Reading Racial Fetishism the Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe Response

With a retrospective for the historic photographer nearly to open at two Los Angeles institutions, the author reassesses the 1990 "X Portfolio" obscenity trial, challenging its distinction between fine fine art and pornography.

Americans take their fine art seriously. Stereotypes almost Yankee simplicity and boorishness notwithstanding, we are a people always gear up to challenge each other's tastes and orthodoxies. And though nosotros always seem surprised when it happens, we tin quite efficiently use the work of artists as screens against which to project deeply entrenched phobias regarding the nature of our society and civilisation.

In retrospect it actually was no surprise that the traveling retrospective "Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment" would and so fiercely grip the imaginations of artists, critics, politicians and laypersons akin. Curated past Janet Kardon of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in Philadelphia, the exhibition opened in December of 1988, just earlier the artist'due south decease in March of 1989. Information technology incorporated some of Mapplethorpe's best work, including stunning portraits and still lifes. What shocked and irritated some members of his audiences, however, were photographs of a naked young boy and a semi-naked girl too as richly provocative erotic images of African-American men and highly stylized photographs of the BDSM underground in which Mapplethorpe participated. Indeed, much of what drew such concentrated attention to Mapplethorpe was the effeminateness and precision with which he treated his sometimes challenging subject thing. He had achieved art superstar status past ostentatiously rejecting certain rules while advisedly following others. ¹

The conversations around change and continuity, indecency and propriety that Mapplethorpe helped ignite were precisely tuned to the zeitgeist of the 1980s. The controversy surrounding "The Perfect Moment" was part of a larger contend in America over the nature of the arts and creative freedom, peculiarly the part that authorities should play as an arbiter of sense of taste and a protector of standards of decency. Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 looking to dismantle many of the structures of the Great Social club put into place past Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. He was particularly eager to dismantle—or at least defund—the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and he did not lack for co-conspirators. In the aforementioned year that the controversy effectually "The Perfect Moment" got nether mode, the NEA came nether fire for its support of Andres Serrano, whose 1987 photograph Piss Christ showed a crucifix submerged inside liquid that the artist described as his ain urine. In the wake of the outcry, and with Mapplethorpe's name heavy in the oral fissure of the NEA's greatest foe, the belatedly Senator Jesse Helms, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., announced that it was canceling its showing of "The Perfect Moment," which had a very successful run at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art following its premiere at the ICA in Philadelphia. After its sharp rejection by the Corcoran, the prove was moved to the Washington Project for the Arts, which presented the photographs to large, enthusiastic audiences.

In 1990 "The Perfect Moment" traveled to Cincinnati'due south Contemporary Arts Center (CAC). Obscenity charges were quickly leveled against both the CAC and its director, Dennis Barrie, exposing them to potential penalties of upwardly to $10,000 in fines or, in Barrie's case, jail fourth dimension. The CAC and its director were eventually acquitted by a jury of viii men and women from Cincinnati and the surrounding Hamilton Canton, a verdict that is correctly understood equally a victory in the battles to protect the rights of artists and to insure connected public funding for the arts.

We are also right to judge the controversy surrounding Mapplethorpe and "The Perfect Moment" in relation to American struggles for civil rights, free spoken communication and sexual liberation. We should remember, however, that fifty-fifty as rights, privileges and liberties have been obtained past oppressed communities, these groups have been simultaneously confronted with novel and at times even more than onerous forms of policing and control. As has been demonstrated throughout our collective histories, there is always a requite-and-take betwixt progress and repression. Speaking of the abolition of slavery in the anglophone Caribbean area, historian Thomas Holt has argued that while elite white abolitionists conceded the vulgarity and barbarism of the establishment—while they agreed that Africans and persons of African descent were, in fact, members of the human family—they remained altogether wary of the idea of full, unfettered liberty. They were afraid that newly freed persons would opt out of the systems of inexpensive labor that supported the plantation system, and that their liberation would be so disruptive and so unpredictable as to threaten basic social and economic structures. Freed people could be trusted to live as total members of the society "but subsequently being re-socialized to accept the internal discipline that ensured the survival of the existing social order." Holt continues:

They would exist costless to bargain in the marketplace, merely not free to ignore the marketplace. They would be gratis to pursue their own cocky-interest but not free to turn down the cultural conditioning that defined what that self-interest should exist. They would have opportunities for social mobility, but only after they learned their proper place. ²

Holt's observations, while applicable to many groups striving for freedom, are useful equally we endeavour to make sense of the aftermath of the so-called culture wars that raged in the 1980s and '90s, for which Mapplethorpe was a spectacularly alluring affiche boy. These debates well-nigh art and moral propriety took place in the context of AIDS activism and the struggle for gay rights. While in retrospect we can gloat the momentous successes of these movements, we must likewise acknowledge that their victories have come up with sure costs.

