Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Nudes: High or Low Culture?

Introduction:

Robert Mapplethorpe was truly a unique and important figure in the art scene of 80s and 90s in America and still remains as such. His personal life as well as his artwork have always received a lot of attention, both negative and positive. He managed to shock and leave spectators in bewilderment with his explicit gay photographs. Although the word ‘shocking’ comes to mind first when looking at most of Robert Mapplethorpe’s nudes, he once told ARTnews: “I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking.’ I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before...I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.” Nevertheless, Mapplethorpe’s perverse and explicit eroticism, his stark and honest approach to expressing his feelings of what it is like being a homosexual artist ‘has been at the center of a major controversy in the United States concerning public funding of contemporary art’ (Mercer, 1991: 184) and attracted immense involvement from the American government in defying ‘decency’ of art. These political attacks against some forms of expression through the medium of photography had put artistic freedom of many at stake. Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial oeuvre had made some dramatic changes in contemporary art and provoked artists to fight for their right to create freely. His work, especially the black male nudes that Mapplethorpe produced throughout late seventies and early eighties exacerbated a number of political social and cultural issues and made him widely known. Because Mapplethorpe’s gay and black male photography often generate rather ambivalent views, this dissertation will, therefore, explore different criteria by which his work could be read and essentially will determine whether the intention of his black male nudes were either to emphasis the privilege of being white or embrace the beauty of a black male’s body and destroy conventional stereotypes. The first chapter will expound the theory of the ‘traditional’ male gaze, which was proposed by one of the most notable feminist theorists Laura Mulvey, where the spectator is male and the subject is always a woman. This idea will then be applied to Robert Mapplethorpe’s nudes, where both the subject and the viewer are male. Moreover, this creates an even stronger controversy due to the racial differences between the spectator and the sitter. The chapter will then evolve into discourse about the racial and cultural stereotypes and how they were formed by well-respected philosophers and thinkers of the time and the long-term influence of this stereotypical thinking on visual representation of black people in the West centuries later. Lastly, the fetishistic and other origins of the fixative gaze and the possible explanations of this phenomenon will be discussed. It will be important to also include the potential reasons for Mapplethorpe’s racial fixation or racial fetishism that is persistent throughout his black male imagery. These topics will assist us in getting a clearer understanding of his mindset and will also help to determine his feelings towards black subjects that he photographed.

The first part of the second chapter will then be dedicated to the work of Frantz Fanon, a French philosopher of the 50s, and his influential ideas in the field of colonial and post-colonial studies. In one of his most famous books “Black Skin White Masks” he explores what it is like to identify oneself as a man of colour and what it is like to be identified as such by others, especially by the white world. He also explores the strong persistent feeling of self-consciousness when a Negro is among white men and the psychic identity or the lack of it of black people that are constantly under the pressure to prove to be ‘different from different’ to a white man. Depersonalization and alienation of ‘Others’ still take place in the West and therefore these psychic identification issues do have a major impact on visual representation of a black man. Therefore, it is crucial to discuss these matters and take them into account when analysing Robert Mapplethorpe’s black nudes. The second part of this chapter will then aim to explore how common stereotypes shaped the image of a black man – ‘the black man as athlete, savage, or mugger’ (Mercer, 1991: 187) and how Mapplethorpe appropriates this typical image of black man and shows it in an unusual until recently light. Hence Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography creates such ambivalent opinions, which will also be discussed in this chapter. Finally, the third and final chapter will be based on the discourse on AIDS and how this disease shaped the gay community and art world in the 80’s and 90’s in America. And therefore how the social response to AIDS contributed to constructing an opinion of Robert Mapplethorpe’s personal life that got exposed to a wider public after his diagnosis and also his often explicit gay imagery. In order to get a better look at what the social opinion of AIDS and gay community was at that time, it will be useful to look at the work of Tim Dean ‘Psychoanalysis of AIDS’ which gives a detailed explanation of the social and hence political response to HIV positive community in the US in late eighties and early nineties. Following the discourse on social response to AIDS, this dissertation will also talk about ‘the Jesse Helms Theory of Art’, which is essentially an article about the cultural wars that Jesse Helms (an American Senator that retired in 2003) used to play. This includes his antipathetic views on Robert Mapplethorpe personally and also harsh criticism and often accusations against Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre. Helm’s fixation on Mapplethorpe’s homosexuality and also his view that "every AIDS case can be traced back to a homosexual act” (Congressional Record, October 14, 1987, p. S14200 ff) can be identified as homophobic and even racist. Unfortunately, Helm’s attempts to censor and restrict artistic freedom were often successful that resulted in dramatic changes of art scene throughout 80s and 90s in America. Nevertheless, this intention to censor ‘has helped bring Mapplethorpe's work to the attention of a wider public audience’ (Mercer, 1991: 184) and as a consequence protests for freedom of self-expression took place. To summarise, this dissertation will explain the ambivalence that Robert Mapplethorpe’s work creates and also evaluate the arguements for and against his black nudes. It will also shed some light on deciding whether his work and his approach was racist.

