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When Style Isn't Enough: The Mapplethorpe Case
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16505 |
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THE ARTS
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11 / 1989 |
2,361 Words |
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Eric Gibson
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By the time this essay appears in print, the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs on view at the Washington Project for the Arts in the nation's capital will be in Hartford; Senator Jesse Helms' draconian amendment will--or will not--be law; and President Bush's nominee to head the National Endowment for the Arts will no doubt be undergoing a grilling as the price for being confirmed. The cause of the controversy will have moved out of town, but the controversy itself will still be with us.
There was a time when Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs were just that--photographs--works of art around which there circulated shock, often considerable, nut no controversy. His regular exhibitions at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York were no more likely to elicit vituperative reviews than was a show of color-field abstraction. Not that this kind of bland acceptance of such self-consciously charged and provocative work was necessarily the correct one. But now that the pendulum has swung so completely in the opposite direction, it might be useful to banish from our minds the purely political reading of Mapplethorpe's work and try to think of it once again solely in terms of aesthetics.
Inferior Works
The first thing that needs to be stated unequivocally is that the problems Mapplethorpe's work presents as art do not have to do with homosexuality in principle. That is to say that if one finds his photographs inferior as works of art--as this writer does--it does not necessarily follow that it is because they frequently depict homosexual practices nor, as is thought in some more extreme quarters, because the photographer was himself a homosexual. (Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989.)
Their weakness has to do with the way the subject matter is handled rather than the subject matter itself. After all, the English painter Francis Bacon tackles the same topic in certain of his works, yet so far his exhibitions have failed to spark the kind of uproar the Mapplethorpe's did. It has to do, as well, with a rather conventional, if not banal, approach to the aesthetic aspects of his work. In other words, it is on aesthetic grounds, not political ones, that he is found wanting.
This point needs to be made clearly because in the polarized atmosphere of the debate on Mapplethorpe, this kind of subtlety is likely to be the first casualty. And because, just as frequently, homosexual activists read any criticism of Mapplethorpe as a covert attempt to turn back the clock on gay rights. This is not thee aim in discussing Mapplethorpe's photography; the aim is to arrive at a disinterested aesthetic judgment.
Perfect Pitch
Mapplethorpe didn't limit himself to photographing men; still lifes and portraits were also his subjects. They share the same aesthetic character, however, in that they are images of remarkable clarity and three dimensionality, as well as sparseness. (Janet Kardon has correctly observed that Mapplethorpe's figures seem carved more than photographed.) In all the photographs, organic life, be it human or botanical, is shown at a perfect pitch of physical development--hence the title of the exhibition, The Perfect Moment.
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