Robert Mapplethorpe, the perfect medium: fuss fades away, 30 years on
Almost 30 years after one of modern art’s biggest controversies it now seems safe to survey Robert Mapplethorpe’s work.
The word controversial is part of the standard glossary of approval in the art world, related to a more general assumption that art should upset conventions, break boundaries and disturb the complacency of its audience. But as the people disturbed and upset are already implicitly defined as conservative, the general result of this kind of discourse is to increase the complacency and self-satisfaction of insiders.
In reality, the right-thinking public today is surprisingly averse to controversy, as we have seen in several recent cases. Most difficult subjects, including minorities, religions other than Christianity, women’s affairs, sexual and gender identity, are treated as sacred cows. There are no boundaries to be crossed here. And in art the best controversies are dead ones, where we can safely gloat over being more progressive than an earlier generation.
Thus it now seems relatively safe to present a survey of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89), almost 30 years after one of the most prominent controversies of the modern art world, when several important galleries in the US cancelled a retrospective in the year of his death because of objections to his representations of homosexual and sadomasochistic acts.
The present controversy in Australia about the life and work of Donald Friend, however, has caused a kind of panic in the art world. Galleries have simply removed his work from the walls and his diaries from their bookshops, waiting for the storm to pass.
No one even wants to talk about the question because the lynch mob already has a ready narrative about the elite protecting one of its own. There is therefore no attempt to distinguish between an acknowledgment of the artist’s personal wrongdoing and the aesthetic merit of his work, or to consider the principles at stake more broadly, some of which I discussed in a comment piece a few weeks ago (The Weekend Australian, October 21).
Many artists have been guilty of misdeeds and even serious crimes. Jacques-Louis David, to take one prominent example, was in many ways an appalling individual: as a member of the French revolutionary government during the years known as the Reign of Terror, he sent many innocent people to their deaths. Yet we do not conclude that the Oath of the Horatii should be taken down from the walls of the Louvre — even though the picture itself can also be considered proto-fascistic in sentiment.
In a mature view of any artist or writer, we must begin by understanding them in the moral and political environment of their own time and place, even though we may be profoundly critical of both.
It is only in this way that we can discriminate between what is odious and what is of enduring human value, which, like it or not, are often bound up together in the imperfect and sometimes squalid nature of human life. Merely to banish and censor work because we object to some aspect of its author’s actions or opinions is a primitive response that precludes a deeper understanding of the moral issues.
These considerations are still directly relevant to the assessment of Mapplethorpe’s work, even if the censors today apparently have lost interest in his case. For the sadomasochistic homosexual underworld he depicted and in which he took an active part was not a joyful, balanced or healthy environment: it was one shaped by deep unhappiness, the scars of repression, humiliation, guilt and shame.
This was not a sane or sustainable way of life but a journey into the extreme that was a dark side of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s and that, like some other aspects of that revolution, ultimately bears witness to unhappy and unresolved attitudes to sexual life and feelings. Protestant guilt about sex had rooted itself in the heart of American culture and somehow the addition of Freudian analysis seems only to have compounded American unhappiness.
Why Mapplethorpe chooses to represent these subjects and how he does so are interesting questions. Why, in the first place, does he reveal things that usually remain hidden because they are considered indecent and obscene? Perhaps the answer is that they are part of his life and he feels they deserve to be observed in the light of consciousness rather than just experienced in the darkness of passion and intoxication. And this meant taking such imagery out of the underground world of cheap pornographic magazines and translating it into the cool refinement of high art photography.
This then leads to the answer to our second question: for Mapplethorpe is a supreme technician in photography, and as when a poet submits passion or desire to the exigencies of metrical construction, the imposition of artifice and exquisitely calibrated composition transforms volatile and erotically charged motifs into more settled objects of contemplation.
Consider some of his most provocative subjects, such as photographs of black men with exposed or even erect phalluses. The pictures are quite explicit, yet while an overtly erotic photograph would seek to draw our attention to the transgressive motif with the greatest naturalism, the rigour of his composition and particularly his use of light and shade draw us into an artificial world of aesthetic form, which partly neutralises its erotic potential; instead of raw immediacy, we are presented with a carefully crafted image mediated by artifice and thus accessible to a more dispassionate viewing.
