ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE

A SOCIETY ARTIST

by Ingrid Sischy

I am a paralyzed veteran of Vietnam. I wrote to you months ago explaining that you are my favorite photog. I asked you to send me some original signed works of yours. My nurse was going to display them on a wall near my bed so I can enjoy them. ... I am crippled and fought for America. I am poor destined to spend my lift in bed. ... Ansel Adams the best photog. we ever had with his bad legs and pain was my pen pal and he sent me several original signed works which are still on my wall. I would never sell them. What can I do with money, go out and dance? You and he are still my favorites. I was an army combat photographer when I got my ass all blown up. ... May God still bless you and keep you and yours healthy. My best, [his name]. (From a letter to Robert Mapplethorpe)

EVERY PERSONAL LETTER written is to bridge a gap-of distance, of silence, of feelings -- and each one is at the same time an object which represents that gap. From the tone of most teenage fan mail, for example, it's obvious that these letters are often deeply intimate vehicles for the expression of a voice that no one around it seems to be hearing. In adult life, people who are imprisoned -- who are incarcerated behind bars, who are bedridden, or who have the feeling of being trapped by their situation or condition -- make up a large proportion of those who raise up their voices to try to reach across the gulf of their invisibility and powerlessness by communicating with someone they see as having power or visibility. A letter written under these circumstances often represents more than a gap; it can show a world where every place one turns there is an abyss, what an English astronomer once called "the awful abyss which separates us from the stars." The choice of who is written to, of who the writer feels will have empathy, is usually made because of a strong sense of connection to that person or to what he or she has come to symbolize.

Such as the above letter sent to Robert Mapplethorpe. Sentence after sentence of this correspondence opens an abyss: between those who went to war and those who didn't; between those who can move and those who can't; between the independent and the dependent; between a world where money counts and one where not even money can help; between Ansel Adams' heroic American West and America during and after Vietnam -- Robert Mapplethorpe's America. The man lying in bed wants to see both on his wall; between them and within them are the splits in his country and his life.

Adams worked outside, in the West, returning over and over to certain spots or types of view like a policeman on a multiple- crimes case. A preservationist who wanted to capture the drama of industrial life's assaults against nature and thereby lobby for controls on it, Adams used mountains, waterfalls, trees, and rocks like heroes under some terrible threat to their being. Surrounding the frame of each image is the noise of modern living, which Adams composed as an atmosphere, a looming tension, by keeping it out of the picture, knowing it is in the viewer's consciousness. But so is another split -- the fact that a machine, the camera, took these pictures, and that for this to occur a person had to be there, had to be standing in a landscape whose very romance is that it seems to be the last place left unchopped, unploughed, unlittered, untouched by human hands. Each picture contains inherent splits between what was, what is, and what could happen next, and the pull at your sentiment, the beat of your heart goes over the top when you come across names like Old Faithful Geyser and Rainbow Falls.

Mapplethorpe looks like Adams' opposite. Working in a studio, in a city where the words "build and produce" seem to hover over the skyline twenty-four hours a day, he also returns over and over to certain spots or types of view. Yet if Adams' role was to be a guardian, pushing for the protection of nature from culture, Mapplethorpe appears the reverse because his vision straddles those territories as though they were one. And part of his terrain is not on American soil, but on the last places on the body that are permitted to be shown, let alone to be seen being touched. At times breaking the codes that are imposed on this area of nature in the name of preservation, he seems more like an outlaw, robbing his pictures' surveyors of the comfort of going along with the rules of what belongs where.

Sometimes Mapplethorpe's booty is not so threatening, as in pictures of flowers so symbolically pure or, at the other end of the scale, so visually lavish that their scent attracts and carries the viewer into what feels like the prettiest of natural worlds. A second look shows nature not so kind, not so natural, and not so youthful. Some of the flowers prickle -- roses have thorns -- and many could only be the result of hothouse cultivation and hybridization. Even when they aren't virtually created by human science, all of them betray the touch of human hands: they have been cut, arranged, and now are held by a camera. These frozen bouquets are so exquisite that they might almost have us forget the fact that hours or days after they have posed here they will end up on the street waiting for the garbage trucks, were it not for Mapplethorpe's light, shadow, and emphasis on falling angles as well as the highest pitch in toning or coloring -- all details that intensify the flowers' evanescence.

