Serrano Mapplethorpe WSU 1990 2016
SERRANO/MAPPLETHORPE: YOU DECIDE
Wright State University
April 1990
I.
Religion, sex, politics, and money. If you grew up in a nice, painfully polite, upper-middle class WASP family as I did, you simply didn’t talk about these things. (Art wasn’t mentioned either; it wasn’t forbidden, it just never came up.) Of course these are the most fascinating and important subjects, and the one about which we are most passionate, conflicted, and divided. In the exasperating, upside-down, mirror logic of families such as mine, these were reasons not to discuss such things. But religion, sex, politics, and money are among the most powerful and primal engines of humanity; they identify forces through which we may redeem or destroy ourselves. Moreover, if you eliminate them from discourse, you are left with very little to talk about.
The Wright State University press release for this exhibition and symposium is, in part, most commendable. It invites people, “…to look, question, study, then evaluate based on first-hand knowledge.” Yet in other respects, far from declaring a position of neutrality or balance, it broadcasts a tone of belligerent bias.
The staff of the University Art Galleries proclaims their belief in the importance and significance of Serrano and Mapplethorpe. They note the respect bestowed upon the artists by the “international museum world.” (This group can be identified by their white hats, their dignity, and, at the moment, by their martyr’s wounds.) We find on the other side Jesse Helms, of course, and others who believe the works in question to be “simply pornographic, and void of any redeeming value.” (This group, naturally, wears black hats, which slip over their narrow brows; they clutch implements of torture.)
The next paragraph announces that it is the role of Wright State University “to see that the citizens of our community are truly informed.” The word “truly” is fatally freighted with ambiguity and presumption, but the thought is admirable. The following sentence, however, clearly and wrongly implies that everyone who disagrees with the opening premise — that these artists are important and significant — indulges in “hotly distorted rhetoric,” that they are “ill-informed about art and art history,” and that they are “responding to titles and preconceived notions rather than to works of art.” This might make good copy for a press release (although I admit I am baffled by the phrase “hotly distorted”), and it may titillate or provoke people to come out to the gallery, but it is not a very promising way to open a discussion. People are already quite sensitive enough concerning these matters without overheated provocation from those purporting to support intelligent debate.
I suggest that merit and foolishness can be found on all sides of the arguments that have been raging these past several months. My own thinking has taken many turns and even reverses as I have repeatedly looked at the photographs, studied much of the rather overwhelming literature, and talked with people who hold different views. I have my opinions, but I also acknowledge that there are many ways to look at this issue. Some of those ways conflict diametrically with others, but I believe we must consider, or at least tolerate, all of them.
Still, we all love to be outraged; hardly anything seems more satisfying than a little self-righteous indignation, whether we take up the gleaming sword of noble crusaders against censorship, or wrap ourselves in the flag to stand as a bulwark of decency against a tide of sin. No matter what the issue, we like to choose sides and defend them fiercely. But there is little to be gained by joining a shouting match among the deaf.
Of course we realize that this commotion has far more to do with making political hay than with any genuine concern over the state of the arts, or with any sense of sacred duty in representing the taxpayer, or with defending the nation’s morality. The conservatives love to heap fire and brimstone upon the pointy heads of the blaspheming, commie, pervert professors who are destroying American values. The liberals weigh in against congressional Neanderthals and fundamentalist zealots who evangelize their flocks into orgies of financial donation and book burning.
In fact, we all have a fearfully hard time accepting, or even acknowledging all the different parts of ourselves, either as individuals or as a society. Our political, religious, racial, economic, cultural, and sexual selves, among others, are infinitely fragmented, and these fragments often are at war with one another.
Minds are not changed through coercion or insult. The problem goes much deeper than a congressional funding debate, the NEA, the boycott of a museum, or popular conceptions about homosexuality and religious symbolism. The central issues are our willingness to strive for greater understanding, our ability to grow, and our potential for reaching higher levels of awareness.
II.
In part of the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris and Isis, Osiris is captured by his enemy Set and chopped into 14 pieces, which are scattered throughout the world. His consort, Isis, accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of finding the pieces and reconstituting Osiris. The only piece she cannot find is the “generative member,” a particularly academic way of referring to the penis. She overcomes this obstacle to their ability to produce offspring by fashioning an artificial generative member, with the aid of which she becomes pregnant. She eventually bears a son, Horus, who carries on the fight against the evil Set.