Much of the celebrity that Mapplethorpe accomplished stems from the ways in which his various audiences have been reminded that no matter the iconoclastic nature of the work, no affair its "vulgarity," Mapplethorpe ultimately ought to exist recognized every bit cultivated, refined and aristocracy—an individual comfortable in the most rarefied precincts of art and civilisation. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are mounting a joint retrospective of Mapplethorpe'due south photography this calendar month. The Guggenheim Museum in New York will repeat their efforts in 2017 with a divide retrospective. This institutional activity speaks to the fact that Mapplethorpe and his work have been fully integrated into the most sophisticated parts of the American fine art scene. In this context, the image of a whip shoved into the artist's anus and trailing to the floor, the photograph of a pinky stuck into the head of an oversize penis, and, perhaps most important of all, the image of the artist, his face lined and pale, daring his viewers to remark on the trace of disease on his skin and the hint of thinning at his temples—none of these can be taken as evidence that Mapplethorpe is anything but a gentleman, a dandy, an aesthete.

This was not ever the instance. Mapplethorpe'south early pornographic piece of work was either rejected or excluded from commercial exhibitions by both Holly Solomon in New York and Simon Lewinsky in San Francisco, even equally these gallerists coveted the artist's portraits and photographs of fruit, flowers and bronze. ³ Mapplethorpe was faced with a difficult challenge: despite his masterful images and immense creativity, his erotic life—the very font from which he presumably drew inspiration and sustenance—could mark him as a character with just the most tentative hold on race and course respectability.

For the gallery owner, the art critic or the museum director excited by Mapplethorpe's piece of work but confused and daunted past its haphazard purchase on propriety, the only option, it seems, was to launch a counteroffensive. They had to begin the painstaking work of parsing Mapplethorpe's creations and then every bit to make obviously the idea that, their content notwithstanding, the photographs demonstrated "internal discipline." This trait would make them acceptable within the main currents of both the fine art world and society at large. The images were not every bit naughty equally one might have get-go thought. They were not pornography per se, but instead indications of Mapplethorpe'southward advanced intellect and technical mastery.

In order to "sell" Mapplethorpe one would take to, in result, translate and simplify his aesthetic. Though it might have been the instance that Mapplethorpe sullied himself among New York's sexually adventurous gay customs, this did not diminish the fact that his work was remarkably well executed, "inside its proper place," to borrow Thomas Holt'southward language again, regardless of its objectionable subject area matter.

It is important to call up that some of Mapplethorpe's fiercest and virtually articulate critics take been gay African-American intellectuals, especially Kobena Mercer and Essex Hemphill, who fence that Mapplethorpe'due south much-celebrated technique, his ability to photograph (black) bodies as if they were marble or bronze sculptures, really continues a centuries-long tradition of separating black physicality from black subjectivity. ⁴ Thus when confronted with Janet Kardon's celebratory claim in the "Perfect Moment" catalogue that Mapplethorpe's black models are "startlingly volumetric, occupying their space so convincingly that the photographer might be belongings a chisel instead of a photographic camera," ⁵ the response of these African-American critics has been to remind usa that there is nothing specially novel nigh Mapplethorpe'due south aesthetic. Paying attention only to surface and volume, or what Kardon calls "the dark terrain" of black bodies, has often been the way that African-Americans take been treated in both American art and culture.

What may relieve the tension produced by these charges is the fact that Mapplethorpe's photographs are at once stirringly sensual and remarkably mannered. Or, to again quote Kardon, "the flowers exude beauty and danger, the nude black models epitomize purity and eroticism, the portraits convey truth and deception." No matter the complexity of Mapplethorpe'due south technique, the fact of his naughty, never-quite-disciplined sexuality cannot be ignored. Those nude black models, those many men dressed in leather and chains were for him something more than shells on which to project his aesthetic. They were also cleaned-upward representatives of a social/sexual hole-and-corner that was very much at odds with the mainstream conceits of 1980s America. What makes Mapplethorpe truly obscene may not be that he pictured whips, bondage, masks and leather, nor that he delighted in the sexual fetishization of black men'southward bodies. Instead, his crime was pairing these images with his many works that might easily be recognized as high fine art.