Sometimes Mapplethorpe's lens crosses a more guarded border and then unwraps images almost guaranteed to unnerve if not offend the categories or rules that come along in all of our lives and have kept the seen and the unseen, the genders and the races, in their respective places on one or the other side of a division so strong it might as well be a fence. There are groups of pictures which make people on both sides of the fence feel as if they've been robbed. Chauvinists can take his photographs of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but they are uncomfortable to see their notions of women as the weaker sex violated, mocked in the images that depict the naked bodies of women with both a classical beauty of form and so much strength that they could out-Atlas anyone. Yet these same images have received criticism from others; for example, they leave some feminists feeling burned, shouting Fire -- yet another woman's body that can be viewed as a male's object of desire. And Mapplethorpe's photographs of naked black men, in studied poses, more than once on his studio pedestal, stir up an even more historically loaded broth, an even thicker steep of bias and bondage. Like the pictures of women bodybuilders from a number of perspectives, they have been judged troublesome because they gut cliches, transgress borders, have an undeniable chic, and show a casting system in which it seems there's only room for the superbody. True -- but these elements belong to the how and why of what Mapplethorpe is holding up for us to see; and these are the ingredients of his alchemy. This is part of the shock of the image -- its "magic," as he would say. Almost instantly we are looking at another universe. There it is in the blink of an eye, lit to perfection, and the result is that all the symbols and forms of difference -- difference from our expectations and our usual experience with the categories that come to mind -- seem translucent, as though illuminated by a new moon, the photographer's eye. The impact is very real -- this is photography, these figures already existed, he didn't make them up; sometimes they reinvented themselves, and he saw them, stopped them so that they could stop us in our tracks. Mapplethorpe finds figures or, often, they find him -- whose physical work on their own bodies asserts the break with the traditional views that have made their bodies the property of others, and who contribute to that break by letting Mapplethorpe illuminate it through his depiction of details or qualities elsewhere deemphasized, excluded altogether, or made shameful: with the women bodybuilders the cultivation of strength and control is completely integrated into an image of beauty and grace; this is also the case with his images of naked black men, many of which include a frontal view so that the visible penis adds to their statement of self-possession with a clear indication of having nothing to hide.

Despite objections to these male and female nudes, they have been the focus of a great deal of pleasure on the part of many of those who the image police would expect to file complaints. The pictures have in fact redistributed assets such as strength and pride in the banks of mass-media and art-historical imagery, which have always shortchanged the accounts of women and people of color, always mediated them, whether consciously or not. In addition to these, another of Mapplethorpe's themes --  homosexuality -- has in part been responsible for a redirection of aesthetic attention to this topic, which has also been in a visual ghetto. The official institutions of fine art, of art history, and in particular of photographic history, for example, have always lightened the work of artists like Baron von Gloeden, have always categorized them as less "important," less "serious," more "fluffy" than the big guys; yet these photographers' contributions to the art of the nude would surely have been stitched in with the studies of Thomas Eakins and Eadweard Muybridge but for the lack of covertness of their homoeroticism, which seems to prejudice the eyes of some viewers against them. In this context, it's worth noting that Mapplethorpe's own homosexuality, in his personal life and sometimes, no less openly, as a subject of his work, has often resulted in a kind of soft-pedaled editing of his photographs in their appearances on the museum circuit. (This has been more the case in America than in Europe.) In general, he has been one of those artists whose work is kept in high-profile circulation because of its loyal and sizable audience (and, because of its dealers, and writers both for and against).

However renegade some of Mapplethorpe's subjects have been, the fact is that he has accumulated a broad and deep sense of visual history, of the images and objects that are both "in" and "out" of the temples of taste. This knowledge is evident in the contents of his photography collection, most of which was sold in 1982; in his collection of glass vessels, sentiently lined up like the tackle and lures in his fishing box; and, most available to the viewer, in the art that he makes. This art is a complex complex of machine and hand, of eye and memory, of invention and found images and materials, of design and spontaneity, and, perhaps most formally, of the premodern, the modern, and whatever it is we're having now. These multileveled elements can be found throughout his work, even in those same nudes, which may look simple, and their beauty is that they can be; but they are more. Herein lies another of Mappiethorpe's holdup actions, his "lifts." Again take those nudes, again in the context of photographic history as he does, sometimes undoing it, sometimes flipping it over, sometimes playing with it, sometimes reminding with it, sometimes transforming with it. The "lift" in some of these pictures seems to happen so quickly, or rather so organically, that it's hard to separate cause and effect, difficult to know whether the past images that echo out of the photographs were stimuli for his pictures or whether the new ones almost unnervingly release our own memories of photographs both specific and generic, provoking them to pop up and show through from behind the new imagery. There is no one answer. The results, however, are myriad. Partial views of bent-over nudes may bring to mind Edward Weston's still-lifes of single peppers. Weston explored the vegetable's shape and form as a content that added to the period's investigation of abstraction. Yet his pictures retain a strong realism and a punch because they never lose their grip on the concreteness of their subject. Mapplethorpe's equally careful attention to the tension between his abstracted bodies and the realism of their flesh puts the pepper back into photography's use of abstraction, which too often has been reduced to arty surfaces. 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.