Chapter 1: The Gaze, Racial Fetishism and Colonial Fantasy

Laura Mulvey, one of the key figures in film theory, states in her essay ‘Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema’ that ‘looking itself is a source of pleasure’ (Mulvey, 1985: 806), which is also known as something called scopophilia. Scopophilia ‘arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight’ (Mulvey, 1985: 808). This term, which was translated from the German ‘Schaulust’, was first introduced by Sigmund Freud in his work ‘Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality’, where he discusses this topic in detail. It can essentially be described as gaining sexual pleasure from looking by subjecting people to a controlling gaze and turning them into sexualised objects. The closest synonym of scopophilia would be voyeurism. Bearing this fact in mind, it is safe to assume that this principle of deriving pleasure from looking is used in all types of visual media such as advertising, journalism as well as television and everything else that includes visual imagery. It is also crucial to point out that Laura Mulvey is of an opinion that only women alone are subjected to that gaze, hence the term ‘male gaze’, whereas ‘the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification’. (Mulvey, 1985: 810). Further more, this sexist theory is backed up by another well-known and distinguished British art critic called John Berger. In his highly influential book ‘Ways Of Seeing’ he analyses and questions Western idea of visual culture and art aesthetics and also explores the topic of the male gaze in depth.

Women are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is different from the masculine – but because the ’ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him.

However, this theory cannot be fully applied to Mapplethorpe’s black nudes for an obvious reason: the spectator artist and the subject are both male. Therefore, it creates a different kind of gaze, a gay male gaze. Kobena Mercer, an established art historian and the author of a number of books and whose work includes mostly of exploring black art culture, proves this point by stating that ‘in Mapplethorpe’s case, however, the fact, that both subject and object of the gaze are male sets up a tension between the active role of looking and the passive role of being looked at.’ (1999: 437) On top of that, because Mapplethorpe deliberately chose his subjects to be black and male, it results in even bigger tension, that involves the racial polarity as well as the fact that both of the model and the photographer (spectator) are male. The proof of such theory can be found in Mercer’s statement that ‘sexual sameness transfers erotic investment in the fantasy of mastery from gender to racial difference’ (1994: 176). As a result, although traditionally, as Berger claims, ‘the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women’, Mapplethorpe breaks all the rules of classic nudes by ‘“feminizing” the black male body into a passive, decorative objet d’art.’ (Mercer, 1999: 439) Further more, the apparent fact that Mapplethorpe, who plays the role of both spectator and the creator of the photographs, is a white male, plus, being of homosexual orientation, chooses his subject to be a black male, makes it logical to point out the significance of the racial difference as well as the wish of ‘mastery’ of black men and the power of white male hierarchy, that still remains apparent nowadays, in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography. Following all the rules of composition of Renaissance nude paintings, Mapplethorpe’s specific ‘way of looking’ on the black bodies that he photographed is telling us more about himself and his own ‘fantasies or mastery’ rather than the story of the black male that he depicted.

Kobena Mercer backs up this hypothesis in his essay on Mapplethorpe’s black nudes called ‘Looking For Trouble’:

The position to which the spectator is invited to identify can be described as a white male subject-position, not so much because Robert Mapplethorpe is himself white and male, but because of the fantasy of mastery inscribed in the "look" which implies a hierarchical ordering of racial identity historically congruent with the power and privilege of hegemonic white masculinity.