In a gossipy and slightly scolding remembrance of Mapplethorpe published in 2008, David B. Boyce, a curator, collector and general fixture of the 1970s New York fine art scene, offers a articulate discussion of the problems faced then by lesbian and gay artists, dealers, critics and curators every bit they attempted to achieve some level of social and professional stature for themselves and their work in the art world. Speaking of his first encounter with Mapplethorpe and Mapplethorpe's partner, collector Sam Wagstaff, Boyce writes:

In purely visual terms, they appeared to be an odd couple. With this exceptionally handsome face up, etched deeply with a desirable masculine divinity, and held gracefully atop a tall, impeccably dressed build, Sam Wagstaff exuded sophistication, taste, education, old money, and confidence, while his slim younger partner, dressed rebelliously in denim and silver-studded black leather, seemed vaguely edgy and preoccupied. Robert Mapplethorpe did not appear to fit comfortably amongst the guests gathered at a cocktail political party on Gramercy Park East that early autumn evening of 1975, and gave the slightest impression that he'd rather be elsewhere. ^half-dozen

The visual and ideological codes that Boyce offers are fairly straightforward. Wagstaff seems to epitomize all that Mapplethorpe threatened. He appears in Boyce'southward appreciation as a sort of necessary bank check on Mapplethorpe'south wildness. Wagstaff was the embodiment of the perfected, mellowed (all merely heterosexual) white masculinity that might finer underwrite—and discipline—the young creative person's rebellious streak.

Boyce describes how, later befriending Mapplethorpe, he was pleasantly surprised past the artist'south knowledge of art—knowledge that came generally from what "he'd picked up along the way nether the tutelage of Wagstaff." He also reiterates that ane ought to resist thinking of Mapplethorpe'south sexual imagery as pornographic or somehow distinct from the residue of his oeuvre. "My instinct was to regard these sexual images with the aforementioned criteria as the non-sexual despite the minute hint of naughty glee that glinted in Robert'south eye."

It is this naughty glinting that catches one's attending. Boyce uses the figure of Wagstaff as a sort of inadequate cover for the fact that Mapplethorpe depicted a world that could non be neatly cleaned upwardly and reframed for easy consumption within the American art marketplace. His sincere appreciation for Mapplethorpe'southward talent yet, Boyce repeats his aversion to the creative person's social and sexual practices, telling us that he was "completely unintrigued past Southward&Grand and the leather culture." He goes on to fret over the creative person's "compulsion to explore the sexually baroque," final that Mapplethorpe's HIV diagnosis in the mid-1980s "quelled this obsession." He was likewise alarmed past Mapplethorpe's "ambition and capacity for drugs." "Those were the halcyon days of gay youth, before the catastrophe of AIDS," Boyce writes. "Robert Mapplethorpe had given that standard of urban gay sexual activity life his photographic imprimatur, and so with a bold and deliberate temerity, he foisted it on the earth. A part of that world never forgave him."

What most irritates Boyce is not then much that Mapplethorpe pictured sadomasochistic imagery, but instead that the artist so successfully blurred the line between so-chosen legitimate art and pornography. He mischievously danced beyond the naughty/nice divide in a manner that makes it hard to know where artistic transgression ends and social capitulation begins.

Nonetheless, Mapplethorpe's life and piece of work provide an unparalleled opportunity to examine the social and cultural implications unleashed when we do the rude work of distinguishing real art from dingy pictures, well-formed citizens from the edgy, the preoccupied, the wild, the rebellious, the naughty and the bizarre. Jesse Helms complained that "in that location'due south a large divergence between The Merchant of Venice and a photograph of 2 males of unlike races in an erotic pose on a marble-top tabular array." ⁷ The critique I offer here is that our power to transmogrify Mapplethorpe from a scruffy downtown lensman with a taste for drugs and nasty sex to an epoch-making fine art star has been achieved through reference to the but half-acknowledged conventionalities that at the core of the matter Helms was right.

The liberal forms of evaluation with which nosotros approach Mapplethorpe not simply reiterate old-fashioned distinctions between practiced and bad fine art but they as well practice the unseemly work of introducing new and potentially more restrictive forms of artistic policing and social command. We have accustomed much too quickly the idea that in that location are inherently pornographic forms of culture, images and modes of social interaction and then plainly vulgar and hating that they must be scrubbed, tamed and repurposed before questions of liberality and liberation can be addressed. One must wonder, in fact, if the ways in which Mapplethorpe has been evaluated, the ways in which a commentator similar Boyce carefully distinguishes the artist'southward interest in "the sexually bizarre" from his skill and talent as a lensman, is itself part of a larger trend to extend social recognition to sexual minorities while simultaneously demonizing the presumed excessiveness and immaturity of these communities' institutions and behaviors "before the ending of AIDS."

