Shock tactics falter

The Robert Mapplethorpe industry has been sustained by three factors: the quality of the artist's work, his vast output and, not least, his notoriety as a maker of shocking images. Mapplethorpe died in 1989, and during a career that lasted little more than a decade he stoked up a lot of controversy.

His thrilling, technically brilliant and coolly beautiful photographs effectively took homoerotica - with a penchant for sadomasochism - out of the sex shop and into the art gallery.

These, his glacial portraits of glamorous New York art world types and his icily erotic flowers have sealed Mapplethorpe's reputation as the real deal. But if you root around long enough in the archives, you're bound to come up with a turkey or two. And boy, what turkeys this show dredges up.

Mapplethorpe only made two films in his life, so even he must have known that was not his natural mÈtier. Nonetheless, these rarely seen shorts form the nucleus of this exhibition - and they show how easily Mapplethorpe was seduced by kitsch and how the 'arty' and the 'classy' easily descends into the kind of clumsy, adolescentspiked nonsense we have here.

Made in 1978, Still Moving features a zoned-out Patti Smith intoning fragments of inaudible poetry while stumbling about in a muslin-draped room for 13 minutes. It's achingly pretentious, of course, but one can almost forgive it as the product of its time.

Much worse is Lady, made six years later. Featuring female bodybuilding champ Lisa Lyon as she walks through a huge Gothic mansion wearing hooded robes, or flexing her body in revealing leather gear, this too is a product of its time - which is why it looks and sounds like a very crass and very camp 1980s pop video which just aches to be Fellini. Think Ultravox without the production values.

Robert Mapplethorpe: Still Moving & Lady
Alison Jacques
Berners Street, W1T 3LN