The work of Robert Mapplethorpe has always been surrounded by controversy. It has been defined by it. He was the artist who re-created pornography in his own image. He declared that he wished to create a vision of “smut that is also art”. He wanted to fashion an art that would have the immediate effect of pornography, but that would also be susceptible to aesthetic interpretation and judgment.
“I had the idea,” he said, “of taking sexual images and doing it a little differently than it has been done before.” In this he succeeded. In 1990 a museum and its director, about to exhibit Mapplethorpe’s photographs. were indicted on charges of obscenity and child pornography; they were eventually acquitted.
Now that the dust has settled, it may be possible to form a more considered judgment as a retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s work opens in Edinburgh. Despite their celebrity at the time, the explicitly erotic images come as something of a disappointment. They are of intimate subjects but they are without intimacy. They forfeit intimacy in the act of being photographed. They become staged.
The revelation of personality is the key to art. Yet in these sadomasochistic images there is only posture and pretence and play-acting. They are the modern equivalent of the Victorian peep-show. Some of the more explicit sexual images have not been included in the Edinburgh exhibition (so all age groups can view the works — the curator refuses to say what has been left out), but there is no reason to lament their absence.
The debate over the respective claims of art and pornography is a long one. The furore over Manet’s Olympia, at the Paris Exhibition of 1865, is indicative; two policemen were hired to protect the canvas from a presumably outraged public. It is sometimes suggested that Titian’s more voluptuous nudes were painted for private patrons who kept them in cabinets for their own secret delight.
It would be wrong to conclude, therefore, that art somehow excludes or negates pornographic readings. I have seen a Japanese tourist in the Prado taking photographs of Titian’s nudes with a clearly prurient intent. Yet that is not the real significance of Titian’s paintings. Unlike the photograph, the painting is intimate. It invites intimacy, and provokes wonder rather than desire.
Many of Mapplethorpe’s photographs are designed to be shocking because they mix up different forms of meaning. “My approach to photographing a flower is not much different than photographing a cock,” he said. “It’s about lighting and composition.” But there is a difference. Mapplethorpe’s flowers seem more threatening than any part of the human anatomy. They are what he called weird. Their textures hurt the eye. They are alien beings, filled with dark sexual intent.
But there is much more to Mapplethorpe than sex. His Polaroid images of the Seventies and Eighties make full use of the casual and almost anecdotal nature of the medium. “I am looking for the unexpected,” he once said. “I’m looking for the things I’ve never seen before.”
Yet his more considered photographs of the period make it clear that he was born to be behind a camera. He was a portraitist of genius, and his images of Patti Smith, for example, are miracles of reinvention. He is complicit with his subject. He is not a stranger. He is someone to be trusted. He is not an observer, except in the most technical sense of the word. He is almost a participant, engaged in a form of artistic and spiritual communion.
Mapplethorpe’s images of the human body in repose are often very beautiful. He was an admirer of William Blake, and he seems to have understood Blake’s dictum that human proportions are in fact spiritual proportions. If it is possible to gauge the spiritual in the material, through the medium of photography, then Mapplethorpe comes close to it. There are some miracles of light here that are reminiscent of a remark by a 19th-century Belgian artist, A. J. Wiertz, “Sun, look after yourself!” In some of his work Mapplethorpe creates shock; in others he conveys serenity. This is his power. He photographs stone as if it were flesh, and flesh as if it were stone. This may account for the spell of cold glamour that he casts over some famous faces; among those included in the exhibition are Marianne Faithfull, Arnold Schwarzenegger, William Burroughs and Truman Capote.
He did not rely upon the chance expression or the unmediated moment; he composed his subjects as if he were about to place them on canvas. His is the art of the studio rather than of the street. The fact that most if not all of his subjects were celebrated or well-known, in various ways, is not important. Mapplethorpe was curious to discover what they were — not what they were “like”, but what they were. The images of himself are not so successful, presumably because his own character remained watchful and elusive.
There are some wonderful images in the exhibition, too, of Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Andy Warhol and others. Mapplethorpe had a real eye for artists, and his images show innate sympathy with their practice. It is as if you could perceive the nature of their work from their stance in the world. In his photographs he alludes to Rodin and to Caravaggio, to Titian and to Raphael. His nudes take on antique poses, and there are deliberate references to the great art works of the past.
Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, for example, is lent a disturbing contemporary relevance in Mapplethorpe’s S&M portrait Dominick and Elliot.