Moreover, in the Western art culture, as Kobena Mercer puts it, ‘black male sexuality is perceived as something different, excessive, Other’. This particular perception of a black male’s body is not seen by Mercer alone. Homi K. Bhabha, the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University, and one of the most significant figures in post-colonial studies, shares a similar view on the same topic. He believes that ‘Otherness’ 'is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity’. (Bhabha, 1983: 19). Hence there appears to be the salient discrepancy between a black male as a chosen subject and Mapplethorpe’s abidance by the codes and aesthetics of traditional fine art nude. He successfully appropriates the common mass media stereotype that black men are savages and muggers, and puts this irony into play. Mercer Kobena suggests that Robert Mapplethorpe’s work shows ‘the interdependency between systems of representation at opposite ends of the hierarchy of aesthetic and cultural value.’ Mercer also expounds the antipathetic, but modern in the 19th century, view on the black culture, the echo of which we can still experience nowadays:

Kant and Hegel both emphasized, it was unthinkable that Africans could embody the aesthetic ideal by which the narcissistic self-image of the West saw itself at the transcendental center of world civilization. The a priori exclusion of the racial Other was not unrelated to the hierarchical separation of "art" from "everyday life," as the value invested in high culture necessarily depends on the denial of value in what is regarded as low culture.

Immanuel Kant, who has been named as one of the greatest philosophers of the West, is widely known by his lifetime work ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ and his views on race. It is not unexpected that his perception of the black culture is seen as crude and bold by some when he states the following: 'the Negro can be disciplined and cultivated but never genuinely civilized' (Refl. 1520, 15: 878). Not only Kant, but George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher, who is considered the one who revolutionized European philosophy, also shared a similar opinion on black race: ‘observations of African man show him as living in a state of savagery and barbarism, and he remains in this state to the present day’. (1997: 125) These rather bold statements allow us to assume that the traces of these ideas of highly influential figures of their time have remained and still influence the modern art world and shape the views of what is considered ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture to the present day. What is so different about Mapplethorpe’s black nudes is that he managed to include both ‘the pure and the polluted’ that ‘fold together in the same pictorial space’ (Mercer, 1991: 192). As a consequence, such strong contrast often results in the ambivalence of views on Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, on black nudes in particular. Presumingly, Mapplethorpe’s idea of using this well-known stereotype is to also create a vivid example of racial ‘fixity’. The term ‘fixity’ is similar to a stereotype and can be applied to cultural, racial as well as historical differences. This idea of ‘fixation’ is confirmed when looked at his photographs of Lisa Lyon, a female bodybuilder that Mapplethorpe saw through ‘a thousand cultural stereotypes of femininity’ (Ibid, 1991: 187). Hence, Mercer argues that Mapplethorpe’s ‘obsessive undercurrent in his black nudes would appear to confirm this emphasis on fixity’ (1991: 187).

Lisa Lyon 1982 Robert Mapplethorpe

In addition to what has been said earlier, Homi K. Bhabha is of an opinion that ‘an important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of “fixity” in the ideological construction of otherness’.

Therefore, the discourse on the significance of the white male (gay) gaze in Mapplethorpe’s case brings us to discuss the decisive role of colonial fantasy and racial fetishism, which, according to Kobena Mercer, does take place in his Black Nudes. Mercer argues that racial fetishism in Mapplethorpe’s work ‘lubricates the ideological reproduction of "colonial fantasy" based on the desire for mastery and power over the racialized Other’. He also believes that ‘the fixative function of the stereotype [that Mapplethorpe employed] played the decisive role in reproducing colonial fantasy’. A clear example of racial fetishism can be found in Mapplethorpe’s choice of framing his photographs. His black nudes not only emphasize sexuality of those black men he depicted by just capturing them nude, but also by identifying them solemnly by their black penis. Kobena Mercer stresses out that this deliberate framing transforms them, the Other, from being just sexual to hypersexual. (Mercer, 1991: 187) Robert Mapplethorpe employs square format negatives (medium format) for most of his black nudes and other photographs, which makes it easier to make use of the very centre of an image. For example, the emphasis of the image below is situated right in the middle, where he chooses to put the penis, therefore, there appears to be a very strong stress on this black male’s genitalia. Frantz Fanon, another significant figure in post-colonial studies, wrote in his book ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, that ‘one is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is a penis.’ (1986: 170). It may seem that what Mapplethorpe was trying to achieve with his photographs is to stress the role of the common stereotype in the Western culture even further, to mock the black and present a spectator the real image of a black man: an inferior savage.

