HOW seriously are we to take Robert Mapplethorpe? His work shifts constantly between disorder and harmony, pain and pleasure, grossness and delicacy, menace and humour. In the self-portraits he presents himself in the guise of trickster, make-believe gangster, streetwise bad-boy, or, in his later, more classical mode, as devil, satyr, faun - this last persona is particularly explicit in the witty, and yet disturbing, cover photograph for the catalogue of the big retrospective exhibition which opens at Dublin's Gallery of Photography next week.
Was he, then, an incarnation of the spirit of aesthetic subversion - Pan in New York Dionysus in Soho - or just another flash pop-artist who set out cynically to shock a world that had thought itself beyond being shocked?
The first thing we remark when confronted with Mapplethorpe's photographs - or at least the notorious ones, the studies of homosexual love and game-playing which have made him posthumously the hero of infamy he so desired to be - is the extraordinary disjunction in them between subject-matter and technique. Enormous male genitalia, some merely on display, many of them strapped, bound, hung with weights, are presented to our view with a kind of pained meticulousness.
All is still, cool, distanced; the light that falls on these by turns flourished or manacled organs is that same luminance that bathes, for instance, Poussin's scenes of frozen passion, stoic suffering, glorious death. We are not moved, nor are we meant to be. We gaze at these images in silence, vaguely horrified, calmly startled, at once stimulated and obscurely depressed.
Mapplethorpe the technician is, I think, beyond criticism. To even the most outrageous studies from the gay underworld he brought an obsessive perfectionism which is at once his most impressive and least appealing trait as an artist. Nothing, we feel, can truly disturb the jaded stillness of these scenes.
Mapplethorpe grew up artistically in the hothouse atmosphere of Greenwich Village in the late-1960s and the 1970s. His milieu was the homosexual bath-houses and leather bars of a "city still whirling in the satyr-dance of sexual licence that was to end with the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. The early work displays all the brazen, tongue-in-cheek (yes, in all possible senses of the phrase) exhibitionism of the lately liberated "gay community".
Ironically, however, perhaps his finest work is the long series of studies of a woman, Lisa Lyon, which he made in the early-1980s. In the admiration, longing and hum our of these pictures we glimpse another Mapplethorpe, the one who in his last years produced the extraordinarily poised and delicate - and erotic - flower pictures, and the eerily immediate studies of statues whose creamy, marmoreal flesh-tones seem more real than that of many of his living models.
Here again, however, he was at pains to emphasise the ambiguousness of his vision. He insisted, for instance, that he did not like flowers, despite the thousands of photographs he made of them. "These are," he declared, "New York flowers", by which I take him to mean that what he wanted was not the living plants, but a stylised, denatured version of them.
This tension between life and non-life, between nature and the manmade world, between the organic and the synthetic, takes on a deep poignancy in his last self-portraits, made when he was in the final stages of AIDS, in which he presents himself foursquare before us in all the starkness and dereliction of illness, a living death's-head, grimly knowing, horribly smiling, challenging us to confront the spectacle of mortality. These are Robert Mapplethorpe's most shocking pictures, and his most authentic, a last testament that compels us to acknowledge the seriousness of his intent, and the weight of his achievement.
The exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs is at the Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin, from Thursday