Among other things, the story of Osiris and Isis is a metaphor of psychological fragmentation, and a lesson that the power of love is needed to make us whole. We have the most aching difficulties coming to terms with sexuality and love! I want to be very clear that I do not equate Robert Mapplethorpe with either Osiris or Isis. But I think we have to overcome our fears and failures with regard to these forces if we are to foster new generations that are healthier and more loving than our own. We cannot do this unless we acknowledge all of our complicated and often disturbing aspects.
While I am on the subject of myths, I would like to refer to the figures of Dionysus and Apollo. Dionysus was associated with wine, revelry, and fertility, among other things, and his worship often included an image of a phallus. Those who refused to recognize his authority he drove mad. We may interpret this to mean that we need to acknowledge our ecstatic, erotic, violent, and instinctual impulses. If we fail to do so, these impulses will destroy us. If we do acknowledge them, we may be able to integrate them with the rest of ourselves and become whole.
A picture of the face of Apollo is featured on the cover of the Whitney Museum book of Mapplethorpe’s work, and I believe this is significant for reasons that were not likely intended. For one thing, this detail of a marble face epitomizes the coldness and the distance of much of Mapplethorpe’s work. This fragment of a disembodied, de-contextualized face seems to represent many other failed attempts by Mapplethorpe to borrow the forms and poses of classical art without understanding, or at least without embodying, their substance.
In Mapplethorpe’s work we find ambivalence, at best, between two conflicting views of the world, which are traditionally defined as Apollonian and Dionysian. The former refers to classical order, intellect, reason, objectivity, and control; the Apollonian is harmonious, measured, temperate, restrained, and meditative. The Dionysian, on the other hand, refers to impulse, emotion, intuition, subjectivity, and exuberance; it is sensuous, lawless, frenzied, unbounded, irrational, and ecstatic. I believe that a key to understanding the work of Robert Mapplethorpe is the recognition of the roles played by these elements. For it seems that he attempted to impose a highly rigorous Apollonian approach to making photographs even as he sought to express a very vigorous Dionysian sensibility. When he met the challenge of bringing these conflicting elements into dynamic balance, he made very fine, even outstanding pictures. But often that sense of balance was not found, and the pictures suffer from either an excess of one or a mutual cancellation of both of these two energies.
Ingrid Sischy, in an essay published in “The New Yorker”, condemns the photographer Minor White for his fearful, self-repressive, highly indirect approach to dealing with his homosexuality through his work, and she heaps praise on Robert Mapplethorpe for his courage in dealing so much more directly with the same subject. You would think that Mapplethorpe had flung open the door to the closet in which White was hiding deep in the corner. You might imagine, from the essay, that Mapplethorpe’s pictures would reveal a vision of love itself.
Well, I believe very strongly in the value of physical love, but I see in Mapplethorpe’s pictures little more than the mechanics and postures of such love, as well as mechanics and postures that articulate the absence of love. I see in his work a very polished sort of elegance and I see the veneration of traditional form, but I also see that these are frequently no more than props for simplistic representations of a dreary form of lust. If I were homosexual, I believe I would be particularly offended by the chilly, disaffected world he portrays. Indeed, I feel anyone might be distressed and saddened by it.
I fail to see why the objectification of the male body in Mapplethorpe’s work is to be any more admired than the objectification of female bodies that has been one of the tiresome and abused staples of art for centuries. In many of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, only the gender of the depersonalized sexual/aesthetic object is relatively unfamiliar. Aside from the obvious
physical facts, what is the difference between the Mapplethorpe photograph of the faceless man with his genitals displayed on a cloth-covered table, the one entitled “Mark Stevens (Mr. 10 1/2),” and a faceless photograph, similarly titled, of a woman, displaying in a comparable manner, a 50″ bust? We have been glutted with pictures of unusually large mammary glands, so perhaps it is a matter of redressing a gender imbalance to put forward pictures of unusually large penises, but this is not a very edifying, promising, or particularly creative exercise.
Still, we do need to ask, why is there such difficulty over photographs of male genitals? I believe the answer is that we live in a culture of shame. We are steeped in shame, dependent upon shame. We are lost without shame. We provide ourselve with endless opportunities to feel ashamed. Many men are painfully sensitive and buried in shame when it comes to their own genitals. When they encounter pictures of naked men, they look to see if the penis of the man in the picture is bigger than theirs. (And don’t for a moment suppose that this isn’t one of the reasons why so many righteous congressmen and other male moralists are so upset over this work.) Surely it is time for men to deal with the sort of awful burden that women have dealt with for so long, concerning the size of their breasts and the shape of their bodies when they are compared with the pneumatic twenty-two year olds held up by glossy magazines as paradigms of desirability.
