|
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE |
|
THE MAPPLETHORPE EFFECT by Richard Howard IN A LATE POEM, Jorge Luis Borges thanks the gathering darkness of amaurosis for rescuing him from the prolixity of the real: what is poetically singular is to be discerned by its disengagement from the world's plurals, necessarily prosaic. In any consideration of an artist's work, something of these constraints, these sunderings, must be invoked, even when it is the prolixity of the unreal which throngs the photographer's images, a congestion of fantasy and obsession. For in even the most schematic and fixated achievement, more meets the eye and the lens than the mind can discriminate. In Robert Mapplethorpe's work -- granted, in his early work -- there are a number of unexpected images, for example, of the sea, the one subject which cannot be made to pose; and in some of his latest work, anomalously in color, there are images of growing plants and of animals in the wild -- granted, only an alligator's snout, but could even Mapplethorpe pose an alligator? As in the work of any venturesome artist, there are examples here which would appear to betray the strictness which the thematizing (and sense-making) onlooker must approve. It makes any effort of appreciation more arduous, having to register exceptions to what we were convinced -- and happy with the conviction -- was a kind of monomania. That Mapplethorpe is a gifted photographer of children, for example, or that he can allow the merest furniture to clog the attention so overwhelmingly bestowed upon Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979 (p. 55), is an obstacle to our perception of him as a specific kind of artist -- narrow, ensorcelled, not to be distracted. No feature of a body of work, then, can be so important as it seems in our discussion of it -- there will be, in Mapplethorpe's copious oeuvre, almost invariably a contradiction to the perceived drift, or even to the tyrannous current; he is venturesome enough, as I say, to inspect the nostalgias of the life we all live, of the sights we all see, as well as his own visions and vilifications. Yet for the rapt artist, the life we all live is not enough of a subject -- and for the photographer, not enough of an object. It must be life with an inclination, a leaning, a certain slant of light, a tendency to shape itself only in certain forms, to afford its most valued and valuable revelations only in certain ... darknesses. And so it is with a crowding awareness of other pictures, a consciousness of their extension beyond my focus, that I shall discuss only some works, by no means a majority of the images Mapplethorpe has made, though I think they will be the ones he has made his own. I think, too, that in the general discussion of photography, the camera's powers are too generally received to permit their being looked at, effectively looked into and accounted for, unless they be isolated, epitomized -- like something in an anthology of provisional faiths. Of course there are, in Mapplethorpe as in other photographers we call fetishistic or fanatical, experiences beyond such sudden identification; indeed the camera by the nature of its processes invites a diversity of experiences -- for like every art, photography has its "interferences," its obstacles to singular realization, and an artist is never more than partly himself -- "a Mapplethorpe," say, or "a Borges," at anyone time. There is besides a kind of outward impulse which keeps our recognition of his specialty muffled quite as much as there is an inward motive which keeps his specialty going in the first (and last) place. My desire to constitute or at least to estimate an imaginative unity in Mapplethorpe's photographs will violate their loyal dispersion in experience. His is an extreme case, perhaps, but is it not always worth making the case, whenever we claim to identify what an artist is doing? Further constructions can be put upon these things, other things can be seen in them beyond or within what has been seen. Here, then, an essay in emphasis, for as Borges himself would surely have acknowledged, even the poems of darkness must be read in the light. Mapplethorpe differs perhaps from other artists in photography by this insistence upon the darkness: if other photographers are artists precisely insofar as they see the light and register its capacity to seize and transform our response to the world, Mapplethorpe would be the photographer who sees the darkness. As he said in 1986, with suggestive grammatical disregard: "my work is about seeing -- seeing things like they haven't been seen before." I have presumed to say that he sees a particular darkness through three subjects: through flowers, through faces, through figures, discarding the prolixity, then, of the real and discarding the prolixity of the unreal. When we are not prolix (which means when we are not liquid), then we are concise (which means we are crystalline), and this indeed is Mapplethorpe's quality and his goal: to restore potency to flowers, to restore aesthetic dignity to the genitals, and to restore form to identity -- and in so doing to set his images before us in such a way that we realize that what