Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, "The Perfect Moment," is now here at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, and it's about time that people heard about all the other pictures there. This commentary is adapted from an article of mine on Mapplethorpe that will be appearing in the August issue of The Boston Review.
As a photographer Mapplethorpe wanted to achieve "perfection," by which he meant having "[everything] where it should be" in the photograph. This approach produced photographs with cool surfaces but which suggested strong energies bubbling just underneath what one critic calls the "skin" of the photograph.
A good example of this is a 1985 black-and-white photograph called "Grapes", part of Mapplethorpe's work with still lifes. A cluster of dark juicy grapes, sprinkled with water, in the rough shape of a human heart, is covered with a light so sharp that we can even see the texture of the grape's skin.
But Mapplethorpe doesn't want the eye to stop at the exquisite detail. His uncluttered surface forces the viewer to move so close to the object that the space between viewer and object becomes charged with a kind of seductive electro- magnetism. Suddenly, these grapes feel robust, erotic, even dangerous and exciting. He wants the viewer to see how ripe these grapes are, how much life and force is in them, and to know that the life-force that ballooned these grapes also works inside each of us.
Mapplethorpe brought this vision of the erotic energy underneath the skin to his work with female and male nudes. His nude studies aren't about "the body," as an abstract object, but about bodies, in all their physical and sexual power. And he takes a step beyond this, suggesting that gender identity is not something we are stuck with but can vary according to feelings and needs -- a notion bound to make some people uncomfortable.
What bothered Jesse Helms was just this quality of pushing against boundaries -- sexual, racial, political. Mapplethorpe was bound to shock and disturb because he was trying to get people to move beyond what they'd been told they were by the society in which they lived. In his own way Mapplethorpe was trying to encourage that process of self-definition and self- discovery, which is also a means of resisting authority, that drives the culture and politics of a democracy.
This is something even Ronald Reagan understood about art. In a speech given in 1985, Reagan said that artists "have to be brave;...their ideas will often stretch the limits of understanding...[and] express ideas that are sometimes unpopular." "Where there's liberty," Reagan concluded, "art succeeds." Mapplethorpe would agree.
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