Robert there was a blurring of the lines between maker and muse. As her partner, Fred Sonic Smith, pointed out of Mapplethorpe’s photographs: ‘I don’t know how he does it but all his photographs of you look like him.’
The reference to Tosca, like her enthusiasm for French poetry, may seem surprising in an account written by one of the doyennes of the punk rock scene. Yet one of Patti’s achievements was to help to bring earlier European culture to the attention of young American audiences. Popular culture – like ‘the primitive’, the exotic and the quotation of art of earlier periods – had always been one of the ways of reinvigorating the art of its times. Yet by the early seventies it was perceived as beginning to overshadow the deference that had been paid to earlier and less accessible forms of art. Patrick Heron remarked of the period that the world changed at the moment that students at his local art college stopped carrying copies of Penguin Modern Classics in their jacket pockets.  Perhaps, students had already stopped wearing jackets and, if they did so, more of them were now women with pockets smaller than men’s.  But he was not alone in his views.

Patti Smith’s involvement in punk seems entirely consistent with her admiration for earlier rebels such as Rimbaud. Her ability to reinvent herself becomes increasingly transatlantic.  In describing Mapplethorpe’s photograph on the cover of Horses, she alludes to her Baudelaire cravats and of how she chose one of seven white shirts that she had bought from the Salvation Army before throwing her jacket over her shoulder in an allusion to Sinatra. It is hard to imagine even Mick Jagger writing, as Patti does, about the significance of a costume change from a white dress and ankle bells to dungarees and work boots. But one of the most interesting moments in the book is where she takes a scissors to her ‘Joan Baez’ haircut and transforms herself into what she describes as a gawky version of Keith Richards. Not only did people start treating her differently but half her glitterati friends immediately asked her for a haircut.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Just Kids is the gradual metamorphosis of the pair from ‘sober, hard-working, judgmental wallflowers’ into two of the best-known artists of their generation. Time and again we see the ‘skinny loser’ and her ‘non-verbal’ partner preparing to attend another scary event in their long journey from the periphery of the New York art scene to its centre.
The fact that the woman whom Dali described as ‘a Gothic crow’ achieved what she did through sheer will-power and a taste for highbrow art is all the more impressive. At the heart of the book is an insight into one of the most enduring relationships between two artists of our times. Not even Mapplethorpe’s decision to live with other men could damage their friendship. For, as she points out: ‘Truthfully, I was into so many things at that time that the question of Robert’s sexual persuasion was not my immediate concern.’  It serves as a contrast to her more glamorous classmates at school as girls ‘who had dreamed of being singers and had ended up working as hairdressers.’