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Kardon's analysis should be critiqued not for its alienation to art,
but rather for its uncritical acceptance of this "scientific" legitimation
of art interpretation, which I call "late formalism." It assumed a quasi-scientific
dispassion in the face of art. As a formalist "scientist," Dennis Barrie
described a Mapplethorpe photograph with the necessary professional distance.
The original is quite striking. . . in terms of light
and composition. It is certainly not a titillating composition, and where
it is certainly a very tough and, for some, very disgusting subject, it
is very well realized.32 
This "scientific" and professional reading of Mapplethorpe, with its inherently
masculine interpretative sheen, fulfills in an unintended and bizarre way
the masculine content of Mapplethorpe's photography. Scientific dispassion
is not alien to the photographs that parody (perhaps even cruelly) a type
of science of observation unto themselves. The directors' responses, though
attempting to avoid the problem of subject matter, replicate the vision
of the artist better than could have been achieved in any other context.
As a male response to a male art that is itself distant and stiff, the
directors' various responses answered Mapplethorpe's dispassion and perhaps
tragically but predictably entrapped it within itself.33
Their controlled testimony from the witness box came closer to giving us
insights into the Mapplethorpian aesthetic than Danto's insistence that
we feel the art in and for itself (without, of course, the values
becoming "ours").34
Danto's claim that we see the content misses the point of Mapplethorpe's
photography, which revolves tantalizingly around voiding content. In critiquing
the directors and admiring Mapplethorpe, Danto thus failed to recognize
underlying similarities in the bizarre alliance between museum directors
and Mapplethorpe, not only in location but in descriptive words.
Both aspire to a masculine autonomy of observation. The fact that Mapplethorpe
was homosexual (i.e., is legitimately "male") does not mean that his male
optic is any more legitimate than that the professional male optic of the
directors is illegitimate. The difference is that he used it to make art,
not analyze it.
The problem with Kardon's scientific "description" is therefore not
with its apparent alienation from art (it is meant to be alienation in
the same way, but in different terms, as Mapplethorpe), but in the attempt
to locate meaning through distance. Art is studied not in and for itself,
so the theory goes, out of some personal interest. Rather, through intense,
unprejudiced observation it teaches us—so it claims—about ourselves. Robert
Sobieszek, curator of photography at the George Eastman House, explained
that Mapplethorpe's art was not an arbitrary game, but "a search for meaning,"
by which he meant that it should be judged not as an involuntary psychological
disturbance, but out of artistic exploration itself. Questions of beauty
or ugliness must to be discussed in the context of the artist's work, not
as abstract a priori determinants. "We learned," one juror commented after
the Mapplethorpe trial, "that a work doesn't have to be pretty to be art."35
An argument similar to this led Ervin Panofsky, a few decades ago, to
interpret the Baroque not as its previous detractors had—namely as an art
of the deformed, vulgar, and unclassical—but as the very paradigm of modern
self-consciousness. The emotional intensity and sensuality of Caravaggio
was not the product of loose sentimentality,
but of the painter's confidence in human emotions. The sensual and orgasmic
content of Bernini's St. Theresa was not vicarious eroticism, but
a search for inner depth.36
Rudolf Arnheim took a similar tack when he defended "schizoid art." Art
of the insane, instead of being merely the jottings of madmen, provide
profound insights into human expressivity. In looking at the work of Vincent
van Gogh, for example, Arnheim felt that schizophrenia, instead of being
a debilitating disease, actually enhanced van Gogh's creative abilities,
releasing energies that strengthened and intensified his artistic work.37
As a result, psychotic artworks touch vulnerable aspects
of the human mind so directly that they arouse emotional public responses
almost everywhere . . . only because it derived from deep-seated psychological
sources shared by all human beings.38
The unprejudiced view of art enabled "difficult" art to be salvaged from
offhand aesthetic judgments and placed in the context of our enlightenment
and humanity. Baroque, schizoid, and of course modern art in general were
argued to contribute to a greater cultural significance than might be apparent
at first glance. Panofsky investigated the Baroque because such study provides
valuable insights into the nature of modern self-consciousness. Arnheim
saw schizoid art as offering valuable insights into the workings of creativity,
and Greenberg defended the difficult art of modernist abstraction because
it served a determining role in leading a skeptical and nostalgic bourgeoisie
away from its love of inconstancy and popular culture. Unlike kitsch, which
he felt constituted a culturally dangerous anti-art, modernist art elevated
our collective aesthetic consciousness. T. S. Eliot, an important American
formalist, explained in his "Cultural Forces in the Human Order," that
"in the end, the judgment of a work of art by either religious or aesthetic
standards will come to the same thing."39
Morality was achieved not through preaching, but through the artwork.
The prosecution lawyers were obviously unaware of this aspect of formalist
history, because they failed to notice that the museum directors could
not legitimize Mapplethorpe's "difficult art" for its larger humanistic
purposes as the theory demands. This would have been a dangerous task anyway,
as it would certainly have been twisted by the prosecution to become a
defense of gay practices. The museum directors could not go beyond the
designation "difficult," and in the process equated—unintentionally but
demeaningly—homosexual art with Baroque and schizoid art. At first, Danto
seems to fall into the same trap.
One worked one's way past portraits, nudes, and still
lifes, some in shaped and classy frames, until one comes to a room, diagonally
across from the threshold, of difficult images.40
In this, Danto was not saying anything different from the museum directors.
"They are images of rejection, aggression, anxiety," Martin Friedman explained;
as such, "they are without doubt, difficult images, but they are images
central to his work."41
Mapplethorpe was not making snapshots of lewd situations or recording "practices
within the gay community," as a police officer tried to contextualize Mapplethorpe;
but "reacted painfully" to his conditions, Friedman added.42 |
