Patti Smith

Of all the parties and private views that have taken place in London over the past week to coincide with the Frieze art fair, only one brought the traffic to a halt. Patti Smith flew into town to pay tribute to a new exhibition of photographs by her old friend Robert Mapplethorpe at the Alison Jacques gallery. Asked to play a few songs at the opening, she was forced to take her guitar to the streets as the gallery overflowed with visitors.

“You have all spawned like tadpoles,” she told her uncharacteristically well-heeled audience, which had spilled into the middle of the road. She told us to take care amid the “happy chaos” and started strumming her instrument with the kind of benign carelessless that only a certain generation of rock star can pull off with any class or conviction.

Smith, 62, showed plenty of both. Mapplethorpe was instrumental in what would today be called the creation of her brand identity. The cover of her first album, Horses, featured one of his most celebrated photographs of Smith, an austere black-and-white shot of a woman headed for protopunk stardom: jacket slung over the shoulder like a 1950s crooner, attitude that dared you to ask her to croon. The image was a little scary, as were the album’s blistering songs of lowlife poetry. They were, as it turns out, misleading. I remember pitching up for a Patti Smith press conference nearly five years ago, when she directed the South Bank’s Meltdown festival, expecting a sharp, edgy woman with an eye for trouble and an appetite for confrontation. Instead, she sang us all a love song.

That same beatific spirit was at play in her inpromptu set in the West End on Tuesday. She dedicated her first song to Jerry Garcia, gave the obligatory namecheck to her hero Arthur Rimbaud, who “would have approved” of the minor mayhem, and she sang her greatest hit, “Because the Night”, a cappella, because “I can only play songs with three-and-a-half chords in them”. All joined in. A couple of police motorcycles appeared and drove straight on, as if too transfixed by the vibe to stoop to anything so prosaic as crowd control.

Unlike most of her peers, Smith has mastered the delicate dilemma of how a posturing rock star should handle the autumnal years. At her own Meltdown concert in 2005, she managed to combine aggressive poses with maternal concern for our well-being. One minute she snarled, the next she told us to make sure we checked our teeth twice a year. Mick Jagger could learn a thing or two about how to treat the seventh decade of a rambunctious life.

Her relationship with Mapplethorpe will be the subject of a book to be published next year, Just Kids. She gave a short preview at a dinner held in her honour by the gallery, in which she recounted their first meeting. It was charming and funny.

It was easy to forget that this was a couple – in a loose but meaningful sense of the word – that once struck terror in the sensibilities of middle America. Mapplethorpe’s photographs, which dealt with highly explicit sexual themes, became a cause célèbre of the art world after his death in 1989, when they ran into one censorship dispute after another.

Like his portrait of Smith, the pictures were indisputably intimidating: a self-portrait of the artist with a bullwhip inserted into his anus; a study of a man with a finger inside his penis (included in the Alison Jacques show). They were part of Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio series, a body of work that challenged dramatically his country’s commitment to free expression. His country, part of it at least, lived up to the challenge. Today Mapplethorpe is revered, not least by an art market that is forever pushing his prices upwards.

Most, but not all, of his battles have been won. On the day that Mapplethorpe’s London show opened, it was announced that Tate Modern was having to remove from its Pop Life exhibition a Richard Prince work, “Spiritual America”, that showed a nude image of a 10-year-old Brooke Shields. The police had warned the gallery that a prosecution under the Protection of Children Act was “likely”, and the lenders of the work asked for it to be returned.

While it is important not to collapse one censorship row into another – Mapplethorpe and Prince are artists of very different styles and intentions, and the depiction of gay consensual sex practices are a world away from the odious references to paedophilia that are undoubtedly present in “Spiritual America” – there was something depressing about this latest scandal. Not the least strange was that there was no scandal, as such. No public outcry, no threats. Could it be because most people now understand that an art gallery or museum is primarily a place for free intellectual inquiry, and are able to understand the difference between the presentation of a work and the intentions behind it?

One day we will look back with bewilderment at all of this. There seems to be, in our age, a time lapse of 10 to 20 years between outrage and acceptability. When Smith and Mapplethorpe were “just kids” it was inconceivable that their seemingly marginal concerns would move into the mainstream; that the provocative photographer would become part of the art historical canon, and the dishevelled songstress named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of culture. But so it came to pass. Societies mature, just as people do.

Patti Smith has played her part, and prefers these days just to talk good common sense. “Drink plenty of water,” she told her audience at the Mapplethrope show. “And don’t smoke too many cigarettes.” It’s a dangerous world out there.

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden