Mapplethorpe and the Genuine Article
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Landscape
Deborah Sosower
At each moment, the question boils down to this: dignity on whose terms?
Increasingly, the answer is that to have dignity gay people must be seen
as normal.
--Michael Warner
No medium or arena is free from political assimilation. Perhaps this is
why the term "the personal is political" is so reverberant in such a
multitude of communities. In the fine arts community, every art piece
reflects a personal decision or touch; what medium to best describe a
subject or idea in, or the physical shape and making of art by an
artist, for example, are ways in which each artist has ownership over
their own work. When art is displayed for an audience, the very act of
placing a personal piece into the public sphere creates a forum for
interactive and political dialogue and judgment. To present artwork in a
public arena authorizes the audience to construe interpretation and
assessment on that art. The policies and politics that dictate the
arrival of art for the public purview are not immune to the authority
and judgment-making that occurs once the art is on display. There are
foundations and organizations that are founded and funded by the
government for the promotion and distribution of fine arts, which of
necessity are bound by the legal and litigious dictates of the governing
bodies and the public it represents. When artwork or an artist is
controversial, it becomes a political issue due to the governmental
involvement in funding, and thus approving, of the contentious art or
art-maker. For artists who work in the photographic medium,
controversies arise more readily due to the realism of the images. In
the case of Robert Mapplethorpe, a prominent and sensationalist
photographer of the '70s and '80s, his photography was the site for
which conservative senator Jesse Helms was able to symbolize the
misinterpretations of visual representation for 'real' action.
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was a gay male artist who died at the
age of 43 of AIDS. His technically brilliant and stylistically
scandalous images sparked both controversy and contemplation. He was
both praised and derogated by his stark and honest appraisal of the
erotic male nude, sadomasochism culture and practices, and homoerotic
and multiracial portraits. "Mapplethorpe's work has a 'shocking' quality
both for his choice of subject matter and the fact that the photograph
is intrinsically more realistic than painting because the images are
'real'." (Cooper, 285). North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms
advocated an amendment for the defunding of the National Endowment of
the Arts in response to their funding of Robert Mapplethorpe, citing
that Mapplethorpe's work was "homoerotic" and "sick" due to the
homosexual nature of the artist and subject matter. "'Homoeroticism' is,
I take it, a term that concedes the indeterminate status of this
sexuality, for it is not simply the acts that qualify as homosexual
under the law, but the ethos, the spreading power of this sexuality,
which must also be rooted out." (Butler, 195). Three months after
Mapplethorpe's death, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. dropped
his show due to conservative pressures in Congress. The following year
the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center was prosecuted with obscenity
charges for showing Mapplethorpe's works, the first time that an art
gallery has been brought to court for any controversial work they have
shown. The charges against the gallery and the director were eventually
dropped, but the questions of censorship, homophobia and federal funding
are still echoing from the contentious affair. Helms' criticism raises
the question of what can be considered obscene or unworthy of public
acclaim, and who has the authority to determine it? "The Helms amendment
reinforces the category of identity as a site of political crisis; who
and what wields the power to define the homosexual real?" (Butler, 199).
Helms' portrayal of the offensive art collided with his insistence on
the indecency of the artist himself, "...the figure of Mapplethorpe is
already a stand-in for the figure of the homosexual male, so that the
target is a representation of homosexuality which, according to the
representational theory Helms presumes, is in some sense the homosexual
himself." (Butler, 195). This serves to illustrate that attacking the
art as obscene translates into an attack on the artist, which many
members of society give authority and credence to due to their
disapproval and ignorance of homosexuality.
Judith Butler links Helms with Mapplethorpe through the fantastic level
of representation to real, construed especially through his use of
photography. She writes that it is the homosexual identity that Helms is
policing and categorizing. It is the photographic and seemingly
documentary quality of the work that allows Helms this interpretive
access.
"Helms not only extends those legal precedents that categorize
homosexuality as obscenity, but, rather, authorizes and orchestrates
through those legal statutes a restriction of the very terms by which
homosexuality is culturally defined. One interpretation could claim that
this tactic is simply an occasion for Helms to assault the gay male
artistic community, or gay men generally, as well as the sexual
practices phantasmatically imposed upon them. The political response is
then to develop a political resistance to this move by simply reversing
the argument, claiming that gay men are not as he says, that
Mapplethorpe is more significant and more properly artistic. It is not
merely that Helms characterizes homosexuality unfairly, but that he
constructs homosexuality itself through a set of exclusions that call to
be politically interrogated." (Butler, 197)
How does Senator Helms achieve the authority to question and interrogate
Mapplethorpe or his work? "Political groups that mediate between queers
and normals find that power lies almost exclusively on the normal side."
(Warner, 44). By attacking Mapplethorpe as being abnormal and defiantly
alien, Helms is asserting his own status as an opposite of Mapplethorpe,
and thus, normal. It is through his assertion of his own normalcy and
championship of the ideals of normal and moral society that Helms
proliferated his opinions and legislation. However, in his call for the
censorship of what he deemed "depictions of sadomasochism,
homoeroticism, and the exploitation of children," (Butler, 195), he is
actually giving political and media importance to Mapplethorpe's work
and vision. "...what Helms performs...is a kind of representational
violence.....if prohibitions invariably produce and proliferate the
representations that they seek to control, then the political task is to
promote a proliferation of representations, sites of discursive
production, which might then contest the authoritative production
produced by the prohibitive law." (Butler, 197). Negative exposure is
still exposure, which is particularly apt in talking about a famed
photographer. Through Helms' vigorous attacks of Mapplethorpe, the
artists' photography became even more accessible to the mainstream and
thus had an increased potential for public education and elucidation.
I am positing that it was not necessarily that nature of Mapplethorpe's
sexuality or appraisal of images that enabled him to be so easily
villainized by Helms, but rather his use of the photographic medium to
capture masculine eroticism. "It is photographers who have mapped out
this terrain [of the growth and extension of machismo] most precisely.
Their point of view has become one of involvement and participation
rather than observation." (Cooper, 284). In its nature, photography
reflects a more realistic interpretation of what the artist views in
such a way as to allow easy identification for an audience. Due to the
clarity of photographs, the separation of real from the representational
is easier to collapse. "The anti-pornography effort to impute a causal
or temporal relation between the phantasmatic and the real raises a set
of problems...by establishing causal lines among representation,
fantasy, and action, one can effectively argue that the representation
is discriminatory action." (Butler, 192). Therefore, if one interprets a
photograph, which is a visual representation, as something that is real
and consequently agent, it is logical to assume that there will be real
consequences from viewing the photograph. However, this logic is
refutable in that no matter the realism of the image, a photograph is
not a window into current reality, "The reason why representations do
not jump off the page to club us over the head...is that even
pornographic representations as textualized fantasy do not supply a
single point of identification for their viewers, whether presumed to be
stabilized in subject-positions of male or female." (Butler, 193).
Mapplethorpe's photography specifically used elaborately staged lighting
and posing of models, which belie any immediacy of sexual action in the
first place. This is not to say that the effect of Mapplethorpe's
depictions are unauthentic or disingenuous, "His particular aesthetic
involves crystal clarity which has nothing to do with the snap-shot and
flash gun technique of commercial pornography. Thus the most extreme S&M
scenes...soon take on a 'natural' quality which can be objectively
studied even if some people find the subject matter overwhelming."
(Cooper, 286). What is appreciable in this critique is the acceptance of
the artistry despite the potentially offensive images. Mapplethorpe's
personal preferences or professional interests are explored due to their
impact on his art and not for the sake of categorizing him as normal,
real, or even homosexual. The understanding of the art form and the
process supercede concerns over representation or realism.
An intervention is necessary in order for the art world , the
government, or any social movement to fight back in the face of
censorship or discrimination in art. A call for education is needed, to
better understand the medium of photography and the articulation of
queer culture and sexuality therein.
"When you begin interacting with people in queer culture...you unlearn
[the] perspective [that the gay and lesbian people have become part of a
gay trend.] You learn that everyone deviates from the norm in some
context or other, and that the statistical norm has no moral value...you
begin to recognize that there are other worlds of interaction that the
mass media cannot comprehend, worlds that they can only deform when they
project images of...deviant scenes. To seek out queer culture, to
interact with it and learn from it, is a kind of public activity. It is
a way of transforming oneself, and at the same time helping to elaborate
a commonly accessible world." (Warner, 70-71)
Mapplethorpe's personal story stands as a testimony of the power that
photographic art has on government policies and political expressions.
In order to promote the continuing federal support of artists
independent of discrimination more queer community outreach and arts
education is indispensable. To continue to discriminate against a
homosexual artist, homoerotic art or the photographic medium is a
disservice to the necessary art and artists who contribute to our
cultural growth.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. "The Force of Fantasy: Mapplethorpe, Feminism, and
Discursive Excess." differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.
2:2 (1990), pp. 105-25.
Cooper, Emmanuel. The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the
last 100 Years in the West. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
Warner, Michael. Chapter Two: "What's Wrong with Normal?" The Trouble
with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: Free
Press, (1999), pp. 41-80.
Dan Doran
--
http://www.fastmail.fm - A no graphics, no pop-ups email service
Hearty
won.' Edward Lucie-Smith smiled. 'Robert Mapplethorpe was a cultural
terrorist.'"
- Jack Fritscher
No medium or arena is free from political assimilation. Perhaps this is
why the term "the personal is political" is so reverberant in such a
multitude of communities. In the fine arts community, every art piece
reflects a personal decision or touch; what medium to best describe a
subject or idea in, or the physical shape and making of art by an
artist, for example, are ways in which each artist has ownership over
his or her own work. When art is displayed for an audience, the very
act of placing a personal piece into the public sphere creates a forum
for interactive and political dialogue and judgment. To present artwork
in a public arena authorizes the audience to construe interpretation
and assess that art. The policies and politics that dictate the arrival
of art for the public purview are not immune to the authority and
judgment making that occurs once the art is on display. In order for
galleries, museums, or universities to display artwork, their high
level officials must approve the works. Furthermore, when the work is
on display it reflects back on the institution it is in, the leaders of
that institution who approve it, and ultimately the artist who made the
work herself. There are foundations and organizations that are funded
by the government for the promotion and distribution of fine arts,
which of necessity are bound by the legal dictates of the governing
bodies and the public it represents for these reasons. When artwork or
an artist is controversial, it becomes a political issue due to
governmental involvement in funding of --and thus universally
approving-- the contentious art or art-maker. For artists who work in
the photographic medium, controversies arise more readily due to the
realism of the images. Homoerotic photographic art in particular is the
site of political and social stigmatization, as exemplified by Robert
Mapplethorpe's life and work. Mapplethorpe's photography was the
catalyst from which conservative senator Jesse Helms was able to
symbolize the misinterpretations of visual representation for "real" or
authentic action and criticize his work as "obscene" due to its
homoerotic content.
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was a gay male artist who died at the
age of 43 of AIDS. His technically brilliant and stylistically
disreputable images sparked both controversy and contemplation. He was
equally praised and derogated by his stark and honest appraisal of the
erotic male nude, his depiction of sadomasochistic culture and
practices, and his own and others' homoerotic and multiracial
portraits. "Mapplethorpe's work has a 'shocking' quality both for his
choice of subject matter and the fact that the photograph is
intrinsically more realistic than painting because the images are
'real'" (Cooper, 285). He is an iconic artist for gay culture because
his photography beautifully and publicly portrayed what had previously
only been represented in underground depictions of homoeroticism.
Mapplethorpe is a celebrated artist in the realm of photography and
freedom of expression due to his posthumous involvement in one of the
most important censorship debates in America. "Although the Stonewall
riots which marked the beginnings of gay liberation occurred in 1969,
photographs addressing gay culture became internationally important
only in 1980. These photographs were made by Robert Mapplethorpe"
(Hulick & Marshall, 248). Mapplethorpe's photographs shaped not only
his own life and career but also the face of photography as a medium
itself. "Photographers have been the pioneers of the new homosexual
eroticism...Mapplethorpe has...taken photographs of the world in which
he himself is involved...his is not the objective view of the camera,
but the active and subjective mood of the participant" (Cooper, 285).
This participation inspired this crisis of censorship in 1989.
North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms advocated an amendment to
terminate the funding of the National Endowment of the Arts in response
to their indirect sponsorship of a posthumous retrospective of Robert
Mapplethorpe's work. "[Mapplethorpe] was an artist certified by
galleries, museums, critics, celebrities, and indirectly by the
National Endowment for the Arts, which funded galleries showing
Mapplethorpe, who himself never received an NEA grant" (Fritscher, 66).
Helms cited Mapplethorpe's work as "homoerotic" and "sick" due to the
homosexual nature of the artist and his subject matter.
"'Homoeroticism' is, I take it, a term that concedes the indeterminate
status of this sexuality, for it is not simply the acts that qualify as
homosexual under the law, but the ethos, the spreading power of this
sexuality, which must also be rooted out" (Butler, 195). Helms was
incensed that Mapplethorpe -and by extension, those galleries who
displayed him and the foundations who funded the displays-had the
audacity to claim that work of such an explicit homoerotic flavor
deserved the same recognition and acclaim as any other piece of "high
art".
In displaying and supporting Mapplethorpe's work, the art world was
arguing that "form carries us to the [sexually explicit] content of
[Mapplethorpe's] work, and all subjects are morally alike" (Hulick &
Marshall, 248). It was the sponsorship of the homoerotic and
unapologetic content of Mapplethorpe's work that inspired the
censorship debate. "This dialogue also was about censorship and the
public's reaction toward a newly visible sexuality that had never until
now appeared with such entitlement in such a public arena" (Hulick &
Marshall, 248). The homosexually explicit work challenged and
problematized the face of American values and morals in the eyes of
many politicians and people. Three months after Mapplethorpe's death,
the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. dropped his show due to
conservative pressures in Congress. Judith Tannenbaum justified
canceling Mapplethorpe's show in her role as the chief spokesperson for
the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in saying "[her]
priorities were to uphold the institution's integrity and identity in
the face of serious scrutiny and possible financial losses and to
evaluate how [the ICA's] situation related to the most basic values and
tenets of American democracy" (Hulick & Marshall, 288). The following
year the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center was prosecuted with
obscenity charges for displaying Mapplethorpe's works, the first time
that an art gallery has been brought to court for any work it has
shown. The charges against the gallery and the director were eventually
dropped, but the questions of censorship, homophobia and federal
funding still echo in the present moment from the contentious affair.
Helms' criticism raises the question of what can be considered obscene
or unworthy of public acclaim, and who has the authority to determine
it. "The Helms amendment reinforces the category of identity as a site
of political crisis; who and what wields the power to define the
homosexual real?" (Butler, 199). Helms inflicts his own narrow
interpretation on Mapplethorpe's work to shape what he sees into what
he recognizes as true or actual. Instead of allowing the work to speak
for itself and its author, Helms sought to control its accessibility
from his own stance as a government official to serve his own needs as
a conservative individual. He usurped the authority given to him to
legislate better laws in order to propagate his own conservative
agenda. To carry out this agenda, Helms needed a scapegoat. Helms spoke
out against Mapplethorpe in order to present a binary opposite and
enemy that, through its very existence, promotes and esteems Helms' own
values as normative and therefore more worthy then the alternative.
"Prohibitions work both to generate and to restrict the thematics of
fantasy. In its production, fantasy is as much conditioned as
constrained by the prohibitions that appear to arrive only after
fantasy has started to play itself out in the field of
"representations." In this sense, Mapplethorpe's production anticipates
the prohibition that will be visited upon it; and that anticipation of
disapprobation is in part what generates the representations
themselves. If it will become clear that Helms requires Mapplethorpe,
it seems only right to admit in advance that Mapplethorpe requires
Helms as well...Helms operates on the precondition of Mapplethorpe's
enterprise, and Mapplethorpe attempts to subvert that generative
prohibition by...becoming exemplary fulfillment of its constitutive
sexual wish" (Butler, 194).
By insisting that Mapplethorpe's work upset and insulted his sense of
decency, Helms allows the photographs to insult his sense of self and
beliefs. He is, in effect, concerting his efforts to convince society
at large and the art world in specific that Mapplethorpe's work has the
power and agency to injure its viewers. What he does not realize is
that in allowing the work to affect his psyche he is illustrating the
power he has over the images in his ability to rationalize and analyze
Mapplethorpe's body of work.
"The other way to argue that representation is discriminatory action is
to claim that to see a given representation constitutes an injury, that
representations injure, and that viewers are the passive recipients of
that visual assault.... and yet, if this were true, there could be no
analysis of pornography...no interpretive distance could be taken from
its ostensibly injurious effects; and the muted, passive, and injured
stance of the...viewer would effectively preclude a critical analysis
of its structure and place within the field of social power" (Butler,
192).
Butler's argument supercedes Helms' assertion that the sight of
photographic representations can hurt its viewers involuntarily. Art
exhibits are maintained in public spaces yet have distinct and
discriminate entrances. Audiences who are likely to see Mapplethorpe's
shows are those patrons who seek out the opportunity. Although the NEA
helps create opportunities for shows such as Mapplethorpe's to be more
widely accessible, the agency of the viewer is still necessary in
constructing interaction between him- or herself and the work of art.
An advisory label warning potential viewers that Mapplethorpe's show
held adult content was in fact added to the galleries on the tour, yet
this was unable to quell Helms' insistence on censorship.
Helms didn't distinguish between the images he purveyed and the artist
who created them. His portrayal of the art he found offensive collided
with his insistence on the indecency of the artist himself, "...the
figure of Mapplethorpe is already a stand-in for the figure of the
homosexual male, so that the target is a representation of
homosexuality which, according to the representational theory Helms
presumes, is in some sense the homosexual himself" (Butler, 195). Helms
turns Mapplethorpe into an archetype of Homosexuality. This serves to
illustrate that attacking the art as obscene translates into an attack
on homosexuals, which many members of society give authority and
credence to due to their disapproval and ignorance of homosexuality.
Judith Butler links Helms with Mapplethorpe through the fantastic level
of representation to real, construed especially through his use of
photography. She writes that it is the homosexual identity that Helms
is policing and categorizing. It is the photographic and seemingly
documentary quality of the medium that allows Helms this interpretive
access.
"Helms not only extends those legal precedents that categorize
homosexuality as obscenity, but, rather, authorizes and orchestrates
through those legal statutes a restriction of the very terms by which
homosexuality is culturally defined. One interpretation could claim
that this tactic is simply an occasion for Helms to assault the gay
male artistic community, or gay men generally, as well as the sexual
practices phantasmatically imposed upon them. The political response is
then to develop a political resistance to this move by simply reversing
the argument, claiming that gay men are not as he says; that
Mapplethorpe is more significant and more properly artistic. It is not
merely that Helms characterizes homosexuality unfairly, but that he
constructs homosexuality itself through a set of exclusions that call
to be politically interrogated" (Butler, 197).
How does Senator Helms achieve the authority to question and
interrogate Mapplethorpe or his work? "Political groups that mediate
between queers and normals find that power lies almost exclusively on
the normal side" (Warner, 44). By attacking Mapplethorpe as being
abnormal and defiantly deviant, Helms is asserting his own status as an
opposite of Mapplethorpe, and thus, normal. This also allows him to
appeal to others in society who want to view themselves as normal and
are easily swayed to pit themselves against the idea of deviancy to
achieve this aim. It is through Helms' assertion of his own normalcy
and championship of the ideals of a normal and moral society that Helms
proliferated his opinions and legislation.
However, in his call for the censorship of what he deemed "depictions
of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, and the exploitation of children"
(Butler, 195), he gave political and media importance to Mapplethorpe's
work and vision. "What Helms performs...is a kind of representational
violence...if prohibitions invariably produce and proliferate the
representations that they seek to control, then the political task is
to promote a proliferation of representations, sites of discursive
production, which might then contest the authoritative production
produced by the prohibitive law" (Butler, 197). Helms must continue to
promote the exposure of Mapplethorpe's work in order to disparage it,
yet this practice only serves to perpetuate the accessibility of
Mapplethorpe's work to the public. However, though more people and
institutions could be punished and policed for reproducing
Mapplethorpe's work in response to Helms' attack, negative exposure is
still exposure, which is particularly apt in talking about a famed
photographer. Through Helms' vigorous attacks of Mapplethorpe, the
artists' photography became even more accessible not only to the
mainstream but to all possible audiences and thus had an increased
potential for public education and elucidation, and ultimately little
was done to most of the sites Mapplethorpe's work was displayed. Most
gallery and museum directors respected Mapplethorpe as an artist enough
to override Helms' censorship insistence. In their minds, "Altering the
show would have seemed like an admission of guilt-that there was
something wrong with exhibiting Mapplethorpe's photographs. [They] did
not want to play into the hands of the conservative groups who believe
they must protect the American people from material they deem
unwholesome" (Hulick & Marshall, 291). Arguing for the value of
Mapplethorpe's controversial work has yet to be employed by museum
directors or curators, but they are credible in their appreciation and
integrity towards Mapplethorpe's art. That the nature of his work is
photographic is all the more reason for approbation due to its recency
as a medium of "high art".
Photography is the key that perpetuates this discourse. Homoeroticism
has existed in many mediums, whether recognized officially or not; yet
it is in the realm of photography that the stakes are higher and
artistic integrity is questioned. Sexually explicit materials can take
the form of graphic "nakedness" when subjected to photography, as
opposed to a more painterly form of the classical "nude" enacted in an
older medium.
It was not necessarily the nature of Mapplethorpe's sexuality or
appraisal of images that enabled him to be so easily villianized by
Helms, but rather his use of the photographic medium to capture
masculine eroticism. No other issue was nearly as compelling to Helms
as the realistic erotic interaction between men in Mapplethorpe's
photographs. "By focusing on homoeroticism of the photographs, the
anxiety over interracial homo- and heterosexual exchange is contained
and permanently deferred...[although this is] perhaps the most
offensive dimension of Mapplethorpe's work, it is never that which is
explicitly named as the offense by Helms..."(Butler, 197). For a North
Carolina senator, race relations should be a lightning rod for
criticism and controversy; yet Helms does not use this at all in his
critique of Mapplethorpe. He hones in on the photographic sex and
sexuality inherent in the subject matter of Mapplethorpe's work because
they convey a sense of realism and interaction that is in truth simply
fantasy.
"I would suggest that the legal equivalence between representation and
action could not be established were it not for an implicit and shared
conception of fantasy as the causal link between representation and
action, or between a psychic act that remains within the orbit of a
visual economy, and an enacted fantasy in which the body literally
enters what was previously a purely visualized or fantasized scene...
'Fantasy' and 'real' are always already linked..." (Butler, 191).
Helms holds the belief that the act of photography enables action or
authorization on behalf of the viewers due to the life-like qualities
attainable through photography. In Helms' view, "it is photographers
who have mapped out this terrain [of the growth and extension of
machismo] most precisely. Their point of view has become one of
involvement and participation rather than observation" (Cooper, 284).
In its nature, photography reflects a more realistic interpretation of
what the artist views in such a way as to allow easy identification for
an audience. Due to the clarity of photographs, the separation of real
from the representational is easier to collapse. "The anti-pornography
effort to impute a causal or temporal relation between the phantasmatic
and the real raises a set of problems...by establishing causal lines
among representation, fantasy, and action, one can effectively argue
that the representation is discriminatory action" (Butler, 192).
Therefore, if one interprets a photograph, which is a visual
representation, as something that is real and consequently agent, it is
logical to assume that there will be real consequences from viewing the
photograph. However, this logic is refutable in that no matter the
realism of the image, a photograph is not a window into current
reality. "The reason why representations do not jump off the page to
club us over the head...is that even pornographic representations as
textualized fantasy do not supply a single point of identification for
their viewers, whether presumed to be stabilized in subject-positions
of male or female" (Butler, 193). Mapplethorpe's photography
specifically used elaborately staged lighting and posing of models,
which belie any immediacy of sexual action in the first place. This is
not to say that the effects of Mapplethorpe's depictions are
unauthentic or disingenuous. "His particular aesthetic involves crystal
clarity which has nothing to do with the snap-shot and flash gun
technique of commercial pornography. Thus the most extreme S&M
scenes...soon take on a 'natural' quality which can be objectively
studied even if some people find the subject matter overwhelming"
(Cooper, 286). What is appreciable in this critique is the acceptance
of the artistry despite the potentially offensive images.
Mapplethorpe's personal preferences or professional interests are
explored due to their impact on his art and not for the sake of
categorizing him as normal, real, or even gay. The understanding of the
art form and the process supercede concerns over representation or
realism. To oppose homosexuality in art is to undermine the purity or
artistic expression and merit of the artist or subject. Critical
examination of works that are exciting due to their explicit and
challenging content is the standard for true appreciation of art.
Observing that Mapplethorpe's photography is able to touch and affect
so many different lives, it becomes apparent how important his genuine
content is for the perpetuation of fine arts and public discourse in
general.
Mapplethorpe's work is also contentious as a basis of "high art" in the
lack of development in his complete body of work. His images are
consistent in their appraisal of symmetry and classical composition
style, yet his work is conservative in its frank but monotonous
portrayal of simple portraits or still lives. The selling point of
Mapplethorpe's work was his own ambitious self-promotion and the
shocking and honest nature of his subjects.
"Lucie-Smith's view from abroad offers insightful perspective on the
young photographer... 'Robert Mapplethorpe was an extremely interesting
American phenomenon,' he said. 'Robert was not a great artist, he was a
great salesman.'...The courts judged not at all if he were a great
artist. Somehow, the media and the public presumed posthumously that
Mapplethorpe's work must be great art because the great furor it caused
made it famous for being infamous" (Fritscher, 66).
The importance of Mapplethorpe's work should not necessarily be judged
based on the genius comparable to masters of sculpture such as Rodin,
painting such as Raphael or printing such as Mapplethorpe's icon, Andy
Warhol; but rather on the social ramifications and influences that
informed Mapplethorpe's work. Like the famous French photographer
Robert Doisneau striving to capture the perfect moment on film,
Mapplethorpe captured the perfect time in the American politics that
enabled gay culture and activists to have a public voice against
discrimination backed by the art community. "Art is...the first and
ideal weapon of those groups who seek to establish new cosmologies that
will legitimize that group's particular values" (Saslow, 262).
Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographic art served as a weapon to combat
the oppression and homophobia present in Helms' public outcry against
his work. Ultimately, Helms' arguments failed due to the nature of
society's innate inquisitiveness about what comprises the actual
censored material. "The effort to enforce a limit on fantasy can only
and always fail, in part because limits are, in a sense, what fantasy
loves most, what it incessantly thematizes and subordinates to its own
aims. They fail because the very rhetoric by which certain erotic acts
or relations are prohibited invariably eroticizes that prohibition in
the service of a fantasy" (Butler, 190). Helms' fantasy is of a
post-homosexual society that places value on discrimination and
censorship of individuals and sites of difference. My fantasy is a
post-heterosexist society that embraces all aspects of art and life and
values integrity and character above stereotypes.
Mapplethorpe's body of work encompasses a vast amount of personal and
political power that insists on being viewed as beautiful and worthy of
esteem in spite of or because of its homo- and autoerotic content. An
intervention is necessary in order for the art world, the government,
or any social movement to fight back in the face of censorship or
discrimination in art. A call for education is needed, to better
understand the medium of photography and the articulation of queer
culture and sexuality therein.
"When you begin interacting with people in queer culture...you unlearn
[the] perspective [that the gay and lesbian people have become part of
a gay trend.] You learn that everyone deviates from the norm in some
context or other, and that the statistical norm has no moral
value...you begin to recognize that there are other worlds of
interaction that the mass media cannot comprehend, worlds that they can
only deform when they project images of...deviant scenes. To seek out
queer culture, to interact with it and learn from it, is a kind of
public activity. It is a way of transforming oneself, and at the same
time helping to elaborate a commonly accessible world." (Warner,
70-71).
Mapplethorpe's personal story stands as a testimony of the power that
photographic art has on government policies and political expressions.
In order to promote the continuing federal support of artists
independent of discrimination more queer community outreach and arts
education is indispensable. To continue to discriminate against a
homosexual artist, homoerotic art or the photographic medium is a
disservice to the necessary art and artists who contribute to our
cultural growth.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. "The Force of Fantasy: Mapplethorpe, Feminism, and
Discursive Excess." Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies. 2:2 (1990), pp. 105-25.
Cooper, Emmanuel. The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the
last 100 Years in the West. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
Fritscher, Jack. Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera. New York:
Hastings House Book Publishers. 1994.
Hulick, Diana. Photography 1900 to the Present. New Jersey: Prentice
Hall. 1998.
Saslow, James. "Closets in the Museums: Homophobia and Art History."
The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in Media, Society, &
Politics. Ed. Larry Gross and James Woods. New York: Columbia
University Press. 1999.