Moreover, one of the characteristics of the scopoptophilic instinct is described as the desire ‘to look at the genitals of the desired person or to watch him or her performing the functions of excretion’ (Freud, 1977: vol. 7). This important discovery made by Freud plays a significant role in understanding the desires and intentions of Robert Mapplethorpe and the outcome of his fantasies and desires. In support of Freud’s theory of this sexual instinct, Otto Fenichel claims that often ‘the person who looks is fascinated by that which he sees.’ (Fenichel, 1999: 328). On top of that, he also states that the nature of this scopophilic instinct is many cases directed toward objects. ‘The underlying tendency may be formulated as follows: “I wish what I see to enter into me”’. (Fenichel, 1999: 330). In addition to the previous statement, Otto Fenichel also tells us that ‘scoptophilic instincts regularly include elements of sadism and the desire to incorporate the object’. In many cases, that desire to incorporate or to subject something or someone to the devouring gaze comes from the will to share the experience. Fenichel believes that the sharing of the experience with the object is made by a process of empathy. As a result, this train of thought leads us to assume that empathy to share the experience is intimately linked with identification of oneself. In support of this theory, Otto Fenichel writes that ‘when we are fascinated by some sight, the fixity of our own devouring gaze is not only the basis of physical feeling, but also in fantasy, the bridge by which identification occurs’ (1999: 335) So what does his evidently strong emphasis on the penis of a black man really mean? Did Robert Mapplethorpe produce these photographs to show his fascination with what he saw and therefore to identify himself with the black men he depicted or was it just the colonial fantasy, the fantasy of power over black men? Further discourse on the visual representation of the ‘Other’ in the Western culture will clarify this ambivalence.

Dennis  Speight  1983  Robert  Mapplethorpe  

Chapter 2: Racist or Anti-racist And Idealised ‘Other’

First and foremost, for the sake of getting a better understanding of what is going to be discussed in the second chapter, it is vital to define and explain what really is Idealisation of ‘Other’ and what forms it takes in the Western mass media and art culture. As well as that, it is also essential to look into what it means to be a man of colour in a white man’s world. In order to do that, the best way would be to refer to someone who can investigate this issue from the first-person point of view. Frantz Fanon, a philosopher and a post-colonial writer, who has been mentioned in the first chapter, had dedicated his whole life for purveying the painful truth of what it is like to be a Negro in the world of white supremacy. His extremely personal work speaks ‘from deep within the struggle of psychic representation and social reality’ (Bhabha, 1986: ix) and touches the crucial topic of loss of the identity of a black man when met with a white man and the alienation of the ‘Other’ in the West. This continuing depersonalization and self-consciousness throughout centuries has had its’ effect on discouraging the healthy construction of the psychic identity of black people in the white world. Frantz Fanon states that the problem of alienation does not start out of nowhere. It is not until a man of colour is faced with a white man. ‘As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others’ (Fanon, 1986: 109). He then points out that the ambivalence of his own psychic identity becomes palpable when under the gaze of a white man:

I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty’

Homi Bhabha, whose foreword you can find in Fanon’s ‘Black Skin White Masks’, then breaks down the significant importance of the statement above. The psychic image of identification can also be interpreted as an actual physical image. This easy to grasp comparison helps to clarify the concept behind the idea of self-image and psychic identification. ‘For the image – as a point of identification – marks the site of an ambivalence. Its representation is always spatially split – it makes present something that is absent – and temporally deferred – it is the representation of a time that is always elsewhere, a repetition. The image is only ever an appurtenance to authority and identity’ (Bhabha, 1986: xvii). Thus, the image or better to say the image of identification can never match the reality. And therefore, however, every man of colour is faced with the burden of this ‘image’ of a black man, a stereotype that formed centuries ago. ‘I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for me ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethic characteristics’ (Fanon, 1986: 112). Hence, the white man, who ‘unmercifully imprisoned’ a man of colour within the confines of this stereotypical image or a ‘fixity’, was the reason of this psychic ambivalence, the self-consciousness, the Nausea that black people experience their ‘being through others’.