When confronted with a photograph of a naked man, we are acutely aware of his penis; it is the ultimate example of the “punctum” of which Roland Barthes was so fond of talking, the particular detail that attracts our attention and around which our awareness of the picture revolves. The most comically blatant example of this is Mapplethorpe’s “Man in Polyester Suit.” The least interesting bit of information we might wish to have about this picture is the type of material from which the suit was made. The most unnecessary information is that the subject in the picture is a man.
Pictures of male sexual organs refer more explicitly to the activity of sex than any conventional view of female anatomy can provide. In addition to this, we have long been indoctrinated to assume at least some connection between female undress and the hallowed place of the nude in art. Furthermore, it is with the male, and particularly with the penis, that we associate the inevitable component of violence that is part of all sexual activity. So it should not be surprising that images of male sexual organs disturb us; we have no familiar context for seeing them, and they evoke feelings we go to great lengths to avoid or deny.
Roland Barthes has written: “Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche. … The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may not show them at all. … (the pornographic body shows itself, it does not give itself, there is no generosity in it)…”
It would be a mistake to suppose that a photograph is automatically pornographic simply because it shows sexual organs. Clearly, some of Mapplethorpe’s photographs are erotic and the bodies in them generously endowed, but just as clearly this is often not the case and we encounter little more than display, fetishism, and exploitation. Mapplethorpe has, unhappily, succeeded in strengthening the stereotypical, phallo-centric image and other prejudices that many heterosexuals have about homosexuality.
“The very thought of the sexual parts forever haunts the fainthearted. In 1967, a baby doll called Petit Frère caused a flurry of protests because it endangered one of the nation’s best-kept secrets of human anatomy. The doll, purportedly modeled after a cherub by Verocchio, differs from others by being equipped with the genitalia of a four-month-old male. On arrival from France, its native place, it passed the test of customs inspectors but ran afoul of the backcountry’s inexorable morality. An outraged Ohio housewife – aided by a committee – dispatched more than a thousand letters to churchmen, government officials, and department store managers, denouncing the “obscene toy.” The doll was promptly withdrawn from the display of some fifty departments stores but went on to do excellent mail-order business.
“Ever since sex was identified with sin, the law-givers who deal with modesty have been concerned with the genitals. Powerless to spirit away the object of their wrath, they tried to legislate it out of existence….”
Bernard Rudofsky The Unfashionable Human Body, 1971
III.
The hyperbole of the art market is notorious, but even there the following remark is a spectacle of excess. “Robert Mapplethorpe … is now internationally acclaimed as one of the most astonishing talents to enliven the art of the past decade.” (The difference between New York and Hollywood is that, in Tinseltown, the last word would have been changed to “century.”) This is from Tom Armstrong, Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Further on in his Foreword to the Whitney catalogue of their Mapplethorpe exhibition, he unwittingly gives the game away. He refers to a film from 1973 in which Sam Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe’s Svengali and lover, introduces his protegé to Robert Scull, the extravagant taxi fleet owner cum art collector who was so gaga over Pop Art in the ’60s. Wagstaff (a name Dickens would have blushed to invent), “advises the collector that he should know Mapplethorpe’s work because he is going to become famous.” (“Know,” of course, is a code word for “buy.”) Not that it is good, you see (what would Scull care about that anyway) but that it will be famous. To be famous is to be good in the art racket. To be notorious or infamous is even better than to be good, it is to be an “astonishing talent.” It enables people to say things like, again quoting Armstrong, “He [Mapplethorpe] has challenged the definition of photography by introducing new techniques and formats into the medium.” How is the thoughtful reader to avoid gagging on such a line?
With the Robert Mapplethorpe controversy we have an extreme example of the failure to distinguish between biography and art. A great deal of the response to his work been concerned, both implicitly and explicitly, with his homosexuality and related personal issues. Robert Adams has commented that, “If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist’s private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker.” Of course we cannot and should not overlook the fact that Mapplethorpe chose to make quite public some aspects of his private life. But the central issue is whether or not Mapplethorpe translated those private details into art that can effectively stand on its own. I suggest that, more often than not, he failed to accomplish this. The work itself, not the current fascination with the man himself, nor the loud noises from the press, both for and against his work, persuades me that only a modest portion of that work will hold up as important imagery after the media circus has moved on to another event.
