JED PERL
653
tide opened with a stunning photographic juxtaposition: Mapplethorpe's
Man
in Polyester Suit,
1980, with an enormous penis hanging out of an unzipped
fly, was set next to.Courbet's
Origin ofthe World,
circa 1866, a close-up look
between a woman's spread legs. When Goldstein asked why people could
support the showing of the Courbet and not of the Mapplethorpe and con–
cluded, "Homophobia," he
missed
the point.
Courbet's picture was created for a private patron almost one hundred
and twenty-five years go. It had never before been shown in public. Its most
recent owner, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, had kept it behind a
special screen designed by the Surrealist painter Andre Masson that consisted
of an abstract variation on Courbet's theme. In her history of French psy–
choanalysis, Elisabeth Roudinesco refers to Masson's painting as a "protective
covering" and explains that a "secret system" enabled viewers to remove
the Masson and view the Courbet. Now if Lacan and Masson, luminaries of
the French avant-garde world that made a cult of De Sade and all manner of
perversity, felt some need to frame or set apart the Courbet when it was
hanging in a private home, what on earth is Goldstein talking about? The fact
is that 1988 may be exactly the time for that Courbet to go public, for peo–
ple to accept its assault on decency and go beyond it. (And people still won–
dered about bringing their children.) By the logic ofGoldstein's juxtaposition,
Mapplethorpe's erotic photographs shouldn't go public until the end of the
twenty-first century. I doubt that by then anybody will even remember who
Mapplethorpe was.
Important artists do sometimes choose to administer shocks to public
standards of morality. An NEA that can't support them when they do so is
condemned to prudery and academicism. Yet it will take people who value
art as art to understand when an assault on public morals is a matter of im–
portance to art. Helen Frankenthaler is right to say that ultimately we must
focus our attention on what goes on within the NEA. Quality is something
about which everybody will never agree, but that doesn't make the effort to
come to some sort of agreement any less essential.
As
in every question
about art that we confront today, the real argument is between those who
believe in the autonomy of the work of art and those who see the work of
art as little more than a message sent out into the world to do battle with
other messages. The people who don't believe that art can transcend
everyday experience have already made an assault on art beside which
pornography'S assault on public morals pales. Those who know that art can
transcend our everyday experience know that art does this in a number of
different ways and that eroticism, perverse, or otherwise, is one method.