Mapplethorpe has always offended these categories -- for example, in those images that represent "the weaker sex" as very strong, or in photographs that portray sex acts and sexual arousal, often zooming in on the penis, subjects which have long been banished as dirty, as not belonging to the higher, purer realm designated for art. Mapplethorpe's rejection of such a system is expressed all the more effectively because he also works with the wheel of glamour, turning it to his vantage -- a view as far away from Riefenstahl's trips with those tribes as could be. This is very evident in his black nudes. Instead of her "jungle-ism," her reductions of, say, the Nuba people or the Masai, to picturesque members of an animal kingdom -- there for the snapping of the paparazzi who want them in their "natural habitat" -- Mapplethorpe's relationship to his subjects is all about consent and belongs to the studio tradition of the artist and model. His work has the unmistakable urbanism that one always feels from the artificial lights and clean backdrops set up for the studio shot. There is a picture of a naked man posing at the wheel of a printing press, or there are images in which a model stands in a large ring, a studio prop, often seeming to be struggling to push it around, as if it were almost immovable. Although these photographs position the subject in the role of physical laborer, they are arch and give the images the edge or irony present in anything that looks so posed. There is a sense of balletics, of models in position, ready for the portrait that will then make them individuals, recognizable when they're out in the world. There are also reversals of the categorizing devices through which society splits and fragments us, pictures with which Mapplethorpe can localize and extract the change in feeling he wants his art to generate, as in the deeply moving shots of black and white men together, especially one of two men embracing.

Mapplethorpe's series of shots of Lisa Lyon, who took the title at the First Women's Body-Building Championship, Los Angeles, focuses on a ready-made reversal of the superman image. As represented in the book Lady, Lisa Lyon (1983), it is a multifaceted portrait including well over 100 details, individual images that map out and play on the restrictive history of consigned female identities -- the bride, the vamp, the butch, the high-fashion model, and other types, mostly from the European tradition but with a touch of the Orient. Together these photographs, the nudes most of all, use the body Lyon has brought into existence to articulate contradiction, and to cut through society's assumptions of gender and nature. In 1983, the English daily  The Sun got the point, in a way, and expressed it in the headline it ran with two of the photographs: " ... a startling new shape ... Miss Muscles!" Lyon's own words are more pertinent: "If one looked at a tiger running across a veld, one would never say, 'That musculature is so masculine.' It's not separated as being male or female." Somehow, in the hands of other photographers, Lyon seems flattened out, even cheapened, like that genre of pinup they used to call the "art photograph." Mapplethorpe's portrait of Lyon is alive because her sculptural approach to her body directly connected to and could be expressed by the sculptural life in his work, and by the work of his life: the exhibition of whatever the elements are that make a picture a physical event.

Physical sensations and reactions are usually generalized and distanced when it comes to art; Mapplethorpe's achievement is that he pins them, personalizes them, activates them. His double portrait of Ken Moody and Robert Sherman is almost an outline of how he does this. Again, Mapplethorpe is drawn to the racial splits that divide our culture; and the ingredient of split is here made blatant by the image's exaggeration of the relative difference in skin pigmentation to which one is accustomed in a black and white photograph of a black and a white person. Mapplethorpe's lighting and toning make this contrast the first subject of the photograph. Highlighting the hue black and the hue white, how blank white can sometimes look when it's flush against black, how black and white together can virtually create the light of a picture, the photographer animates the subject of color. The issue of color is never a latent subject, never avoided. In Mapplethorpe's work with color film, you can witness the emergence of every last drop of color right up to the surface, where it vibrates as though it could lift right off the picture. In the black and white portrait of Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, the color difference pops up, and then the same light that revealed it reveals patterns of sameness -- made stronger since both men are bald as a result of alopecia -- until it feels as if the overlapping profiles could collapse into one, yet still retain their individual outlines.

Most art calls primarily on what we have learned to recognize, or on how our lives have trained us to put something together or take it apart. Mapplethorpe's work does this too, but it really revolves around something opposite -- around those people the culture is reluctant to recognize, does not want brought to the surface; around those images it does not want shown or taken apart, in face around the whole training of "do nots" and "are nots." This has been such a source of energy in Mapplethorpe's work that its impact touches all of his photographs. It gives even the less controversial works -- the many portraits of luminaries as well as those privately commissioned, for example -- an added dimension of excitement. It is a version of guilt by association, the forbidden by association, and he knows how to needle it in everywhere. It's part of the fabric that draws some to the work and pushes others away. And it's what makes his art so perfect for its time.

