Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) has had his fair share of controversy. Despite his wide range of subject material, he is perhaps most notoriously remembered for his photographs of 1970’s gay subculture, which often depict explicit nudity, sexual acts, and sadomasochistic activity.
While such graphic photographs would be likely raise eyebrows anywhere, controversy over his work exploded in 1989, when protests by the American Family Association led to a traveling Mapplethorpe exhibition being shut down across the United States. The crusade was spearheaded by archconservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms, and escalated into a nationwide debate on obscenity and policies on public arts funding. In many ways, the controversy over Mapplethorpe’s photos is indicative of the art vs. obscenity debate that continues to rage even now. As recently as 1997, police confiscated a book of his photographs from a British university library.
At the Mapplethorpe exhibit in November at the Olga Korper Gallery (in the west end of town near Roncesvalles), there was only a hint of what fuels this ongoing controversy. The show was surprisingly tame, with tactful nudity and only a single penis to be seen. Gallery director Olga Korper used part strategy and part gut intuition in selecting the show’s thirty-five pieces from the over 2700 held by his estate. The objective, she states, is to give the viewer a taste of the range of his work, and the show focused on the artist’s work in portraiture, nudes, and still life images.
The nudes included the two Lydia Cheng images (1985), elegant and classically inspired, lending a soft, Venus-like air to a female torso. Other nude portraits emphasized the musculature of the body, particularly the Ken Moody prints (1983, 1984) and Dan S. (1980), which manipulate light and shadow to accentuate the robust anatomy of their male subjects. Bodies are captured in motion, flexing, stretching, clenching, and posing, and perhaps here, more than anywhere else, was the artist’s immense technical skill evident.
Whatever his subject material, Mapplethorpe captured it in an undeniably meticulous and pristine light. While some criticize his interpretations of the body as clinical and over-exacting, the incredible detail of each photograph and the precise positioning of the subject also indicate a reverence for the body. These are real bodies, with moles, freckles, wayward hairs, and even stretch marks, and the photographer-along with the viewer-is exploring the vast potential that each body holds.
And of course there were also Mapplethorpe’s well-known images of all manner of sexually suggestive vegetation. Two stunning photographs of orchids (1982, 1987), one photographed singularly in close detail, and another in a smooth, oblong vase on a flat black surface, are undeniably vulvic in their execution. Phallic images also abound: Eggplant (1985) depicts a single, perfectly formed eggplant on a bare surface, the smooth and bulging skin striped with velvety lines of shadow. Calla Lily (1985) captures a single taut bud of this flower, long and white and just delicately beginning to unfurl. Cactus (1987) is perhaps the most forcefully phallic, depicting a single cactus stem-tall, erect, and prickly-standing rigid in the center of the frame.
While the show lacked the controversy and notoriety that dogged previous exhibitions, it provided a comprehensive glimpse into the most significant bodies of Mapplethorpe’s work, and, at the very least, gave the uninitiated viewer a chance to see what all the fuss was about.