What do Mapplethorpe’s pictures add to the corpus of the best that has been accomplished in photography? We are asked, implicitly at least, by Mapplethorpe and by his many advocates, to accept the premise that it is sufficient to point the camera at a subject and let textbook studio lighting and decorative presentation carry the day. There are some very good, striking, even important pictures to be found in Mapplethorpe’s work, but the acclaim he has received as an artist is wildly out of proportion to the merit of the work as a whole. We need to find a point of view other than those offered by either his sycophantic devotees and by those who are rabid to vilify him.
Compared with Nan Goldin’s work in “Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” Mapplethorpe’s pictures are cool, even cold, dehumanized, somehow hollow. Both photographers dealt with sexuality and subcultures that are some distance from sanctioned, middle-American values. But where Goldin’s work is human, warm, messy, often painful, personal, and filled with a sense of vulnerability and honesty, Mapplethorpe’s work is detached, chilly, formal, and tidy to the point of sterility. The obsession with pose and with elegance frequently becomes a straining after effect, and a great deal of the work is remarkably lacking in feeling.
The thoroughly modern, worldly-wise sophisticate is a creature impervious to shock. We all know the pointedly glazed eye, the blank and disaffected stare of the ultra-fashionable looking disdainfully past us from magazine advertisements and clothing catalogues. More and more, the enterprise of art has become indistinguishable from the marketing of fashion. We are also aware that art is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from fashion. Just as fashion titillates and dissipates in a cycle of novelty and boredom that is fuelled by anxiety, much contemporary art relies on the thrill of ephemeral notoriety, which is purchased at the expense of enduring value. We find fashion masquerading as art and art dressed up as fashion and the market manipulators in both camps couldn’t be more delighted at their success.
In photography over the past few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of crossover, the mutual opening of borders between previously exclusive provinces such as commercial and fine arts, fashion work and personal work, or, to put it in general terms, public and private. This is widely extolled as healthy pluralism, as indicative of our increasing visual sophistication, a matter of opening up, synthesizing, integrating, and knocking down artificial, restrictive barriers of elitism. Avedon and Penn move from fashion subjects to coal miners or foreign peoples in native costumes and they create, we are told, art. Joyce Tenneson appears to have no idea whether she is making lingerie ads for French “Vogue” or personal images of sensual dreams. Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts employ various hallmarks of the so-called fine arts tradition to lend allure to their fashion work. Indeed, we have seen the rise of the fashion photographer as “auteur,” which is not unlike the idea of seeing Steven Speilberg as a new Jean-Luc Goddard. Robert Mapplethorpe’s work stands as another instance of the crossover phenomenon. As such, it represents the hazards and failures of that trend more than it provides encouragement about its possibilities.
A natural, healthy, and essential antipathy exists between art and commerce, between, as Lewis Hyde has so eloquently explained, gift exchange and commodity exchange. The crossover phenomenon certainly has its merits, but we must not suppose that we are talking about equivalent values on both sides of the dissolving borders. In the short run, marketplace values of celebrity and greed will consistently shoulder aside the more durable and generous values that are the gifts of art. Art is for the present and for the long run.
IV.
Congressional, fundamentalist, and press attacks on Serrano and Mapplethorpe assume that the people of this country constitute a homogeneous public, which has a clearly defined “public taste.” This absurd misconception is the result of wishful thinking, to put it in the kindest possible terms. Worse than being merely oblivious to reality, these attacks demonstrate a pathological fear of values, opinions, and lives that are perceived as threatening simply because they are different.
The only reason we have not had a huge flap before this over tax money spent on ostensibly offensive art is that few have bothered to look very closely at work supported by the NEA. Those who did couldn’t make a decent case against it. (Also, the level of funding involved is so ridiculously small it seemed hardly worth the trouble of complaining.) More importantly, it required work as blatantly theatrical and clearly calculated to shock as Mapplethorpe’s and Serrano’s pictures before anyone took much notice. After all, neither subtlety nor aesthetic value have a significant place in the world of wrathful zealots. The current controversy is a response to work that was clearly made to attract attention. Now we must find out if the attention it received will ultimately prove better or worse for the arts than the tradition of having the arts ignored.