Mapplethorpe’s choice to work in black and white is thus also a crucial element in his art. This had always been the medium of serious art photography, even after the development of colour — and perhaps indeed especially after the adoption of colour photography by the mass consumer market in the 60s and 70s.
It was precisely in this context that William Eggleston had shown colour could be used for artistic purposes, but his work, with its ostensible casualness and banality, was very different from Mapplethorpe’s. One deals with subjects that are seemingly light and almost ephemeral; the other with material that is heavy, highly charged and needs to be abstracted, removed from the naturalism of colour and subjected to the discipline of formal composition.
Only a small number of works in the exhibition are explicitly confronting. Many of the most difficult have been omitted, although they remain the ones that most demand discussion. Far more numerous are such categories as the male nude; flowers, ostensibly the most innocuous of subjects but in reality the sexual organs of plants; portraits; and even self-portraits.
The male nudes are mostly of black men, chosen for their strong and muscular physiques, like living incarnations of the ideal forms of sculpture. These consciously idealised forms make an interesting contrast with the thickset, often ugly and hirsute bodies of the white men in their bondage leather.
Curiously, Leni Riefenstahl also found in the black male figure an ideal of beauty at around the same period (The Last of the Nuba, 1974, discussed by Susan Sontag that year in a famous essay, Fascinating Fascism).
The female figure is prominent too, but in a single and significant incarnation, that of Lisa Lyon, a bodybuilder with a powerful physique. Mapplethorpe’s portraits and studies of Lyon are among his best-known and most popular works. They include nudes as well as images that juxtapose masculine and feminine themes, such as the picture of her in a hat and veil but flexing her biceps and forearm muscles, which was reproduced on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, Lady: Lisa Lyon (1983).
Androgynous bodies are inherently aesthetically ambivalent. When an individual seems of indeterminate sex because they possess neither male nor female traits, they are seldom very appealing; when on the other hand they seem to possess certain characteristics of each simultaneously, as in Lyon’s case, they can be disturbingly attractive to men and women, recalling the myths in many cultures about how the sexes were once unified and were then split into the polarity so fundamental to human experience.
Androgyny naturally interested Mapplethorpe, who seems to have been bisexual in his early years and lived for a time with Patti Smith, a lifelong friend. They were a glamorous and bohemian couple, each unconventionally beautiful: Mapplethorpe with a certain feminine side, which he later explored in photographs of himself as a woman; and Smith with a boyish quality Mapplethorpe captured in several memorable photographs.
Unfortunately, this potentially harmonious complementarity was not enough for Mapplethorpe who, like Michel Foucault in the same period, was drawn deeper and deeper into an ultimately fatal world of extreme, promiscuous and unprotected underground sex; and these were the years when the AIDS virus, not yet recognised, had begun to spread rapidly before being revealed for the terrible epidemic it was.
In hindsight, we may wonder what went so wrong with the sexual revolution, even before the catastrophe of AIDS brought all carefree sex to an abrupt end. Why did it not lead to the countercultural ideal of gentle, loving and happy enjoyment of erotic relations between any permutation of the sexes the participants wished to take part in?
One can only surmise that the hangover of puritanical guilt and shame was too heavy to be so easily dispelled or, even more fundamentally, that the kind of dissolving of the norms and structures of the ego that is entailed in sexual union cannot occur without elements of aggression, domination and submission.
In any case Mapplethorpe was an expert not only at revealing the underworld of sex but also at memorably capturing the performance of the self: his portraits — such as those of Isabella Rossellini or Marisa Berenson — are particularly elegant and focused, although what we know of the rest of his work makes us acutely conscious that these are surfaces, shells of the self that are so expertly evoked.
He made several self-portraits as well, throughout his career, including one set for which the contact sheet is also displayed. In this series he photographs himself turning away from the camera, so that the image registers the blur of a moving head. It is a simple but effective metaphor of the self in movement: elusive, impossible to pin down and doomed to vanish.
The exhibition ends with a portrait taken about a year before Mapplethorpe’s death. In this memorable image, the artist, debilitated by the ravages of AIDS, stares straight into his own camera, his hand resting on the death’s head knob of his cane: just the man himself and the image of an end he knew to be imminent.
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until February 18.
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