This matter came to a head in the 1990 trial in which the Cincinnati CAC and its director were charged with two counts each of pandering obscenity and the illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented textile. The attorneys for the defense proved to be especially hard-nosed and practical in their approaches to the case. The basis for the charges was the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Miller v. California in which the court adult a 3-pronged standard in guild to place pornographic material: (1) the piece of work, taken as a whole, appeals to a prurient involvement under gimmicky community standards, (ii) the work is patently offensive, or (3) the piece of work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Writing in the journal Litigation 2 years after the successful resolution of the Mapplethorpe case, chaser Marc Mezibov, partner in the Cincinnati-based firm Sirkin, Pinales, Mezibov and Schwartz, noted that from the very starting time the team defending the CAC and director Barrie understood that it was the third leg of the standard, the presumed creative merit of Mapplethorpe's piece of work, that would permit them to call back it from the trash pile of the prurient and the pornographic.

They were met immediately, nevertheless, with 1 quite impressive stumbling block; that is to say, the expert citizens of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Mezibov writes:

In the last 20 years a community-broad understanding has developed of acceptable forms and means of expression, largely the effect of rigorous law enforcement. X-rated movies are non acceptable, nor are adult bookstores. Neither type of establishment exists whatever longer in Hamilton County. ⁸

Not but were potential jurors unlikely to be Midwestern versions of Eastward and West Declension liberals with passionate commitments to the protection of free voice communication, merely they also could not be expected to have had more than than the most limited exposure to the then-called sexual underground from which Mapplethorpe drew inspiration for some of his most provocative images. To brand matters worse, the team was not successful in its efforts to limit the jury pool to the residents of Cincinnati versus the presumably less cosmopolitan, more conservative residents of Hamilton County. Nor were they allowed to expand the jury's mandate to encompass the creative merit of the entire exhibition. Instead the jurors were asked to judge the images in Mapplethorpe's "X Portfolio" (1978), those peculiarly naughty BDSM photos. As Mezibov later complained, the prosecutor sought "to display the controversial materials in a vacuum, totally unaccompanied by explanation and completely disconnected from the greater context and dignified setting in which the photographs were displayed at the CAC."

The defence force'south responses to these challenges were altogether logical and obviously successful, but likewise troubling in the ways in which they reinforced calcified ideas about art and respectability. In effect their tack was to train the jurors, to offering them expert educational activity in how to distinguish fine art from pornography. Moreover, their methods turned on the strong proposition that pornography happened "over in that location," in the X-rated movie houses and developed bookstores that no longer existed in Cincinnati at the fourth dimension of the trial, not in the "dignified setting" of the CAC. "Despite the graphic nature of the photographs, which some jurors described equally gross and disgusting," Mezibov writes, "the jury concluded that the prosecution had not made its example because, like a poorly baked apple pie, 'it was missing an ingredient.' [The exhibition] had creative value, and that'due south what kept it from being obscene."

Hopefully you will forgive what may seem an untoward criticism of the politics surrounding the defense force of the CAC, Barrie, and in a sense, Mapplethorpe himself. My concerns are based on the suspicion that the arguments utilized in the case might very easily slip from the divvying upward of obscene versus elegant objects to the apportioning of respectability to individuals and communities. Homoerotic and sadomasochistic images in the gallery are recognized every bit art; homoerotic and sadomasochistic images in the adult bookstore are pornography. And even more to the point, while the patrons of the gallery are to be marked as exemplary, advanced, cosmopolitan and progressive, the patrons of the bookstore are doubtable and suspicious, individuals who might be rightly detained and arrested all in the name of "customs-wide understanding" reinforced by what Mezibov describes as "rigorous police enforcement."

The ultimate success of the defense hinged on their power to offer careful education in the very forms of understanding that accept simply been described. At the heart of the matter was the issue of whether they could produce a narrative of respectability powerful enough to rescue Mapplethorpe and his work from the nether side of the good fine art/bad pornography carve up. The defense force in the example was extremely attuned to just this problem. They were particularly careful in their choice of expert witnesses, hoping to strike the right balance between prestige and normativity. They chose only individuals who had "Midwestern connections or at to the lowest degree Midwestern manners and appearances." This group included:

. . . a Westward Coast museum director with a professorial manner; a curator from the Eastman Kodak Institute of Photography (renowned for the "Brownie" photographic camera) which is located in the innocuous-sounding city of Rochester, New York (as opposed to New York City, which has threatening connotations for many Cincinnatians); and a museum director from Berkeley, California, who was built-in and educated in Michigan [and] looked every bit if she had stepped off a Midwestern college campus.