might never have been seen at all can never be seen as anything but what it appears. Which is, as Paul Valery used to say, the realization of the beautiful. Flowers Flowers are the sexual organs of plants. In all Mapplethorpe's photographs of flowers I have seen, they are no longer a growing member of plants, but dissevered from them, their provisional status emphasized, their duration on sufferance, in bowls, vases -- one exception: Tulips, 1983 (p. 154), still growing from bulbs but not in earth, not destined for any completion of their cycle, but clumped together in a wooden flat, a suffocating contiguity of bloom, as contra naturam as any of the arresting orchids and lilies thrust into a thimbleful of water or simply cropped, like Easter Lilies, 1979 (p. 67), which admit of no attachment to anything beneath a stem. Yet if Mapplethorpe's flowers are never shown in any kind of fertile continuity, neither are they seen to have any traffic with mortality -- no fallen petals, no withered or faded parts. Whatever their complexity of structure and fragility of substance, the flowers are shown -- sometimes leaning into the shot from the side, with no basis in fact -- to perfection, in their heightened, erectile state, engorged with the liquids which make them such solids, driven through the green fuse by that force which, Dylan Thomas wrote, drives our human age as well. In these images, which are never afforded a landscape or even a setting where the condition of being indoors might be implied by the absence of weather or world, withholding any object that might serve as a reference of scale, the flowers are indeed fetishized so that we must perceive them not only as the sexual organs they are, but as analogies to our own. In his 1985 collection Black Flowers, Mapplethorpe plays this game of equivalents in quite explicit terms, setting the flower studies opposite his highly genitalized male nudes which counter a millennial convention of pelvic disregard or concealment -- he insists that we confront what Yeats once called "the mystery which touches the genitals, a blurred touch through a curtain." But Mapplethorpe would focus that blurred touch, would compel us to see with the same focusing wonder the "expression" of the uncircumcised glans and the "assertion" of the cut flower. The penis, in all the images by Mapplethorpe I have seen, is never shown erect, the flower always so, its erethism undeterred "by any natural thing" (Yeats again: Mapplethorpe has certainly sailed to Byzantium, no country for old men indeed; unlike Rodin, his greatest rival in the adoration of "bodily shape," Mapplethorpe "sees" only the fulfilled, perfected physique as his subject, his satisfaction). And even when the images of flowers and of the male genitals are not conflated, there are still extraordinary coherences: the photograph of Michael, 1983 (p. 155), in white tights which against a black wall make the genital contour more than explicit -- which make it a decorative arabesque his stare defies us to disregard -- leads us to the 1982 orchid (p. 103) in its prim white vase against a gaining outer darkness, with but the one iris leaf-spear to hold its analogously genital outline against our mind (even the verbal pun is presented: orchis-testicle). More surprisingly still, the 1976 photograph of Mark Stevens (p. 49), in which the nude model arches over a stone altar so that his genitals are laid on the surface like some sacrificial first-fruits, annexes the 1985 Eggplant (p. 137), in which the arcuate vegetable precisely echoes, in its identically shadowed realm, the phallic oblation. In all of Mapplethorpe's flower pictures, with their specific equivalents in his images of human sexual organs, we are granted what one of his Italian critics has called, after Nietzsche, the retroaction of form upon force. In these genital studies, human and botanical, something very intricate, very particular, and yet very generic is -- I believe for the first time as a deliberate artistic manifestation -- articulated, studied, with curious consequences for our conventions and decorums with regard to gender. Flowers -- just think of Emily Dickinson, of Georgia O'Keeffe, with their patient explorations of bloom! -- which have so traditionally been associated with female art and female organs, are here, in their engorged, erectile, anti-chthonic forms, identified with that "male" principle we so clumsily (and often so reductively) decry as "phallic" -- in the brutal sense that the word is made to share with our related English word "bull." Indeed, much of Mapplethorpe's enterprise, in the flower photographs made to "match" photographs of male genitals, as well as in such images as the one of Ken Moody, 1984 (p. 155), where the oneiric figure (eyes closed) holds, on the rim of a bright circle, a fully open tiger lily: evident analogy of the sexual organs here not revealed -- much of Mapplethorpe's enterprise urges us to see the male genitals as potential forms of great delicacy and poise, paired with the thrusting, assertive, conventionally female figurations of flowers. What is spoken, Heidegger says, is never -- and in no language -- what is said. I might add: not even in the language of flowers.