This feeling of ambivalence drove black men to the point where they identified oneself and proved themselves to be ‘different from those that are different’ (Bhabha, 1986: xvi) through the acknowledgement of a white man. Fanon makes a point that ‘the negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation’. This results accordingly: ‘black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect.’ (Fanon, 1986: 12). And to prove ‘the richness of the thought’ often implies to be accepted in the white world. In the era of colonialism, through education and adoption of European values, a Negro or an Asian could become ‘evolved’ or the French term for such form of Europeanisation is ‘évolué’. However, another road to the white world, according to Fanon, lies through the love of a white woman. ‘By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man.’ (1986: 63). Hence the desire of a black man to possess a white lover. This line of thought leads us to assume that Mapplethorpe was aware of the reason behind the yearning of a black man for interracial relationships and therefore often portrayed his black subjects in the act of love-making or placed them in an intimate setting with a white lover, where they could be taken ‘onto the noble road that leads to total realization’ (Fanon, 1986: 63). The traces of the averment of this theory can be found in a number of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. One of those photographs is on the cover of one of his best selling books called ‘Black Book’. In this image, it could be argued that the position and the shape of the white drop resemble a white woman’s genitals, a ‘door’ to the white world through the love and acceptance of a white woman, that is a man of colour is striving to get into. Due to the lack of written proof of this point, such a way of interpreting the image can only be assumed.

Phillip Prioleau 1982 Robert Mapplethorpe

However, there are far more vivid examples, where Mapplethorpe left a lot less room for reading the photographs in any different way. For example, in the photograph below, Robert Mapplethorpe depicted the act of making love to a white woman itself.

This image could act as the representation of a black man’s wish to prove himself worthy of a white woman’s love, to belong to the white community, to be loved as a white man, as well as the racial sexual fetishism of the white.

Marty and Veronik 1982 Robert Mapplethorpe

This hypothesis is reaffirmed in the third photograph, where we can see a black man portrayed by convention of one of the most common mass media stereotypes: a Negro as an athlete. He is pictured wearing sports clothing, with a white woman resting on his knees. These two factors could also imply the same striving of a black man to be identified as a part of the white world, with a white woman as his lover.

Paris Fashion/Dovanna 1984 Robert Mapplethorpe

Finally, there is another photograph of a black man and a white woman, where potentially the same principle can be applied as to the images above. According to the description of this photograph on the website of Christie’s Fine Art auction house, ‘a highly sexually charged image of a black male nude engaged in a waltz with a white woman in a flowing white evening dress, encompasses issues synonymous with Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre sex, race, class and power’. http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/robert-mapplethorpe-thomas-and-dovanna-1987-4696310-details.aspx?intObjectID=4696310#top

White woman in a white long evening dress could represent what is considered pure and noble in the Western art culture, or it could also be an emphasis on a white world that a Negro desperately wants to be a part of. In addition to that, of course, waltz is a dance that traditionally was practiced by a white privileged European community. As a result, this striking and unlike clash of culture and race was undoubtfully composed in such way to shock and leave a spectator with a feeling of ambivalence, as well as to reference the striving of a black man to be culturally accepted in the white world. Therefore, this particular photograph could carry the same message, but in a much more elegant and sophisticated form than, for example, in ‘Marty and Veronik 1982’. So when these observations are taken into account it is logical to suggest that this particular way of reading Mapplethorpe’s photographs have a firm reason for existence. Presuming, he was aware of the strong urge of a black man to be identified as a white man, ‘for the miserable Negro to whiten himself and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction’ (Fanon, 1986: 111), and Mapplethorpe successfully depicted this aspiration for a man of colour to become ‘different from those that are different’.

When you look at Mapplethorpe’s portraits and photographs of bodies of both black and white men, it is hard to deny that the use of chiaroscuro lighting and composition often forms a strong resemblance with classic Greek sculpture. Mapplethorpe ‘sculpted’ his sitters, turned them into ‘objet d’art’. This evident similarity with the classic sculpture of Ancient Greece is present in most of his nudes and in fact, it is something that Mapplethorpe developed and turned into his own recognisable style. This photograph of Derrick Cross below is one of many examples, where this resemblance is especially remarkable.

