Two shocking testaments
Bruce Bernard
MAPPLETHORPE with an essay by Arthur C. Danto Cape, £60, pp. 380 SEX by Madonna, photographs by Steven Meisel Secker & Warburg, £25, pp. 120 Arthur C. Danto's Mapplethorpe is one of the most interesting monographs on a photographer that I have ever seen, because it seems more relentlessly and completely personal than any other and because there are so many remarkable and well reproduced photographs in it (more than 300 by themselves and more in the text). I have often wondered uncertainly how much I admired Robert Mapple- thorpe's work, and because I really liked him on the few occasions that we met, I'm glad to find that I admire most of it a lot, and more than I thought I would. I first met him at the austere and modest penthouse at No.1, 5th Avenue, where the patrician Sam Wagstaff held photographic seminars in his faded blue jeans. I had come to see his unequalled collection for journalistic reasons. Sam had been pro- voked into making himself the greatest ever collector of photographs by Robert, who already had a very fine collection him- self. They had been lovers, and Sam, on dying of Aids in 1987, would leave Robert most of his fortune, when he himself was clearly marked out for the same terrible, but in the New York art world, not un- common catastrophe. I liked Mapplethorpe at once because he seemed entirely direct, unaffected and economical in his speech and appeared to be only interested in things of the highest quality. And whatever may be thought of his work, that is its foundation. Though his priapic preoccupation has made him noto- rious, I think he made more intelligent and sympathetic, if less stylised, portraits of both men and women than Avedon or Penn, both of whom he remarked 'started in commercial photography and then got into art', thus separating the two. . Mapplethorpe's flower pieces are pictures as much for himself as anybody and are only obliquely and subtly related to the Conde Nast ethos. I confess I don't entirely like the 'weirdness' he acknowl- edged in them, but they are extraordinary things. I must also admit to not normally caring for relentlessly sharp, deep-focus and predominantly static photography, and most of Mapplethorpe is that. He would irritate me, as Edward Weston mostly does, if his technical procedures did not perfectly serve his much more complex and reckless attitude towards his subject matter.
As to his notorious pictures of cocks and other quite shocking homoerotic images and visual puns, which he sometimes delib- erately carried to absurd or grotesque lengths (though some of the more simply erotic nudes and intimate portraits are really beautiful), it seems to me that it is to do with a depressing, if understandable, American notion of homosexuality as a moral gesture against American Dreams, together with a curious fascination with `aesthetising' and making monumental the prime instrument and consequently object of lust — but just as importantly asserting his candour for its own sake. It is certain that, unlike common pornography, they cannot be undone. They are art, however rebarbative.
Phillip Prioleau, 1979 I once suggested to him that his work was almost entirely permeated with melan- choly, and he readily agreed. It is neither warm nor cold and seems indeed to have no temperature. I see his more obsessive photographs as a challenge to override many of my natural responses and his life's work as one of the most deeply felt set of photographs ever taken. Arthur C. Danto's substantial text surveys it all with pains- taking intelligence and Mark Holborn and Dimitri Levas have made the book a truly handsome production.
The much heralded and shameless diatribe, Sex, comes ring-bound in alumini- um boards with what seems a vulva symbol cut out of the back and an X, as it were, marking the spot. I first looked at it with some distinguished graphic design friends who liked it for looking like a smart late- Fifties art college magazine, so I had to concede that, whatever else it is, it is at least a nostalgic book for ageing graphic designers. There are all kinds of typograph- ical conceits: photographs printed in two or three arbitrary colours, negatives printed as positive, some text written in phoney, deco- rative longhand and acres of meaningless contact sheets used to reinforce the scrap- book effect.
The introductory text is a crummy paean of praise for sex and love, which, we are told, don't often coincide, together with a declaration from the authoress that she does not condone unsafe sex, and that 'condoms are mandatory'. She then promises to teach us how to fuck, and a few pages follow, uninstructively, with pictures of two SM lesbians having a lot of their way with Madonna. And so it goes on: the les- bian narrative 'hornier' than the 'straight' ones, but none better or wittier than the fantasies off any newsagent's top shelf. A gesture of solidarity is made to male homo- sexuality with crowds of sullen beach boys and their dinner-jacketed patrons in close contact, sometimes with Madonna in their midst.
I've heard that Steven Meisel is one of the highest paid photographers in the world, but under the art direction of Madonna he and his 'team' have only been successful in evoking a strangely timeless banality. In the last meaningless 'story' the photographs reminded me of a series called Photocrime which appeared in a popular Thirties magazine — simple and boring detective stories told in set-up photographs. Madonna's text and the pic- tures seldom go together, but that's proba- bly just being cute, and her 'letters' are very untouchingly written on ruled paper. Furthermore, you never even get a decent look at the pussy about which she waxes as eloquent as she is able to be.
To compare Mapplethorpe and Madon- na is, in a sense, ridiculous, but they are both trying to resolve the problem of sex in the context of a freedom only limited by possibility and a few necessary laws. Both give us a glimpse of an abyss, but Mapplethorpe will surely be seen as a much more meaningful figure of our time. He is, at the very least, always intelligent, while Madonna and her team fail to estab- lish her as anything at all. No Whore of Babylon she, nor any relation of Marilyn's. I trust that she will be as forgettable as she's tedious and depressing. But both books perhaps indicate that we need all the help we can get.
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