Wave (Fire Island). 1980
Tulips, 1983
Michael, 1983
1983 Ken Moody, 1984 There is a further point to be made, or a perception (the word is a translation of "aesthetics") to be reached with regard to these fiercely present flowers -- one that is suggested by Susan Sontag in her 1985 essay on the photographer: Mapplethorpe, she observes, could never become a photographer of accidents. He wants to photograph whatever can be made to pose. "What he looks for, which could be called Form, is the quiddity ... of something. Not the truth about something, but the strongest version of it." An extremity of strength: that is why these flowers are always, for all their artifice and their assertion, perfect specimens, luminously disposed -- as in Orchid with Palmetto Leaf, 1982 (p. 156) -- to reveal the pinnacle, the crisis of la condition botanique, of that kingdom where only a master of shadows can reveal to us, without color, without odor, that all is yet Erotic Form. And that is why the male genitals are often presented -- as in the two notorious images of 1982, the Untitled naked man with the Klan-like pillowcase over his head (p. 156) and Man in Polyester Suit, 1980 (p. 95) -- as surrogates for the face, forming with the carefully included hands a new and quite recognizable expressive entity, though one for which our culture has no accommodation. It is without incident or anecdote that these flowers, like these unaroused genitals, are presented: not as dramatic power but as lyric potentiality -- as what Valery, speaking of the effect of light upon the sea, calls "a mass of calm and visible reserve." Our received sense of "flower" as "epitome" is invoked by these images: to flower is to come to a point of physical perfection which has something of the sacred about it -- the fine flower of manhood, not a frivolous word in the context, though by Mapplethorpe's evident parodies of Muscleman poses and House Beautiful arrangements, it is a word manque even more than a word mocking; it is a sacred traduced by commonplace associations, and Mapplethorpe's task is to restore the gravity which has leaked out of what is unspeakable.
Orchid with Palmetto Leaf, 1982
Untitled, 1982 Faces If he never had them, he makes heroes now: the carefully arranged, cropped, lighted, or rather shadowed countenances assert just that degree of victoriously fulfilled flesh which -- without envy or schadenfreud -- exemplifies a heroic mode of being there. The great majority of these faces are of beautiful people, particularly of black men perceived as physiognomies so symmetrical as not to admit those "accidentals" which for most of us constitute the recognizable self (Ken Moody, 1983, p. 123); and almost no one smiling. A remarkable exception to this general solemnity of regard is the portrait of Louise Bourgeois (one of three superb effigies of old-women artists in Certain People, the others, Alice Neel and Lee Krasner, revealed as flaunting the damages of a lifetime like a shield before them, stoically endured). Sometimes exhibited or reproduced in a cropped version, the Louise Bourgeois portrait (p. 115) then seems no more than a rictus of mysterious complicity. Seen in the version Mapplethorpe prints in the book, the complicity is accounted for: under her arm (and she is wearing a shaggy-monkey-fur?-jacket which accentuates the spooky side of things), she carries like a sidearm her own sculpture of a two-foot phallus-and-testicles, lighted and held in such a way as to form the base of a sinister -- castrational? -- pyramid. The livid light on Louise Bourgeois' face, explicitly tracing the seamed and wrinkled flesh, pronounces sentence on the entire composition: like some sibyl out of Petronius, the sculptor is on her way to a ceremony of puzzling erotic nature; she knows what she is about to do, as the shocking hand makes explicit: fingers can be taught, but that thumb was born knowing. Roy Cohn, 1981
Alice Neel, 1985 Within these faces, then, is a potential identity, not of necessity the celebrated or notorious ones associated with the name attached to the face (an exception: the portrait of the late Roy Cohn [p. 157], made in 1981, is precisely the portrait of everything that name has come to signify, and the portrait is not so much a proleptic death mask as a Veronica's Veil of ill-omen, floating in a black void, bodiless and therefore soulless). A Mapplethorpe portrait represents a power of the flesh as a Mapplethorpe flower constitutes an effigy of sacred assertion: it figures Being taken -- posed, beguiled, inveigled by all the sortileges of darkness -- to the very limits of itself, all that flesh is heir to without the connivance of circumstance. I approach this instance of the sacred gingerly, as does Mapplethorpe himself: implicit in each of these faces, famous or obscure, desirable or desolate, is that pulsion of energy, a velleity within the flesh, against the flesh often enough, which seeks to transcend the given, which counters the pervasively downward pull, the gravity of substance. Sometimes this power, or this potentiality, flickers very near the point of extinction, as in the portrait of Alice Neel, 1985 (p. 157), where only the open mouth -- open on the same blackness as that which surrounds the disarranged hair -- signifies an effort to resist subsidence. But often the symmetrical delight of certain faces is so instinct with just the counterpoise of potency, as in the portrait of Ken Moody, 1983 (p. 127), that there is no need for the eyes to be open, no need for the features to register. What we call the facial mask has momentarily triumphed over individuality, over the personal, the human, and all that the merely human hides. Indeed, in the face of such an image I no longer know why we must praise an artist, a photographer, for being "human," when as Mapplethorpe shows us, all that fulfills and completes humanity is inhuman, is superhuman ... is divine?