Every period has many images and objects that are said to capture the moment's essence. Most of them fade with the years, but in a few cases, the hookup between imagery and time can be so dynamic and so acute that the work comes to essentialize the period. This is when art enters and carves what George Kubler would call "the shape of time." It happened, for example, with the Cubists at the beginning of this century -- you can see and feel in their dissolution of perspective the breaking apart of old views. Mapplethorpe is one of those artists whose work will define the past two decades, which have had a similar dynamic of change. But right now, at the end of our century, it seems as if many of the pieces we need to puzzle out our future have the most difficult and intractable shapes. And it often feels as if our anxiety -- for example, our current fear of sex -- encourages the return to archaic views. When Mapplethorpe is asked about the work that people have found to be the most difficult -- his sexual pictures -- which were in fact the images that created his entry into "the shape of time," he always answers with the same phrase and the same story. The phrase is "that feeling in my stomach." The story goes:

I would see a young kid walking down 42nd Street and then go into a magazine storefront, which were places I didn't know anything about. I became obsessed with going into them and seeing what was inside these magazines. They were all sealed, which made them even sexier somehow, because you couldn't get at them. A kid gets a certain kind of reaction, which of course once you've been exposed to everything you don't get. I got that feeling in my stomach, it's not a directly sexual one, it's something more potent than that. I thought if I could somehow bring that element into art, if I could somehow retain that feeling, I would be doing something that was uniquely my own.

What Mapplethorpe calls the feeling in the stomach is the internal, physical signal that a change in one's self-awareness is taking place, brought on by intensified or intensifying sensations, emotions, and perceptions. The stomach is a very hard place to reach in art. It is the inward seat of many of our feelings, the place where our secrets lodge when the mind can't afford to recognize or contain them. To get to it, art has to travel through and beyond the usual visual elements that might reach the heart, the brain, or the spirit, beyond the look and feel of a work. It has to be in some way meat and potatoes, has to activate or break through senses not always considered (although always lurking) in art: hunger and taste.

Mapplethorpe's meat and potatoes come from the subjects that have been forced by our culture to be hidden like secrets. He realized their force in the late 1960s while walking in the stomach of New York City, Times Square, a place a tour guide might call our island's badlands of the body. But Mapplethorpe was not passing through, he was landing. He had been hovering over this territory with the fetishistic jewelry he was making and the found pornographic images whose surfaces he was reworking. Somewhere in all of this, and heightened by his reaction to those sealed (and, inside the seal, unedited) pictures in the magazine stores, lay the bridge between what he was intuiting in his work and feeling in himself, and what he could do in art. But first there is another bridge to be crossed between Times Square, where the altars and signs are dedicated to forgetting everything but the pleasures of the present, and a few signs and altars of Mapplethorpe's past.

Joan and Harry Mapplethorpe had six children: four boys, two girls. Robert was the third born. In his environment, there were objects and imagery based on the cross before he started to cross all those lines, and there was an atmosphere that made a strong impression, one with effects and affects that go deep: "I was a Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child. It still shows in how I arrange things. It's always little altars. It's always been this way -- whenever I'd put something together I'd notice it was symmetrical." This autobiographical information gives a certain feel to Mapplethorpe's background as well as to his artistic style. It also contains an obvious analogy to the way he described the visual and psychological power of those 42nd Street storefronts. Those words illustrate the magnetic force which draws in people who have a hunger to see what our Judeo-Christian teaching insists be kept our of sight, a scripture with proscriptions that help keep those booths in business as places of guilty excitement.

Mapplethorpe remembers a secure childhood in Floral Park, Queens, and then sums up these years with a characteristically terse but canny understanding: "I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment. And it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave." Mapplethorpe didn't go far when he left home, in 1963 -- not to Paris, or any other of those European cities with cafes that Americans used to be pictured smoking and drinking in when they went off to become, or to be with, writers and artists. This was the 1960s, and Mapplethorpe was to go to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he got an unsentimental art education.

An anecdote from Mapplethorpe's Pratt days about his first encounter with the poet and musician Patti Smith is resonant. It has a magical beginning most fitting for what turned out to be a magical bond, a relationship that is the stuff of dreams, myth, and history. Like most such stuff the story of how it all began had its practical details. Mapplethorpe described it to me this way: "I had a basement apartment. She wandered in off the street into my house. Actually I was asleep and I opened my eyes and there was somebody I had never seen before. She was looking for someone else and came into my place because the door was open. Remember it was the '60s, hippies, nobody locked their door."