Derrick Cross 1983 Robert Mapplethorpe

‘With the tilt of the pelvis, the black man's bum becomes a Brancusi’ (Mercer, 1991: 191) However, one thing that may strike you the most is somewhat obvious – the discrepancy between the size of genitalia in classic Greek sculpture and the size of genitalia in Mapplethorpe’s nudes. Of course, that is not the only difference between the two. It is well known that Ancient Greek sculpture is considered ‘classical’ sculpture, it is an aesthetic ideal of what is deemed to be beautiful. As Kobena Mercer puts it, ‘the model of physical perfection embodied in classical Greek sculpture serves as the mythological origin of the ethnocentric fantasy that there was only one "race" of human beings who represented what was good and true and beautiful’ (1991: 192) The author then expounds his statement further: ‘the Negro was none of these: ugly, animalistic, and ultimately inhuman, the black subject, whether male or female, was necessarily excluded from access to aesthetic idealization on account of its Otherness’ (Ibid, 1991: 192) Therefore, there appears to be another striking difference between classical Greek sculpture and Mapplethorpe’s living ‘sculptures’ -- and that is the colour of the skin. However, despite of what has been said earlier, J.A Rogers, the author of ‘Your History’, states that ‘several sculptors and scientists have said that the finest physiques in the world are to be found among the Negro peoples. Dr. Sargeant, Director of Physical Culture at Harvard University, said in I903 that he thought the Greeks modelled the bodies of some of their finest statues from Negroes and that the Apollo Belvedere, the most superb of all, was modelled from a Negro”. (1940: 44)  As a result, this gives no choice but to reconsider the alleged idea of the universal aesthetic ideal of beautiful. Apart from the ambivalence of psychic identity that had had its considerable impact on the visual representation of a Negro in the West as well as the common racial stereotype (that black men are often portrayed as savages and athletes in the mass media) discussed in the first chapter, it also appears necessary to explore the influence of one of the biggest myths about men of colour on Robert Mapplethorpe’s black nudes – and that is the belief that a black man has a notably bigger penis than a white man. So, as it has been mentioned earlier in this chapter, the significant discrepancy between the genitalia of classic Greek sculpture and Mapplethorpe’s nudes is hard to ignore. And this does not look coincidental. It is said that the size of genitalia in Ancient Greece sculpture served a very specific purpose:

For idealization here entails that the discrepancy between the viewer’s sense of his own sex and the ideal, as well as the accompanying anxiety, be resolved by so diminishing the genitalia that no anxiety concerning discrepancy will arise. The gap between actuality and imago is dealt with by reversing it so that the idealized genitalia do not compete with the real thing; or, more precisely, they are made to compete – gap and disparity are presented – but the spectator wins. (Bryson, 1993: 235)

The assumption that Mapplethorpe purposely emphasized the size of black man’s penis could be based on what has been said above. The purpose of such emphasis could be to affect a white man’s ego. ‘Mapplethorpe summons up from the political unconscious one of the deepest mythological fears in the supremacist imagination’ (Mercer, 1991: 188). In his essay ‘Looking For Trouble’ dedicated entirely to analysing Mapplethorpe’s black nudes, Kobena Mercer talks about the outcome of ‘the belief that all black men have monstrously huge willies’ in constructing visual representation of black men. Although, it has been proven scientifically that this myth is only a myth on multiple occasions, it still seems to fool the minds of many into believing this stereotypical

