Tate provides a platform for participation, discussion and debate among a conveyor belt of art and creative talent. Tate Liverpool was in need of identity for an online exhibition called Composition, which traces the collaborations between visual artists and musicians.
Choosing to focus on the collaboration between Robert Mapplethorpe, a great master of art photography and the Godmother of punk that is Patti Smith because their relationship was shrouded with ambiguity. They were in love. They were soulmates. They lived in glamorous poverty. The duo had a merging of aesthetics and they both fed a mutual curiosity that spawned boundary. It was the intertwining of their creative paths that gave them iconic status, which lasted until Mapplethorpe’s unfortunate death in 1989.
Mapplethorpe described his collaboration with Smith “like taking drugs, you’re in an abstract place and it’s perfect”. Both their works explored themes of light and dark, intensity and manipulation so this is reflected with a monochrome colour palette, made by glitching and malfunctioning their works.
The monochrome diagonal lines are a glitch of Mapplethorpe’s famous photographs. The musical score of Smith’s 70s chart smash ‘Because The Night’ has also been glitched, as this is the song that fulfilled Mapplethorpe’s dream that she would one day have a hit record.
Ultimately, Smith promoted Mapplethorpe to pick up a camera and Mapplethorpe encouraged Smith to turn her rock poems into hard-hitting lyrics. The exhibition gives off a sense of how they shaped one another’s lives. He was her muse and she was his.
Once the identity was complete, the microsite needed work. Tate is a relatively flat and monolithic museum website, so navigational knots and obstacles weren't ideal. It retains an intuitive and
user-friendly interface, with a minimalistic colour palette that clearly reflects everything Tate is.