By now the connection between Mapplethorpe and Smith is well known, almost over-known, overshadowing what meant so much; the mechanisms of fame always seem to need to suck just one image out of the fuller picture. The image we have been left with is more one of early punk than of the exploratory culture that preceded it and which is truer to the spirit of their respective developments. But the sleeping-beauty first moments of friendship between these two people is quoted here not just for the sixties mise-en-scene it sets up. Mapplethorpe's memory of opening his eyes and seeing Smith evokes the atmosphere and feeling of awakening, reminding us of the importance of what the two of them had together. They woke up each other's dreams, spurred each other on, each taking the role of ideal viewer and listener for the other at a crucial time -- the beginning of their beginnings as artists. Recently, when Mapplethorpe and I were talking about how someone who matters in your life can help you believe in yourself, he said of Smith: "We used to stay up all night and she would do her thing and I would do my thing and then we'd take a break and smoke a cigarette and look at each other's work. It was great. She was one person who respected what I did. The school that I was in wasn't very behind what I was doing [and so] to have one person who you think is intelligent and who you're doing it with, who I was doing it for, sometimes [is what you need]."

"Doing their thing" in these years for them meant drawings, scribbles, jewelry, collages of found images and objects, and for Smith, poetry too, and generally the generation of ideas, the finding as well as the creation of the crumbs marking the paths that each of them would clear and traverse; it was the kind of searching around you do when you're trying to locate a special space for your expression as an artist. Smith and Mapplethorpe were fellow spirits, fellow outlaws. Later they were fellow new kids in town, and as they became insiders, while maintaining their identities as outsiders, together they made acquaintances with people such as John McKendry and Sam Wagstaff, who each played important parts in their lives. And along with all of this discovery came the seventies version of a star-crossed lovers plot. But even after sexual preference eventually led them to choose different roofs and different routes, they continued to be each other's knock-on-wood at critical moments in their lives.

Although not that numerous, Mapplethorpe's portraits of Smith can be seen as an informal lifelong project begun when he took his first Polaroids. Despite huge intervals along the way, his portraits of her stretch right into the present with his 1988 picture for the cover of her newest record. Because these photographs capture different periods in her life they come to stand for time, intensely so, as do all his images. They work photography's time-travel effect to its full capacity. Each one is taken from a perspective that is inside the time it will forever describe, that is "with it," not outside it like a voyeur. Whether with or without telltale props, every Mapplethorpe photograph is a madeleine of sorts, capable of transporting the viewer back with it into its world. If the world in the picture is unfamiliar, the viewer may have farther to travel; it may be to a world that at some other time had to protect itself in secrecy, or the journey may be to a place the viewer doesn't wish to go. But Mapplethorpe's camera and his subjects seem to have the same relationship that light has to flowers -- it makes the petals open. You see this clearly in his pictures of Smith: the process seems almost palpable, his images of her shyness giving view of what lies deep inside, which explains why these pictures have meant so much to her followers from the second his Polaroid camera snapped her ragged edges.

A camera has a quiet sound, but a lot of noise has surrounded Mapplethorpe's pictures after they were made, particularly those that go beyond what's considered representable, go so far that they're viewed as reprehensible, better off as dirty secrets. This is because they have to do with sex. The topic of sex has been so censored and made to seem so dirty that it also habitually stays out of any discussion of personal relations except for the most intimate exchanges, in which one feels safe enough to share a secret. What follows is such an instance, although intended for the ears of the world and as much about disliking secrets as telling them. Patti Smith can be overheard confiding to a friend in Sandy Daley's 1970 film featuring Mapplethorpe and titled Robert Having His Nipple Pierced: " ... like it was my boyfriend or nothin'. I guess the thing I don't like is that they got secrets." As Smith's language often does, these words, so casually remarked, move like an arrow through the flesh of the times in which they were spoken and land right in the heart of today. They are about both personal and public relations and they take this essay into the subject of secrets as well as the secret of Mapplethorpe's work. Secrecy is an old tale when it comes to the subject of sex, and his pictures explode it. They have enormous consequences for the deepest split in our collective opinion about sex: should it stay in the dark or be brought into the light?

Here is a story of the dark. It is about sex and the medium of light, photography. I heard it from the photographer G. Botsford, who heard it from his friend, who heard it from the horse's mouth, her mother. It was graduation day, 1910, for the girls' school that the mother had attended, and there was no way that her friends, family, or teachers could persuade her to join the group that was sitting for the senior-class photograph. So the picture is without her, an absence that she explained to her daughter as follows: the night before, at the class dance, a fellow had taken her hand, placing his around her wrist and giving it a squeeze of affection that literally terrified her. She was convinced that he had made her pregnant and was too scared to tell anyone about it, but knew that if she sat for that photograph her shame would show through the print, and everyone who looked at it, her school, her friends, her family, her whole world, would be able to tell. This is the terror that occurs when the zipper is pulled up to conceal what we need to know, tyrannizing us into fear of consequences that have nothing to do with the plumbing of the body.