perception of black male sexuality. Mercer proves it by stating that ‘modern science of sexology repeatedly embarked upon the task of measuring empirical pricks to demonstrate its ideological untruth’. Nevertheless, despite of the scientific evidence, a white man ‘who shrinks in impotence from the thought that the subordinate black male is more sexually powerful than he’ (Mercer, 1991: 188)  often experience anxiety about their ability to satisfy women when compared to the stereotypical aggressive sexual power of a black male. As a result, this common myth that a black male might be more sexually powerful than him drastically affects ego of white men. Therefore, in many cases ‘the other is idolized to the point of envy’ (Mercer, 1999: 439) In addition to the Mapplethorpe’s certain look on black bodies that has been discussed in the first chapter, it is also thought that his gaze is ‘oscillating between sexual idealization of the racial other and anxiety in defence of the identity of the white male ego’ (Mercer, 1999: 438). However, the apparent fact that Robert Mapplethorpe is attracted to black men, makes it logically to assume that the purpose of taking photographs of black nudes was not to mock their sexuality but rather embrace and appreciate the beauty of a black man’s body, to explore the topic that haven not had much attention hitherto and show it in a different light. In a conversation with Marlies Black, who was one of his biggest collectors, Mapplethorpe once said:

‘At some point I started photographing black men. It was an area that hadn't been explored intensively. If you went through the history of nude male photography, there were very few black subjects. I found that I could take pictures of black men that were so subtle, and the form was so photographical’

Evidently, Mapplethorpe is not intimidated by ‘the big black phallus [that] is perceived as a threat’ (Mercer, 1991: 188) in the eyes of a white master. However, he does acknowledge a black penis as a powerful weapon. The perfect example of that can be found in the photograph below where he playfully and rather ironically compares the black penis to a gun.

Cock and Gun 1982 Robert Mapplethorpe

Not only he recognizes the power of black penis, but he also seems to connive that common myth about the size of a black man’s penis. With his photographs, it may seem as if he is saying ‘I know (it's not true that all black guys have big willies), but (nevertheless, in my photographs they do).’ (Mercer, 1999: 188). Mapplethorpe employed that ‘image’ of black men portrayed in the media and took advantage of this myth. Thus, ‘the transformation of the subject assuming that image’ (Bhabha, 1986: xvi) took place in his black nudes. Finally, Mercer Kobena, who once laid structures on Mapplethorpe’s work and called it racist, took a different view on his black nudes:

By virtue of a strategy of promiscuous intertextuality, whereby the overvalued genre of the fine art nude is "contaminated" by the connotative yield of racist fears and fantasies secreted into mass media stereotypes, he shows the interdependency between systems of representation at opposite ends of the hierarchy of aesthetic and cultural value.

Although, according to Frantz Fanon, ‘White civilization and European culture have forced an existential deviation on the Negro.’ (Fanon, 1986: 16), but Mapplethorpe managed to smuggle the ‘polluted’ into the Western art culture and present it in a whole new subliming light. Most Mapplethorpe’s sitters ‘who in all probability came from this underclass are elevated onto the pedestal of the transcendental Western aesthetic ideal.’ (Mercer, 1991: 193) In addition to that, he also states that Mapplethorpe’s ‘aesthetic strategy begins to subvert the hierarchy of the cultural codes that separate the pure and noble values of the fine art nude from the filthy and degraded form of the commonplace racist stereotype’. Robert Mapplethorpe, who ended up to be on the margins of the avant-garde movement in the 70s, openly collaborated with his black subjects, who were also on the margins, but of an underclass. Therefore, as Kobena puts it, ‘the photographs can be read as a document of relations of mutuality under shared conditions of marginality’ (1991: 193). A vivid example of such ‘relations’ can be seen in one of Mapplethorpe’s photographs ‘Embrace’, where the faces of both of the subjects cannot be seen, therefore, this photograph can represent the peace and friendship between black and white all over the world, rather than an embrace of two individuals.

‘Embrace’ 1982 Robert Mapplethorpe

Judging from the statements above, it can be easily argued that Robert Mapplethorpe was hardly a racist, but a fellow social misfit, who was not afraid to express his feelings and political views through the medium of photography. He was also a sufferer from the all-pervading AIDS in the US. This issue was massively neglected in the 70s and 80s and when it was found that Mapplethorpe was one of many, who had to fight with the illness, AIDS suddenly attracted a lot more attention from the press. The impact that AIDS had on Robert Mapplethorpe’s work and how AIDS also helped spectators to perceive and read his photographs differently when news about his illness broke will be discussed in the final chapter.