More than likely, most of those in Congress who have inveighed so vehemently against Serrano and Mapplethorpe have not yet heard that photography has managed to gain some sort of family connection with art. If they knew about this they wouldn’t be nearly so upset because they know perfectly well that art is even more remote and irrelevant to their constituencies than our diplomatic relationship with the South Sandwich Islands.
Photographs are almost universally regarded as direct evidence, as truthful, clear statements of fact. Paintings of the same subject matter, regardless of their realism, would not have aroused anything like the firestorm with which the Serrano and Mapplethorpe work has been met. After all, only a few people feel that painting – or poetry or sculpture or music – are important parts of everyday life. In the case of Mapplethorpe’s sexual scenes, the photograph unmistakably shows us that someone actually was in front of a camera, actually doing what we see. In the case of Serrano’s pictures, our reaction is powerfully affected when we learn that the photographs show us actual urine, semen, blood, and milk.
Photography, we believe, tells us the truth, and it does so in a form that is as familiar to us as the image of our face in the mirror. We see photographs every day as family snapshots, advertisements, news pictures, and in hundreds of other places. Pictures that shock and disturb us appear to have been slipped insidiously into the mainstream of our culture, poisoning the wells of visual information. In this light, it may be worthwhile to note that we Americans, whose innocence is being so vigorously defended in Washington, rented and/or purchased last year over 100 million X-rated videotapes. None of these, to my knowledge, was funded by the NEA. Nor have I heard any sermons from Congress about what such brisk business implies about our chaste and sacred “public taste” that they are so eager to protect.
V.
“Old Helms will win every time on cutting Federal money for art projects with homosexual themes.”
“Old Helms does not quit. If the Senate does not approve the amendment today, the Senate will vote on it again and again, in bill after bill, month after month, year after year, until government subsidies for artistic perversion are prohibited once and for all.”
Jesse Helms
Here we encounter one of the manipulative skills practiced by rhetoricians and lawyers for as long as there have been debates. The far right in this country has used it repeatedly with remarkable effectiveness. How is it that so many people continue to be seduced by such a scam? And why is the opposing side so inept at using this skill on its own behalf? I am referring to the loaded, manipulative characterization of issues. In both of Helms’ statements he implies a direct, cause and effect relationship between government funding and, in the one case, “art projects with homosexual themes,” and in the other “artistic perversion.”
This is an echo of the now-classic example of anti-abortion activists asking people if they support the cold-blooded slaughter of the innocent unborn. It is just as manipulative to ask, “Do you approve of government support for perverted homosexual art work and disgusting, blasphemous photos?” Few people would answer that question in the affirmative. We could expect a different response to the question, “Do you believe in government censorship and prohibitions against free expression in the arts?” I would propose yet another question which I believe speaks more clearly to the heart of the matter: “Do you believe that tolerance is vital to a free society and that the creative arts contribute to civilization, even when they disturb us and challenge us to see things in new ways?”
“None of the funds authorized to be appropriated for the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities may be used to promote, disseminate, or produce materials which in the judgments (my emphasis) of the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities may be considered obscene, including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
Helms amendment, “Congressional Record – House”, October 2, 1989, p. H6407
This is the compromise version of the Helms amendment. Helms did not vote for it. He felt that the inclusion of the obscenity definition and the language which retains the judgment of the Endowments gutted his intent. The original version, which would have prohibited anything found offensive by members of any “religion or non-religion” appears to have come from Alice in Wonderland via Franz Kafka. We may be grateful for small acts of sanity as we note that the original version did not pass. Had it done so, it would certainly have been struck down in the courts, but it would have caused a good deal of damage before it got that far.
The current version changes little, if anything, legally speaking. So it may appear to be a relatively innocuous bit of legislative showboating. But the viewpoint implicit behind this statute is far more important than the legal niceties of its language. For this is rank coercion, thinly veiled. It is a response of bigotry and fear in the face of ideas and images that are not even understood, let alone tolerated, and whose expression is not protected, let alone supported.