The mother who absented herself from the picture passes on an anecdote that seems very relevant to Mapplethorpe's work and to today. It has multiple plots -- historical, biological, psychological, art historical. These have echoes that vibrate in our moment because of how they strike similar chords. There's the period -- Victorian-Edwardian; there are the facts of life -- never has anyone gotten pregnant from the squeeze of a wrist (a blush, yes; a baby, no); there's the fear and the resulting irrational correlations that come when we are in the dark about a subject which either seems to -- or in fact does -- threaten the order or well-being of our immediate world; there's our old tradition of X-ing out images, and there are the various voodoo powers we give them.

Mapplethorpe's most fearful-looking pictures are those with a sadomasochistic sexual plot. They were made in the mid- to late 1970s. One variety is of men in leather or another constricting material: some alone, some in twos, some in groups; some partially naked, some rigged up head to toe; some chained, some terribly disturbing and intricately frightening; some sitting as ceremoniously as an aristocrat posing for a society portrait; some hanging. Part of the upset and brilliance of these pictures is their matter-of-factness, their forensic quality, creating the kind of sharply focused ground for belief that only the least sentimental evidence can offer. When these pictures first appeared there were shivers and most often people turned away, myself included. Eventually they became the portion of his work which stayed in the drawers, only appearing on the rarest of occasions and many of them never again seen. But no one who knew about them forgot these scenes, even if the knowledge was only by rumor. They stayed in the back of the mind, tugging a little every time another Mapplethorpe work went by. I have wanted to look at them a lot lately. They are still tough to see but they are masterpieces and they really matter. Their revolt against the idea of the sexual secret is epic. And from the point of view of today, what also matters is how they tap and provoke that old tyrannical nonsense of a punitive system ruled by the gods -- with supposed consequences which are said to be brought on when you decide for yourself what is right and wrong to do with your own body. They give us an opportunity to untangle such myth.

I write this because in the present these images are vulnerable to being used as a different type of evidence, as pictures that can offer proof of a false logic. Today, any image of sex, especially of male homosexual sex, filters into the culture through the screen of death that has been placed in front of the subject because of AIDS. The risk with these criminal-looking pictures is that  some viewers -- upon seeing this private world which enacted the plot of crime and punishment -- would jump into the new scenario of injustice that is playing throughout our world, which confuses sex as the originating agent rather than one of a variety of conduits for what is currently a virological mystery with an unknown etiology. To look at these pictures and feel superior is to be a juror arriving at the wrong conclusion because the evidence seemed so persuasive. To misunderstand a physical disease as well as the society and the events which these images describe would be a real crime, a bit of madness we cannot afford. We now have a world in which even children know that a hand on a wrist is not a penis in a vagina. We see that it was a symptom of the girl's ignorance and terror to think in this way and to imagine the photograph as proof of her faulty equation. But in our present situation it is also a symptom of terror and ignorance to make similar associations. The faster we reject any faulty equations such as between homosexuality and disease as its inevitable consequence -- the better. This tendency toward crosswire thinking arises because sex has been so cloaked in mystery, secrecy, and shame, so used and abused by houses of worship -- and their extensions, houses of guilt -- that when it is brought into the light it's hard to have clarity. First you have to drive yourself through the fog which I suspect surrounds each of us because we all live in this world. We have all felt the terror of one phantom court or another. And the gavel always threatens to come down again when this misty screen has been made denser by an extra film of blindness caused by fear. This is the moment when it's critical for the witnesses to appear.

Mapplethorpe's frightening pictures bear urgent witness. Sadomasochistic scenes such as the ones he brought into public view are not exclusive to any single subculture. And they remind me of Voltaire's Candide, which attacks the Leibniz "school" that promoted indifference to suffering, because all is for the best in this, the "best of all possible worlds." Voltaire took the reader through various plots that show a different world, one that is far from the best for some.

The twenty soldiers who guarded us had sworn never to surrender; but the extremes of hunger to which they were reduced forced them to eat our two eunuchs for fear of breaking their oath. A few days later they decided to eat the women.

We had a Mohammedan priest in our fortress, a most pious and compassionate man. He preached a beautiful sermon to the soldiers persuading them not to kill us outright. "Cut just one buttock off each of these ladies," he said, "and that will provide you with a delicious meal; if you find you need more, you can have as much again in a few days' time. Allah will be pleased at such a charitable action, and the siege will be relieved."