Dennis Speight, 1983
Thomas, 1986 Figures In his studies of the bodybuilder Lisa Lyon (pp. 110, 113, 114), it is of course a reversal of stereotypes which Mapplethorpe effects. Precisely the kind of lyric stasis so lovingly studied in male bodies traditionally granted movement and power (in other words, a paradoxical anti-phallicism, if we take our lead from the culture's interpretation of the phallic as dominance, as inflexibility, as denial of the other's response) is withheld in the Lisa Lyon series: Lyon repeatedly subverts, in images of sleek force and definition, the conventions of female iconography she is made to criticize, to parody, to transform. "Seeing things like they haven't been seen before" -- Mapplethorpe's words hover over all his nude figures, though I am convinced that the major revelation of these studies, the burden of their enormous effort -- in which the camera is compelled to acknowledge desire with an avidity not just optic but haptic -- is that of the body's implicit energeia to rise, to mount, to erect itself into an insurgent principle. Against what? What is the antagonist of these forms so suavely figured, so cunningly sectioned to reveal new anatomies, inadmissible analogies, what Macbeth calls understood relations which bring forth the secret'st man of blood? Perhaps the answer is given most diagrammatically in the photograph Thomas, 1986 (p. 158); in darkness, tangent to a great white arc on the right, the frontal nude -- garishly lighted so that it has lost its bronze patina so prized by Mapplethorpe -- yearns upward, strives, grasps (though the hands are cropped), for ascension while the body depends, the very organ of erection limp, the double socle of the thighs ponderous in their (also cropped) downward thrust. In all Mapplethorpe's figures, though, each separate body is its own repertoire of ascensional pulsions, reservoirs of potential elevation against the gravity of its own structure, a headlong architecture of antitheticals. The unified if never uniform impulse I would discern in Mapplethorpe's flowers, Mapplethorpe's faces, Mapplethorpe's figures is a continuous struggle, the contestation of heft. Solemnity of effigy is the consequence, I suppose, of a certain undecided outcome: flowers spring up against their own weight; engorged with juice, they are never shown attached to the cycle which would make their momentary victory more than just that. Faces are transpicuous with energy, with appetite, yet there is always the gravity of the features, of the flesh which pulls, which ponderates, in the sense of bearing down what aspires to rise, to mount to expression, to identity. And figures glow with the potency of their rhythms, their newly revealed analogies of form -- yet even as these arresting pelvic landscapes can rise and indeed reach beyond themselves, they are shown always in their dense and onerous potentiality only, the long muscles and the delicate veins finally burdensome, unredeemed -- impugning all we used to mean by "phallic." If I reach for such terms as transcendence, redemption, the apparatus of the sacred, it is because I used to think Mapplethorpe's photography was grim with the restrictive occasions of obsession and fetishism; but after a certain meditation, pondering their reasons and their realizations, I discern these pictures -- a good share of them -- to be emblems of contested mortality, grave with the contradictions of organic life in their aspiration to ecstasy, as crystalline in terms of their own art as the sonatas of Scarlatti or the last paintings of Mondrian, but as problematic, as imprecatory as any representation of the body I know, fond enemy and ally.
|