The defense team besides went through an exacting procedure of jury modeling and pick in order to create the right audience for the arguments and educational activity they offered. This resulted in the option of a largely eye- and working-class group of four men and iv women, "all from rather conventional backgrounds," all employed, ii with some college education, and one with a college caste. None had attended "The Perfect Moment," nor had whatsoever ever visited the CAC. Moreover, in an impressively clarifying bated, Mezibov remarked in his postmortem of the trial that, "our model juror was a single black man living within the boundaries of the city of Cincinnati. Out of a jury array of approximately 60 persons, merely one fit the model contour." Even as much of the controversy surrounding both Mapplethorpe'south body and his body of work relates to his images of black, urban, unmarried and presumably queer men, the legal deliberation nearly whether those images are pornography or art, obscene or respectable, took place—and indeed takes place—in their absence. The signal was, in effect, to reframe Mapplethorpe for the mainstream, to make him and his work "dignified" and, therefore, at to the lowest degree somewhat palatable to Americans "from rather conventional backgrounds."

Barrie and the CAC won their cases. Senator Jesse Helms, liberally using Mapplethorpe'southward photographs as tools to rile the adept white folks of North Carolina, twice won reelection to Congress, overcoming surprisingly vigorous challenges from Harvey Gantt, sometime mayor of Charlotte, who if he had been successful would have been simply the fourth African-American to proceeds a U.S. Senate seat. An amazingly successful industry has grown up not simply around Mapplethorpe'southward photography, both the wicked and the polite, but also around the personal effects and furnishings left after his decease. Mapplethorpe's many fans eagerly anticipate major retrospectives of his photography, while an HBO serial about his life is in the works.

Even so, it may be Mapplethorpe himself who was the great loser in all these machinations. The maestro died at the height of his artistic powers. Moreover, much of the world that spawned him, a world that included non only grand museums and galleries, but also the confined, baths, piers and rambles that Mapplethorpe frequented and drew inspiration from, accept been censored and shuttered (through rigorous law enforcement), not but in the interest of public health, but also in society to field of study newly liberated queers.

Nosotros are complimentary to bargain in the market, just not free to ignore the market. We are free to pursue our own self-interest, but non free to reject the cultural conditioning that defines what that self-involvement should exist. We accept opportunities for social mobility, but only later learning our proper places. Robert Mapplethorpe died a celebrated artist and a fellow member of the American aristocracy. The price of the ticket was a mere handful of personal liberties, loss of connection to a history of sexual liberalism and radicalism, and some stunning, earth-making photographs.

"Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium," at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Mar. 15-July 31, and the Los Angeles Canton Museum of Art, Mar. xx-July 31.

This essay expands upon a lecture presented at "Mapplethorpe + 25," a symposium organized by FotoFocus and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Oct. 24, 2015.

Endnotes

1. During his lifetime not simply was Mapplethorpe'south work extensively collected simply it was also exhibited at, among other places, Light Gallery, Holly Solomon Gallery, Robert Samuel Gallery, Robert Miller Gallery, Leo Castelli Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York, and Jurka Gallery, Amsterdam. In addition, Mapplethorpe published two very successful collections of photography: Robert Mapplethorpe: Black Book, New York, St. Martins Griffin, 1988; and Certain People: A Book of Portraits, Santa Iron, Twelvetrees Printing, 1985.

2. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p. 53.

3. For more on this matter, meet Richard Meyer, "Imagining Sadomasochism: Robert Mapplethorpe and the Masquerade of Photography," Qui Parle iv, no. 1, Autumn 1990, pp. 62-78.

4. Run across Kobena Mercer, "Only Looking for Trouble: Robert Mapplethorpe and Fantasies of Race," in Anne McClintock, Aaimir Mufti and Ella Shohat, eds., Unsafe Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Printing, 1997, pp. 240-52; Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry, San Francisco, Cleis Press, 2000.

5. Janet Kardon, "The Perfect Moment," in Janet Kardon, ed., Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, Philadelphia, Institute of Gimmicky Art, 1991, pp. 8-13.

6. David B. Boyce, "At Home with Robert Mapplethorpe," The Gay and Lesbian Review 15, no. 6, November-Dec 2008, pp. 24-26.

seven. Jesse Helms quoted in Richard Meyer, "Mapplethorpe'south Living Room: Photography and the Furnishing of Desire," Art History, vol. 24, no. two, April 2001, p. 293.

viii. Marc Mezibov, "The Mapplethorpe Obscenity Trial," Litigation, eighteen, no. 4, Summer 1992, pp. 12-20, 71.

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Source: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/putting-mapplethorpe-in-his-place-63141/

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