Only enlightened leadership or benign neglect could sustain government non-interference in the face of controversial art. We have never experienced the former condition and we have seen at least a temporary halt brought to the latter. We have built and maintained a great variety of institutions on the basis of government funding of the arts. A great deal of good has come of this, but we have ignored some fundamental problems. We have failed to realize that the government of a basically materialistic, anti-intellectual, and culturally incoherent, free-enterprise-worshipping, and sometimes paranoid country is not likely to be the most reliable or most generous funding resource for the arts. Yet many institutions have become so dependent on government funding that they would be forced to shut their doors and wait for the roof to cave in if that funding was stopped. We have done nothing much to strengthen the system of support, to fortify it against inevitable assaults, such as those we presently confront.
I have no difficulty at all understanding that many people would be profoundly disturbed by much of the work under discussion. But no matter how offensive one might find these pictures to be, it is an absurd overreaction to seek the destruction or even the diminution of the NEA on the basis of these few images. Even the most vehement persecutors of the NEA have not claimed that the Endowment has been guilty of chronic irresponsibility. They cannot find any record of persistent support for pornography or blasphemy. Nor can they deny the innumerable worthwhile projects funded by the Endowment. Is it appropriate to lobby for the dismantling of an entire institution simply because one dislikes a few pictures that represent a tiny fraction of its funding? Are we ready to throw out the Department of Justice if a lower-court judge somewhere makes a decision we don’t like? Are we to destroy our libraries because they contain some books that advance opinions contrary to our own?
Some of the greatest faults of the Endowments have arisen because of too little funding and too narrow a view of what should be funded, not because of too much money or excessive liberality. Absurdly high numbers of applicants compete for absurdly small quantities of money. This has too often led to funding decisions based on conservative estimates of merit rather than more venturesome risk-taking. Yet now we are faced with still further cutbacks of funds and newly restrictive guidelines for selecting projects to support.
I find much to complain about at the NEA. I see funding given to too many artists who are very well established and who have no real need for such support. I see too much money going to college professors, but that is because there is too little art being made outside of academia. I see a lot of funded work that is half-digested, superficial, trendy foolishness. Too often we have seen people stumble out of grad school and into a life of grant dependency, unable to conceive of doing work without a grant to prop up their fragile imaginations; they produce a surfeit of vapid, strained, pseudo-intellectual art. The NEA has contributed to this sad process.
But that is the way it goes and it should carry on in spite of these shortcomings. (I hasten to add that I have seen a great deal of wonderful work supported by the NEA and other funding agencies; I simply want to point out that the system is less than perfect and that problems exist along with successes.) The Pentagon has been in business a lot longer than the NEA and it still makes an awful lot of horrendous and astronomically expensive mistakes. We might also look to the Department of Housing and Urban Development; in spite of apparent outright fraud over there, no one in Congress has suggested scrapping the entire operation. I believe the NEA should continue to have the opportunity to learn as it grows, to improve its review procedures, to make better judgments, and to use greater wisdom in the distribution of greater sums of money.
VI.
Let us consider some questions that may be more theoretical than particular. In a democracy, if people are obliged to give their money to support the government, should they not have a right to know how their money is spent? And doesn’t the government owe the people a close accounting of its expenditures of their money? And shouldn’t the people be able to approve or disapprove of those expenditures? Remember, this is theory! Which of us has asked that his or her tax dollars be spent to support fascist dictators and death squads? When was the last time your congressman asked you personally for your views on offshore oil leases or immigration policy?
But the fact remains that we insist upon our right to voice our approvals and our objections, and we want this right to count for something; we want our representatives to hear our voices and respond to our votes. And my right to influence government to support artistic freedom is no more sacrosanct than the right of another citizen to object that my freedom is his obscenity.
I say that anyone who objects to work such as Serrano’s or Mapplethorpe’s does not have to enter the gallery or open the book in which it can be found, just as I have the right, which I exercise daily, not to turn on a television, or read “People” magazine. So we should be able to retreat to our corners, content to disagree in peace, and respect one another’s rights to choose.
You say you have no problem with any artist doing exactly as he or she pleases, but that you strongly object to the use of your tax money to support activities that offend your values. I reply that I also object to the use of my tax money to support activities that offend my values, but the government goes right ahead making nuclear weapons and destabilizing legitimate foreign powers in spite of my views. Now this suggests another way to look at this issue. Would we not rejoice to find our congressmen as effective in limiting fraud at home and bullying abroad as they seem to have been in interfering with the supportive operations of the National Endowment for the Arts?
Of course the NEA is a far easier target and a much simpler institution to hold accountable than the Defense Department. But don’t we wish our representatives would shape military policy to suit our objections as readily as they have shaped arts funding policies to suit the complaints of others? Still, I believe there are more important questions to be asked about this and a higher plane on which to carry forward the debate.
