[Librarian's Comment:  Remember the Rule:  If they say they aren't doing it, they are.]

"In one photograph a black nude wears a pointed hood that suggests a Ku Klux Klan cloak with its motive of concealment as well as its by-product, the release of hate so bloodthirsty that for the prey, too, facelessness becomes a defense: if you can't be found you can't be bloodsport. The hood in Mapplethorpe's photograph is an object which represents this world of the witchhunt, but the man is not hiding. The contrast between his covered head and his naked body, which plainly exhibits a lack of shame, is the twist throwing the shame elsewhere -- back to the hiding Klan.

The nudes also turn the tables on the work of those artists who have sought to travel outside the image world of the West by portraying what they see as "the primitive." This tradition has a different look from the obvious splits and insults of, say, black and white segregated bathrooms, and often it even claims to be complimentary. But this exotic route has often been merely a circular one, the culture returning to itself, reflexively feeding on the idea of a white nature and a non-white nature and an abyss between, with the white thought of as civilization and the other as its opposite. Such white noise can be subliminal, the more so the more smooth and perfected its machinery becomes. Nowhere has this vicious cycle been more glamorously kept in circulation than in fashion and in advertising -- and in art that uses their mechanisms -- and at no time does it have more panache than when it's compassed by those who understand the polish and glamour that have to go into a war in order to get people into its spirit. Hitler's moviemaker Leni Riefenstahl had that glamour well under her belt, along with a specialized version of these abysmal theories of civilization and nature, by the time she ran away on her exotic forays to Africa to photograph the people of the Sudan and of East Africa. Piling gilt upon guilt, she brought back her naked-warrior images, thinking -- and she was not alone -- that they shone with the truth of her subjects' nobility. Instead, her theatrics, her kitschy choices and angles betrayed the fact that she saw these people through those Aryan glasses that seem to have only one end in sight -- the creation of an Ubermensch. This idea of supermen may arrive in the notion of an army of sophisticated, disciplined blonds purified of "darkness," or it may be packaged in a negative of that theme, a vision of darkness as "pure" nature; or as we see on television and in the movies, it can be some sci-fi construction of unfathomable bionic stuff. However it comes, not far away is the stink of its sickness, of its binary categories of weak and strong, of pure and dirty."

-- A Society Artist, by Ingrid Sischy

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What is spoken, Heidegger says, is never -- and in no language -- what is said.

... 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?

-- The Mapplethorpe Effect, by Richard Howard