To look at Mapplethorpe's pictures that appear so felonious is to be conscious that a world in which a sexual life has to remain secret is also far from the best of all possible worlds and has to affect in some way the sense of self of those who feel so unprotected that they have to hide. It is to be conscious of the terrible loss you feel when you don't experience safety, when this leads you to furtiveness, and to the association of your desire with illicitness. It is to be conscious that this theater of criminalism was staged in the context of a culture that forced the homosexual world into secrecy to avoid punishment, forced it to create one place at least where it could control power and powerlessness. It is to be conscious of what all this does to your sense of the possibility of intimacy -- it hurts it. It is to be conscious of how much it meant to human dignity to say, as we did in the gay liberation movement that had already begun -- no more dirty secrets, no more hiding. Mapplethorpe couldn't have recorded the abyss between self and world that these pictures reflect unless the individuals had wanted to exhibit themselves through his camera. These men were not studio models for hire, reaping the profits of the viewing audience's boredom, and the images have none of the emptiness of, say, Helmut Newton's peek-a-boo, this-is-what-the-rich-do, pseudo-Victorian ticklers, where models hang around, figuratively and literally, and you imagine them complaining to their agents about having to wear all that leather under the hot lights. Neither do Mapplethorpe's pictures distance themselves from their subjects through a point of view that somehow insinuates that the photographer is plunging down into this other world of freaks and monsters. That sense of descent oozes out of the work of Diane Arbus, and although it makes her subjects no less memorable, it alters the found quality that is essential to the power of her images. If we let ourselves ask, we end up wondering whether she's taking these people down with her. We always hear about Arbus' capacity for identification, but one suspects that her discomfort with it was the source of her tragic life -- that she simply couldn't get over the fact that she so clearly shared something with her outcast subjects. Mapplethorpe doesn't look down on his subjects and he doesn't look up. He looks at. Perhaps it is easiest to see just how directly he does this in his portraits, which of all his pictures are the least likely to distract the viewer with other issues.

After the S&M scenes Mapplethorpe made his transition from the rough conjoining of bodies to anatomical classicism, which shows an intimacy with the body we rarely experience in art. Intimacy is the core of his work, what runs through it like a hidden zipper. Pull it down and you'll find a picture like this: a tightly cropped image in profile starts with a man's mid-stomach and ends about a foot down his thighs; his right arm is stretching down and the hand is splayed open so that the flexing of each finger echoes as well as reinforces the presence of the penis; the thumb is curling up as if it were moving into erection. The details in this picture make it so intimate, and so specific, that they attract the viewer's careful attention. Consequently they can unearth buried feelings as well as locate -- or still -- responses that are usually too ingrained to perceive.

Since the day they were made, Mapplethorpe's photographs about sex have received a mixed welcome. Not everyone wants to look -- and some critics have said the pictures are disgusting. I decided to show them to a purveyor of what I thought was meant by "disgusting," a man who publishes pornography, and he in turn said, "I don't even want to look." Then he continued: "I know those pictures, I've never liked them. They're so personal." In its typical formula, pornography invokes distancing mechanisms that invite one to feel one's control over the image, to feel that what one is looking at is not a person but an empty vessel for one's ego. These mechanisms are not at work in a Mapplethorpe. Other critics have complained that his pictures of sex are too "fashionable" -- too polished, too aestheticized -- but fashionability has been one of his biggest crossover instruments and is among his sharpest devices. By making his subjects so fashionable, he makes knowledge of them fashionable instead of something dirty.

There is a line of Susan Sontag's about Mapplethorpe: "(However wide his subject matter, he could never become a war photographer or a photographer of accidents in the street)." As I was reading through the literature on Mapplethorpe in preparation for this essay, Sontag's parenthesized perception that he could not become a war photographer especially surprised me, which in turn started me thinking about why his work has always meant so much to me. Something had always made me pause when I came to pages in books, or spots on the walls of art shows, with Mapplethorpe pictures featuring military dress or militarist connotations. There are quite a few -- for example, one of a frayed American flag. Another photograph is almost empty but for a battleship, way down at the bottom of the horizon line. There are several photographs of his friend Jack Walls in army uniform; there's one of Milton Moore, in a sailor suit, saluting. These are among the few contemporary militarist images I know of that are without the spectacle of violence; yet they are as keyed into the national mood as Rambo. They are respectful pictures; the emptiness of their flat gray backgrounds switches their meaning, so that they show not action but men ready for action. There's another such photograph -- a silhouetted bust of a man saluting, hand to head. He appears to be naked except for his cap. Behind the shadow that fills in and outlines his form are two large white vertical spaces that look like empty pages in an opened book, or like plaques on a wall for recording names. It is the most solitary of all of Mapplethorpe's photographs, rendering the other side of the emblems and polish that are used to inspire belief in the grandness of fights and wars -- the shadow side, loneliness and loss. I look at this picture and the empty vertical spaces seem to fill up with names, particularly two communities of names, those who died in Vietnam and those who have died of AIDS. The shadow evokes history and, with it, remembering or forgetting -- ideas present in other Mapplethorpe works which emphasize fragments, such as the polished looking classical torsos and busts that he has recently begun collecting and photographing, or, another of the objects he has occasionally featured over the past two decades, the skull.

