Stuck in Mapplethorpe
It occurred to me yesterday that what has launched me on my most recent exploration of representation was that horrible binary of objective/subjective. I was reading Browning’s preface to Shelley’s poems over the summer. In Browning’s view, the problem with “subjective” poets like Shelley, is that their entire life becomes fair game in evaluating their stature. If you don’t like the kind of person that the poet is, it becomes difficult to judge their poetry fairly. The ill fortune of many artists who are less than admirable human beings, is that they are judged on their behavior rather than their art. The “objective” artist who sees himself in conversation with some mythic fabric of time (like Eliot) has been seen as superior across the early twentieth century. In Browning’s view, taking an “objective” stance, one evades criticism of one’s personal life— it becomes off limits, outside of consideration— if you successfully buy into the myth of objectivity. It’s safer, and more artistically sanctioned to remove yourself from your art. It’s so paradoxical— to assert the authority of your hand in your work, you must chop it off by denying that you control it. But it depends on the age. After the sixties, the rise of the “me” generation has swung the pendulum back to subjectivity.
The more I consider the problem, the more it seems parallel to Foucault’s theories regarding the repressive hypothesis and the formation of sexuality— and by extension, identity. Rather than looking at the endless cycles of repression and rebellion, or in my case, the assertion and withdrawal of subjectivity in representation, it seems like that question is all wrong. There is no denying that repression and subjectivity have happened, and continue to happen but no matter how these questions are cast, the approach becomes circular. For Foucault, breaking out of the box means turning instead to consider regimes of power. I think that in my case, what I’m looking for are the regimes of value.
I’ve been reading a articles on Robert Mapplethorpe lately, for a class. I never cared for his work much, and never really saw what all the fuss was about. I thought he was overwhelmingly average, not bad as an artist but certainly not groundbreaking. An idealizing, universalizing vision for the most part— the male nudes and flowers are neoclassical, or better still— high modernist. Heads are removed, body parts excised from context. In the S&M stuff, there is that modernist flouting of the very conventions they assert— stuffing a bullwhip up the ass of classicism. Yawn. It’s been done, folks. Provocation replaces personality as the value of the day. Since the romantic period, provocation has been a staple of our discourse. Posing as an outsider, subverting a system when you’re operating so far from within that system that your position is much like that of the bullwhip in the infamous photograph. Understanding how power works seems a more viable way of figuring a way out of the “identity crisis,” and understanding how “value” works is a better way of understanding representation. Subjective/Objective isn’t the real binary, useful/useless is. Somehow, I think Mapplethorpe’s creative stock is horribly overvalued, in no small part because his “objective” approach is misread as a subjective one. He was provocateur of the week.
The paradox of how a conventional artist following time-honored traditions should suddenly become a superstar due to confrontational value alone deeply mystifies me. The subjective side, the question of his lifestyle, rather than being a damning force as it was with Shelley becomes an object of intense valuation for the art establishment. To photograph something is to claim that it has value— that it is worth preserving as an object of study, of desire, or merely of fascination. The subaltern will always carry with it its own values, its own politics. And the reception of these objects by the core hegemony says much more about the purchaser, than it does the producer. What irritates me about Mapplethorpe is not his position as a radical representative of a cultural minority, but the conservatism underneath it. And more than that, the readiness of a critical establishment to attribute great depth to such a shallow puddle. I suppose it’s like Swift said— when a well is dark, it appears to be deep no matter how shallow it is.
I remember when I was worried, around ten years ago, regarding politics in art. I asked the head of a local arts council what her opinion was. She said: “I don’t care if works are overtly political, as long as I agree with the politics.” That seems to be the biggest value across the 80s and 90s in art curatorship. I accept now what I couldn’t accept then— all art is rhetorical, and hence, deeply political— the only difference is the strategy used to hide it. I agree with Foucault that power is more effective when hidden. The hidden power of the art establishment, like the literary establishment of Swift’s day, is deeply self-congratulatory and self-serving. You can hang your pictures in the service of the revolution but it never happens, because deeply seeded in each picture are the structures it seeks to overthrow.
