Smith recalls motivations as artist, honors Mapplethorpe

Smith, an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who is known as the “Godmother of Punk,” alternately spoke freely to the audience, read from her recently published memoir, performed songs and fielded questions during the one-and-a-half hour lecture, with the atmosphere relaxed and lighthearted.

Smith’s memoir, “Just Kids,” won the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction. In it, she recounted the stories of the herself and the late Mapplethorpe in their youths.

In addition to reading excerpts from her memoir, Smith also shared anecdotes from her youth. She described her chance meeting with poet Allen Ginsberg at a burger joint, where Ginsberg offered to pay for her burger after she did not have enough money. Smith also recalled her failure to keep up with current events in the late 1960s, explaining that she did not even know about Woodstock and Neil Armstrong’s historic moon landing when they happened. She also performed such hits as “Because the Night” and “Wing,” both warmly welcomed by her fans in the audience.

Though the focus of the lecture, titled “Picturing Robert,” often shifted, Smith came back to Mapplethorpe, a prominent yet polemical figure in American art history.

Although the objects of his photographs were varied, Mapplethorpe’s name is intimately connected to his “Perfect Moment” traveling exhibition of the late 1980s, which was funded by the National Endowment of the Arts. The exhibition included some of Mapplethorpe’s most controversial photographs, including sexually explicit images, and became the center of a battle over what kinds of art the government should fund.

Smith said she thinks that both she and Mapplethorpe became artists because they had aesthetic reactions to everything. As a child, she refused to drink cocoa from a plastic cup, drinking only from porcelain because she found plastic repulsive. And Mapplethorpe always saw more colors in the world than others could, she said.

Smith described the first time she met Mapplethorpe, in 1967, as a chance encounter between two people who understood the world through aesthetics. At the time, both worked in New York bookstores. Some of Smith’s album covers are photographs taken by Mapplethorpe, with whom she remained a close friend until his death in 1989.

Smith described her friend’s confidence in her work as his biggest gift to her.

“Robert never had doubts. He knew he was an artist, when a piece was finished and when one had to be abandoned,” Smith said. “He was able to instill some of that confidence in me.”

The lecture attracted audience members both young and old.

David Burkett, a teacher at Princeton Day School, said he felt connected to Smith after reading her memoir.

“When she sang that song [“Because the Night”] without accompaniment, it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” Burkett said. “We’ve all heard it before, but she made us all loosen up.”