When Mapplethorpe is asked about the body of work that he has created, he says, "I wasn't setting out to make a statement, that isn't the way I work. The statement grows out of what I do." There are many statements to be gathered from his art but they are all connected by the polished surface that emblematizes his work, the looking-glass layer, on occasion made literal through the presence of mirrors, reflective materials, and in works within which you can see the same image exactly repeated or slightly varied. There is always the mirroring back and forth between world and studio world, between the content of the work and the viewer's experience, and between the photographer and his various subjects, a link made most directly in his self-portraits. The mirroring and the polish work together, as though the one caught what was going on -- by reflecting it -- the other by freezing, finishing, and perfecting it. Here lies yet another of Mapplethorpe's crossings -- the polished military look with the polished cultured look. And here we have the genius -- and the fortune -- of what he has given us. By holding up images which not only show the splits in our culture but also some which create reversals and transformations of those splits, he gives us a vision of wholeness. This is his secret service. He is not really an outlaw; he is a preservationist. The only thing he is robbing us of is ignorance. And whether the wholeness projected by his art is envisioned in images of women bodybuilders, of black and white men together, of portraits that are the record both of recognized figures and those usually passed by, or in pictures that include what has always been behind a fig leaf, it almost always entails the highlighting of those very details that symbolize our history of splits -- many of which owe their ability to keep things split to the fact that they are usually not confronted. Often they seem too controversial to bring into the light and so they stay unexamined, and it is from underneath the surface that they exert and perpetuate their divisive controls. Mapplethorpe never leaves them there, always bringing them out for view, all polished up for inspection.

This is an artist who has made a deep incision into our culture, here going into the no-nos placed upon the flesh, there making brilliant portraits that connect familiar and unfamiliar faces via the look of polish that they all receive. In between there is the scent of flowers -- the photographer's spice of things we think of as nice -- and many other still-lifes as well as the occasional miscellaneous subject. And all along there is the trace of the man who made this work, his self-portraits. Marking the path he takes everywhere, these photographs by and of Mapplethorpe give a many-sided view. The picture keeps changing -- now he's very elegant in black tie, now an outlaw in a hip jacket and holding a gun, now winking, now in drag. In one picture of him bare-chested and with horns, he outsmarts a reading of the image as evil by quickly slipping it into humor; but another self- portrait is truly unsettling, with a whip shown going up his ass. Then there's a glorious young self-portrait in which you can only see the lunge of his head and one extended arm into the picture frame, like a funny grand entrance. There are none of him in fatigues. And he hasn't gone to war. But it seems to me he has also, in fact, been a version of the kind of photographer that to Sontag he could never be. What he has recorded and the style with which each image or object has been made ready for presentation calls up that ready-made image of war -- the battle. It is literally there in his work in the battleship, and in the pictures of men in military dress. Atmospherically it's always there because of the general look of spit and polish. But Mapplethorpe transforms militarism the same way as he does other found imagery. Most notions or images of war end up perpetuating the idea of the wipe out -- either of a people or a threat. Mapplethorpe's work has been about not wiping things out.

Robert Mapplethorpe has been a society photographer in the largest sense. There are many communities within the collective, just as there are many selves within an individual. So choices always have to be made. In Mapplethorpe's instance the choices he went with are the subjects which drew him, and this in turn drew the picture we have of Mapplethorpe as an artist and as a man. Like all pictures, it offers many possible interpretations. In 1988 something seems very urgent to me. It has to do with memory, and with freedom. So I chose to emphasize in this essay that part of his work which is a record of our civil battles, and an expression of our civil rights. This is work that is ultimately about no coverup, no censorship, no shameful secrets, no burial of what should be seen and what must be remembered. One picture by Mapplethorpe, Thomas and Dovana, epitomizes this. It is of a couple dancing. The man is black; he is naked. The woman is white, she wears a white evening dress, white gloves. She is arched in a melodramatic pose, and he supports her. The picture is a twist, a tie of images that summon Gone with the Wind, Mandingo, and fashion all in one, and the knot that holds it together is very different from anything we might expect. It is the opposite of the tradition of burying; it is part of the tradition of showing, and thereby of knowing. In "John Brown's Body," the poem about America and the Civil War, Stephen Vincent Benet writes "Bury the whip, bury the branding bars, /, ... Bury the fiddle-music and the dance, / ... And with these things, bury the purple dream / Of the America we have not been.... "

Mapplethorpe's picture of Thomas and Dovana, as well as much of his other work, might as well be a do not placed in front of each of Benet's "bury's," as if to say, do not forget what we have been. How can we, as long as Mapplethorpe's art is around.

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