6. mapplethorpe by gary indiana
Robert Mapplethorpe's photography demands the kind of diplomatic immunity that only the most persuasively self-aban-doning artistic venture deserves. Like the late novels of Céline, many Mapplethorpe pictures mirror experiences that would normally compel other responses than aesthetic ones. The strength of Mapplethorpe's art is that it defines strong experience more intensely than an uninvolved, moralizing observer could, while registering the peculiarity of its own enterprise. In Céline's work, the freighted material is daily life among the middle echelons of Nazi society, while in Mapplethorpe's it has often been the dehumanized extremities of homosexual lust.
Scarcely a photographer alive could cover the terrain Map-plethorpe has without plunging deep into witless vulgarity or blatant exploitation. Mapplethorpe's influence on other photographers has been unsalutary, for the same reason that William Burroughs's influence on other writers has been entirely deleterious. An obsessive artist spawns epigones galore, but his/her self-imitations are as close as anyone gets to the real thing. Mapplethorpe combines a preternatural refinement with an insatiable appetite: he can traffic in banalities and make them fresh, or tunnel into forbidden zones of scopophilia without losing grace. His signature is so distinct that he can easily plunder other photographers' cherished turf and claim it, while no one seems capable of "doing a Mapplethorpe" —attempts range from tacky shock tactics (Joel-Peter Witkin) to the eroticization of contempt (Bruce Weber).
Mapplethorpe's career has been one of escalating risk. After minting his horrific S&M images in the '70s, he proceeded to photograph, among other things, naked black men, blacks holding guns and knives, blacks with enormous baskets, and blacks with huge cocks snaking out of their trousers. He filled an entire book with pictures of bodybuilder and curator Lisa Lyons that outraged feminist antipornographers. What is even more damning to many people, is the fact that Mapplethorpe continually accepts portrait commissions from the high and mighty, and will photograph almost anything for sufficient remunera-tion. The qualms various people express about Mapplethorpe's work are certainly justified, when they aren't inflated into censorious hyperbole. There are at least two ways of viewing every Mapplethorpe photograph; for viewing Mapplethorpe's production as a whole, there are many.
Mapplethorpe's current show of platinum and large color transparencies offers a respite from some of the "issues" that attach, barnaclelike, to Mapplethorpe's content. As far as I know, only the works in color, mounted on light boxes, have not been shown previously in silver print versions. These pieces feature models in high punk fashion lit by varicolored lights, some encircled, Deco-style, in colored backlighting. In these works Mapplethorpe achieves a strong sculptural effect of volume with colored gels. Mapplethorpe has manipulated the gels to draw precise lines and areas of color on the model, where fashion photographers would "bathe" the subject in an undifferentiated field. One female nude, cropped midthigh and above the breasts, absorbs Mapplethorpe's lighting as if it were body paint. Some of the models are black, one who isn't is holding a knife, and all of them exude the minatory eroticism that is one of Mapplethorpes difficult qualities.
The platinum prints are arranged in red, black, gossamer, and white frames. The free range of subject matter indicates that Mapplethorpe has edited this show according to what would translate into platinum beautifully, and it all does. And the promiscuous mixture-leg in fishnet stocking, marble cross, art collector Doris Saatchi-achieves the opposite effect from Irving Penn's recent retrospective at MOMA. Penn's work looked consistently commercial. Mapplethorpes looks consistently like art, however slick and fashionable Mapplethorpe tries to be. Penn's "art" photos served as ineffective apologies for a career in Vogue; Mapplethorpes forays into Vogue territory test the edges of fashion.
Mapplethorpe's show isn't pointed anywhere, ideologically. But the reification of certain images from glossy plastic laminate into the richly willed preciosity of platinum carries its own current of audacity. His selection is shamelessly "incorrect." Francesco Clemente and Doris Saatchi, for instances, might be the obligatory obsequies in any number of photography shows. Yet Mapplethorpe's portraits forcefully undermine the bloated self-importance of these subjects by etherealizing them beyond the call of duty. Clemente stands in an awkward, self-pitying pose in front of one of his larger masterpieces, trying for a look of unwilled magnetism-the sort of look Giacometti came by naturally. Saatchi wears the fraudulently pensive, angelic countenance of some Knightsbridge socialite searching her memory for what intense concentration might look like. At the same time, the flesh wears off these people as if time were melting them down. So does the force of their assumed pretensions. They look marooned in their chosen attitudes.
Mapplethorpe's portrait subjects never appear as if they've been manipulated against their better judgment. They invariably read as people in collusion with the demonic vision they believe they're encountering. For me, Mapplethorpe's brilliance resides in the space he allows his subjects, whether or not they perceive this space in a useful way. He wants a beautiful picture, and won't print anything less. But it has to be a truthful picture, one that the subject would, on some level "agree with." On this point, the racism attributed to Mapplethorpe's studies of blacks seems a callow charge. It presumes a white proprietary interest in the behavior of black people who have chosen to appear in front of Mapplethorpe's camera.
There are few of the stormier porn images in this show, though one, a white man's fist clutching his enormous, stiff, bent dick, has the same harsh elegance as the numerous voluptuous studies of flowers (which are, lest we forget, sexual organs). One of the most startling pictures shows a dead pheasant dangling from a string, like something in a Harnett painting, its tail, feet, and body breaking the image area into peculiarly balanced pieces. Another is The Coral Sea, a study of an American aircraft carrier in Naples Harbor. The photograph is 19 ¼ inches across and 22 ¼ inches high (most of the pictures in this are 19 ¼ inches square); the carrier itself, which is almost flush with the pictures bottom edge, runs 10 inches across at its widest points and two inches high from the top of the mast to the water line. In other words, the ship is almost invisible at first glance. It's surrounded by an almost uninflected field of gray.
The line between the water and the sky has been obliterated by 4 a.m. mist. This picture needs a close, careful look to reveal the war planes parked across the carrier's deck, the curved strings of light running down from either side of the mast. The splendid isolation of the ship, its subtle presence in a neutral-colored fog, its quiet threat to the surrounding calm: The Coral Sea is a perfect metaphor for Robert Mapplethorpe.
