648
PARTISAN REVIEW
are all black and white. Of the many concerned citizens who've gone into
print, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, writing in an Op-Ed piece in
The New
York Times,
strikes me as closest to the mark. Frankenthaler speaks as a
person who has sat on NEA panels in the past. "I, for one, would not want to
support [Mapplethorpe and Serrano], but once supported, we must allow
them to be shown...
.I
find myself in a bind: Congress in a censoring uproar
on one hand and, alas, a mediocre art enterprise on the other!"
I agree with Frankenthaler that Robert Mapplethorpe doesn't amount
to much as an artist. His photographs of hothouse flowers and figures from
high society are elegant but facile. His more provocative works hold our at–
tention longer only because of the unexpected disjuncture between the sil–
very luxe of the style and the unabashed libidinousness of the subject matter.
But to say that Mapplethorpe doesn't amount to much as an artist doesn't in
any way deny the seriousness of the challenge that he and his supporters
have posed to received ideas of what is possible in art. The Mapplethorpe
controversy raises important questions about the relation of order and out–
rage, convention and innovation-in
art
in particular and in culture in general.
Mapplethorpe made his appeal to a sophisticated modem public-a public
for whom events such as Nijinsky's simulated masturbation
L'Apres-Midi
d'un Faune
in 1912 are monuments of Western civilization. When this
audience was confronted with the farthest-out Mapplethorpes, its sense of
history told it that it couldn't just turn and walk away. And Mapplethorpe
upped the ante by making a very conscious decision to present his public with
images that flaunted their obscenity: a three- or four-year-old girl with her
skirt hitched up to her waist and nothing on underneath; a diptych in the first
panel of which a penis is in some sort of metal restraint, and in the second of
which the restraint has been moved in such a way that the penis appears to
have burst. When Mapplethorpe exhibited photographs such as these, was he
using the public's-our-confidence or abusing it? In answering this question we
must keep two things in mind: our allegiance is to the internal logic of artistic
experience, but what we value in the formalized universe of art has some
relation to our other values.
Robert Mapplethorpe came before the public at the end of the seven–
ties as an aesthete and a sexual provocateur. At a time when the art scene
was shaking off a decade of self-imposed asceticism his appeal was assured.
The smoothly graduated grays of his photographs evoked the high-style fun
of the fashion photography of the thirties and forties. His work told the peo–
ple who were just then abandoning Studio 54 for points south of Fourteenth
Street that there was nothing to be ashamed of-neither a taste for expensive
hothouse flowers nor for back-room sex. Mapplethorpe's own matinee-idol
good looks were a part of the story that his photographs told, and those who