Whether we respond with outrage or admiration to the work of Serrano and Mapplethorpe, we need to expand the context of our inquiry and consider our responses to other forms of imagery that have not been in the spotlight of controversy. In fact, we have to ask why they are not controversial. Why do we fail to respond with shock, outrage, and a commitment to positive action when we confront images of war, violence, brutality, starvation, addiction, degradation, and injustice? Through what peculiar short-circuiting of reason has it become possible to remain unaffected by the countless pictures that fill our newspapers, magazines, television and movie screens with evidence of tragedy, while we condemn or applaud or debate over a few pictures hung in museums? Why do we spend fortunes rewarding the so-called entertainment industry for churning out endless full color spectacles, larger than life, in which people filled with hate and cruelty savagely destroy one another, but we have an act of Congress that deplores the depiction of a few naked bodies and some theatrical presentations of religious subjects? Why is a picture of Nicaraguan corpse, mutilated in a bloody conflict sustained by our government, any less offensive than a picture that shows a living man’s genitals? Why, if the government insists on taking a stand against one form of alleged obscenity created by artists, should it not stand against those other forms of obscenity that it condones and even perpetrates, directly and indirectly, itself?
I am critical of some of the images under discussion. But I do not denounce them out of one side of my mouth and defend free speech out of the other. To do so would be to capitulate to the indignant and coercive moralists who are manipulating this issue for the purposes of their repressive political agenda. I may not think much of these pictures as art, but I place the greatest value on the ability of images to stir response, and I am strongly in favor of making them available to any person who cares to see them and who has the courage to confront the issues they raise with maturity and intelligence.
Try reading the following remark without glancing at the name beneath it and see if you can guess it.
“Artists have to be brave. They live in the realm of ideas and expression. And their ideas will often be provocative and unusual. Artists stretch the limits of our understanding. They express ideas that are sometimes unpopular. In an atmosphere of liberty, artists and patrons are free to think the unthinkable and create the audacious. We are free to make both horrendous mistakes and glorious celebrations.”
Ronald Reagan
Any insistence that art always must be well behaved, that it not disturb our conventions or startle us awake, is no less foolish than insisting that it always must contain a touch of red, that it make us smile, and that it fit nicely on the wall above the couch.
The government of a free society has a duty to support education without dictating the limits of what should be taught, confident that free inquiry will strengthen rather than weaken that society. Similarly, the government of a free society should support the arts without defining what art can and cannot be in order to merit that support. We have heard ad nauseum the argument that the issue here is not freedom of expression, that artists can do whatever they like, but that the government should not support the making of art that some people find offensive. That sounds reasonable, almost tolerant. In fact, it is dangerously shortsighted. Ultimately, it is ignorantly simple and simply ignorant.
We cannot control and we cannot predict what will come of free inquiry, so we must proceed with that process in a spirit of faith. We will be disturbed by many of the things we encounter along the way, but our faith must remain in the process itself and not with any specific outcome that we desire or, worse yet, upon which we insist. We must have faith that the arts will continue to nourish civilization as they have done for millennia, in spite of the fact that we may find individual works or artists or movements which disturb, offend, or even outrage us. Further, we must sustain the wisdom of supporting those activities that are larger than ourselves and our narrow self-interests. We must abandon the vanity of supposing that everything of which we disapprove should be condemned and banished. If we believe in the enterprise of learning and in the enterprise of art, we must be prepared to support them on their own merits and not according to how well they meet our personal standards.
The most critically important task for those who believe in freedom of expression, who deplore censorship and ignorance, and who believe in the greatest possible public support for the arts, is education.
Ultimately, the lesson of this debate is that we need to be more honest, brave, and tolerant. This is a much more important concern than whether or not Robert Mapplethorpe’s or Andres Serrano’s photographs have great value. We need to learn how to see without having our vision distorted by ignorance, prejudice, and fear. Insofar as Mapplethorpe and Serrano have contributed to bringing us closer to the day when it is possible to perceive the world and ourselves without such crippling illusions and limitations, they deserve the highest of accolades and our sincere gratitude.
Sean Wilkinson
April 1990
Parts of this text were published under the title “Mapplethorpe, Money and the Generative Member” in the magazine “Images Ink”, Volume 5, Numbers 1/2 in 1990.