Season’s Bleatings: The War on Christmas Starts at the Smithsonian

The signs of the holiday season are upon us: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, twinkling lights, overdecorated malls, and now, finally, the annual conservative cri de Coeur—The War on Christmas! This year, the battle begins at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which has played host to the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture since October 30^th. An intrepid conservative reporter finally stumbled upon (or disingenuously timed coverage of) the exhibition this past week and fired the first shot in 2010’s War on Christmas by taking aim at the late David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video “A Fire in My Belly.” Somehow a show centered on difference and desire in American portraiture has become a “Christmas show,” as conservatives take umbrage with Wojnarowicz’s imagery of a crucified Jesus Christ covered in ants (a still from the film is shown above). So, let’s all gather under the tree and let the Season’s Bleatings begin. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Season's Bleatings."

Out in the Open: Sexual Differences in Art

"Telling the history of art without the history of gay people is like telling the history of slavery without mentioning black people," says David C. Ward, curator of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. "There's been an entire history hiding in plain sight." In Hide/Seek, art history comes out of the closet and out into the open, working specifically in the area of American portraiture to give a general impression of the role of persons of sexual difference in the art we already know and love. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Out in the Open."

Body Shop

Rachel Spencer’s Financial Times review of Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfection of Form at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy caught my eye last week. The Galleria dell’Accademia, home to Michelangelo’s David and other great sculptures by the master, draws a very clear, very distinct line between Michelangelo and Mapplethorpe’s approaches to the depiction of the human body. The idea itself seems fantastic. Unfortunately, according to Spencer, the execution fails to match the promise of that idea. Only a few works by Mapplethorpe appear near any of the Michelangelos, with the rest of Mapplethorpe’s work screened off in another part of the museum, as if they didn’t want the mainstream, David-loving tourists to accidentally see anything by Mapplethorpe. “Such an impoverished comparison merely teases at the possibility of a shared aesthetic,” Spencer laments, and I have to agree. Mapplethorpe’s Derrick Cross (above, from 1985) presents the human form at the peak of muscularity with all the unreality and symbolism of anything by Michelangelo, with the added twist that Mapplethorpe’s subjects actually existed in the physical world, whereas Michelangelo’s flexed and twisted only in his mind.

Spencer suggests Piero della Francesca as a better classical analogue for Mapplethorpe. She argues that Mapplethorpe’s dispassionate, almost mathematical approach to subjects such as Thomas (above, from 1987) follows the example of Piero more than that of the passionate, “agony and the ecstacy” Michelangelo. I’m not a big fan of the either/or dichotomy of passion version precision. There is certainly a great deal of precision and balance in all of Michelangelo’s figures at their most passionate. The David sculpture at the Galleria dell’Accademia sneers with defiance, but he stands balanced and almost symmetrically on two sturdy legs. Conversely, Mapplethorpe’s figures stretch themselves to the point of almost breaking to achieve his desired poses, but the rippling muscles and taut ligaments also speak of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s that rippled through and stretched the gay community to its limits. I see great passion in Derrick Cross, Thomas, and other photographs of Mapplethorpe from this period when such “perfect” bodies symbolized the breaking down of gay men’s bodies by disease and the failure of the American body politic to set aside prejudice and come to their aid.


Is the unspoken issue of this Mapplethorpe—Michelangelo pairing the artists’ shared sexual orientation? Michelangelo’s sexuality remains a topic of debate for scholars, but works such as Prigione Barbuto (above, 1530), one of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures of slaves, make more sense when seen in a homoerotic way. Sadly, Mapplethorpe remains the untouchable third rail of American art history for many museums, even twenty years after his death by AIDS. Perhaps only in Europe could Mapplethorpe be allowed to stand beside masters of the Western heritage, whereas American art continues to segregate Mapplethorpe and other homosexual artists into a defined zone separate from the mainstream. “Here, the absence of sex shots haunts the show like Banquo’s Ghost,” Spencer writes of Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfection of Form’s lacking of Mapplethorpe’s more notoriously explicit photographs. Perhaps the best way to exorcise that erotic ghost once and for all is to allow it to walk freely and be seen, not only for better understanding Mapplethorpe but also for better understanding Michelangelo.

Sex and Magic

"For me, S&M means sex and magic, not sadomasochism,” the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe once said. “It is all about trust." Born November 4, 1946, Mapplethorpe became the poster child for cultural controversy in the 1980s as AIDS, the disease that claimed Mapplethorpe’s life in 1989, thrust homosexuality into the American spotlight and opened up discussion of all types of sexual conduct. Whereas most of us see violence in many of the acts Mapplethorpe alludes to in his photography, he saw intimacy—acts natural to his sense of sexuality. Mapplethorpe fostered through his work an ideal of male physical beauty to rival the traditional female ideal in art. Mapplethorpe’s Robert Sherman (above, from 1983) echoes Man Ray’s famous portrait of Lee Miller titled simply Neck. Whereas Miller embodied the idea of the female muse for Ray, Sherman’s bald pate and heavily muscled neck and shoulders does the same for Mapplethorpe. Personally, I find much of Mapplethorpe’s work disturbing, but that’s more of an issue of my own boundaries than of any failure on his part. Sexuality is perhaps the most deeply personal aspect of whom we are, so any judgment is by definition a personal value judgment and not, as many hold, some universal rule to which all must conform. Sadly, Mapplethorpe’s sexuality and his artistic exploration of his sexuality still overshadow his larger achievement as an artist.

Mapplethorpe knew and exploited the whole history of Western art, especially in the field of portraiture. He felt a special kinship with musicians, including Deborah Harry, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, and Patti Smith (shown photographed above, from 1976). Mapplethorpe also photographed Smith for the cover of her first album, Horses. During the days of disco, Mapplethorpe enjoyed the freer sexual and cultural climate that these musicians came to embody. Unlike so many other celebrity photographers, Mapplethorpe actually maintained his high art aspirations while climbing the social ladder. The photo of Smith above reflects the singer’s “naked” style of emotional singing and playing. Smith famous “unladylike” persona struck back against sexual stereotypes as much as Mapplethorpe did in his sexually charged photography. It’s fascinating to see how Mapplethorpe flourished during this period knowing in retrospect the struggles he faced in the American culture wars just a few years later.

With the possible exception of Brett Weston, Edward’s son, Mapplethorpe emulated the flower and vegetable studies of Edward Weston like no other. Mapplethorpe’s Calla Lilly (above, from 1988), one of a series of studies of that flower, captures all the beauty of the surfaces and folds in striking close-up. Like Georgia O’Keeffe, Mapplethorpe also clearly alludes to the sexual overtones of the flower’s shape, but by the fact of his sexual orientation turns those allusions on their head. Sexual politics aside, Mapplethorpe knew how to create striking images in any format. The fact that his name has become synonymous with controversy seems a sad legacy. However, the number of artists and curators who have risen to his defense in the name of artistic freedom gives one hope that one day Mapplethorpe’s work will hang beside that of his inspirations and bring a sprinkling of that sex and magic that pervades all his art.