The mainstreaming of Mapplethorpe

THE first and most important thing to be said about the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin is that it has a right to be there. With Mapplethorpe, this is not a statement of the obvious. His photographs have invited not criticism, but censorship. In the US, public funding of a touring exhibition of his work led to an obscenity trial, a congressional inquiry, and a sustained attack on the National Endowment for the Arts by the Christian Right. The Hayward Gallery catalogue on sale at the Gallery of Photography carries a notice that "following police and legal advice (the gallery) has felt constrained to remove three images from this edition." In this context, it is worth saying that it is possible to believe both that there are profound problems with Mapplethorpe's work and that the Gallery of Photography should be applauded for bringing it to Ireland.

The least productive way to talk about Mapplethorpe's pictures is to refer to them as pornography. In a sense, one marker of his decline as an artist is precisely his move away from a concern with pornography. One of the revelations of this exhibition is Mapplethorpe's very early work, collages and paintings done between 1970 and 1974. It is deeply, almost scientifically, interested, not in the production of pornography, but in the definition of the pornographic. It uses images from gay pornographic magazines, but interrogates them by disrupting their smooth surfaces, by setting them beside pictures of classical sculpture, by questioning the difference between a photograph of an object and the object itself.

None of this is great art but it does show a serious artistic - and therefore moral - purpose. Part of the problem with the obscene images that Mapplethorpe produced after he had been taken up by art dealers is that they are not pornographic at all. They are, on the contrary, extraordinarily cold, abstract and distant. They turn the human body into pure form. In some of his later images, like Black Bust (1988) and Antinuous (1987), the body that is photographed is literally that of a statue. But even in the bulk of the work, where the subjects are real people, it often seems that they might as well be statues.

To me at least, the most objectionable image in the exhibition is not one of the sado masochistic photographs but a photograph of a black man, Ken Moody. He is pictured from behind, posed with his arms stretched invisibly in front of him, so that they appear"to be stumps. The reference, obviously, is to the Venus de Milo, and the suggestion that the photograph offers is that mutilation in the cause of perfect form is well worthwhile.

Whereas in the early work, classic forms and pornography are placed side by side, with the result that both are questioned and disrupted, in the later work the pornography is entirely occupied by the classical aesthetic of beauty. And in the course of that occupation, the bodies of the subjects are dominated, shaped and controlled by the photographer. This is especially problematic when the photographer is white and so many of his subjects are not just black men, but black men with enormous penises - one of the all time greats among western stereotypes.

It is all the more problematic because there is, on the whole, a markedly different attitude to white celebrities on the one hand and to black unknowns on the other. The rich and/or famous Donald Sutherland, Doris Saatchi Philip Glass, Cindy Sherman get to keep their clothes on and always have their faces shown. The black and/or infamous are usually naked and often represented by faceless body parts. Looking at the portrait of Donald Sutherland side by side with a picture of a faceless black man in a suit but with his penis hanging out, it struck me that what would, be really subversive and shocking would be if Mapplethorpe had reversed the procedure - if the celebrities were photographed with their penises hanging out and the unknown black men were pictured face on, looking the camera in the eye.

This hints at the real problem with Mapplethorpe's work. There is a sense in the pictures that the extreme obscenity is generated, not by an anarchic free spirited radicalism, but by a claustraphobic conservatism. The ideas of beauty that are at work are in fact overwhelmingly traditional, and his photography remains in thrall to painting and sculpture.

Whereas the great photographers invented an art form that owed nothing to traditional visual art, Mapplethorpe owes it everything. There is a neo classical sense of human form. There is still life - a series of extremely beautiful colour images of flowers. And there is fame - flattering portraits of wealthy patrons. Mapplethorpe would, in fact, have done rather well in a corrupt Italian city state during the Renaissance. The only thing that can make him modern is obscenity. And precisely because his conservatism is so overwhelming, he has to go (literally, as well as metaphorically) to extreme lengths to escape it. A greater, more humane artist, with a richer sense of what is beautiful, would not have needed to go so far.