Chapter 3: AIDS and Jesse Helms Theory of Art

Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in March 1989. Three years prior to that he was diagnosed with this killer disease. Despite of the illness, he still led a creative life of an artist right until his death. In the late 80’s, however, especially after his diagnosis, Mapplethorpe focused more on his floral photography, self-portraiture and celebrity photography, rather than nudes. After his death, Mapplethorpe received a lot more attention from public and ‘a far wider audience than he ever did during his twenty years of art practice on the margins of the New York avant-garde’ (Mercer, 1991: 184). As it was briefly discussed earlier, the views of many took a different, positive, turn after Mapplethorpe’s death. Kobena Mercer, being black as well as gay, changed his opinion on Mapplethorpe’s work after the photographer passed away in 1989. ‘It was the death of the author, and the sense of loss by which the AIDS crisis has affected all our lives, that made me reread the subversive and deconstructive dimension of Mapplethorpe’s modern erotica’ (1991: 192) So how did this deadly disease shape the view on gay and black gay community in the West? The first wave of AIDS swept the US in the 80s and ‘twice as many Americans were killed by AIDS in the first nine years of the epidemic (June 1981 to June 1990) as were claimed as casualties in the nine years (1964-73) of the Vietnam War’ (1993: 83) writes Tim Dean, a British philosopher and author, who is well known for his notable work in queer studies. Back then AIDS was considered the gay disease, that was more common among white men rather than black. In fact, it was actually considered ‘"a white man's disease"-even though we could all see that black people were dying’ (Mercer, 1991: 196). At the time, Robert Mapplethorpe noted that ‘most of the blacks don't have health insurance and therefore can't afford AZT. They all died quickly, the blacks. If I go through my Black Book, half of them are dead’. Mercer expounds this further by stating that ‘this cruel rhetoric of denial…can only imply a negation of diversity and difference in black society’. In order for us to have a broader understanding of the impact of AIDS on everyone, both physical and social, whether gay or straight, we will turn to Tim Dean’s piece of work on AIDS called ‘The Psychoanalysis of AIDS’.

In his essay, Tim Dean asks the readers the obvious question: ‘What can psychoanalysis, which works on the human subject in his or her particularity, say or do in the face of such epidemic dimensions?’ (Ibid, 1993: 83) And then  offers a coherent answer:

Psychoanalysis addresses itself to the subject of speech, it recognizes that every body, including the sick body, is caught in a network of signifiers, a network that mortifies all bodies by precluding access to either one's own jouissance [*psychical or intellectual enjoyment: author’s note] or any knowledge of the body outside of symbolic structure

Tim  Dean  is  of  an  opinion  that  in  order  to  understand  ‘social  responses  to  AIDS’, it will best to use the Lacanian theory of psychosis, ‘particularly because, in his 1959 écrit on the topic, Lacan makes provision, via what he calls "a legitimate analogy," for the concept of social psychosis. The notion of a psychotic society seems pertinent in relation to AIDS because received psychoanalytic wisdom characterizes psychosis as a defense against homosexuality’ (Ibid; 1993: 85), which, basically implies that HIV positive population of America is placed on the margins of the society. Tim Dean reaffirms this by stating that ‘America pushes AIDS - and the social groups seen as representing AIDS - to the outside of its psychic and social economies, treating them exactly like shit’ (Ibid, 1993: 87). He then offers a more thorough explanation of where and how this discrimination takes place:

In New York City, for example, 13,000 PWAs [People With Aids – author’s note] have been literally "put outside," made homeless by a sociopolitical system that refuses to shelter its sick. "Testing is more cost-effective than treatment," said George Bush before his election to president. Following such a lead, emphasis has been placed not on care (who tends their shit?), but on identifying the "outside" (calls for mandatory HIV testing) so that it may be excluded all the more thoroughly (calls for the quarantine of all persons who test positive for HIV).

Of course, the question of social response to AIDS is highly political. To be precise, its symbolization ‘hinges upon a specific political failure, or a series of political failures’ and ’those in power have made every effort to prevent the establishment of any identificatory signifier by which the suffering and deaths of hundreds of thousands of gay men, nonwhites, and other socially marginalized groups could achieve positive significance’ (Ibid, 1993: 95) Therefore, if we refer to what has been stated by Tim Dean above, it can be easily argued that the same principle of discrimination can be applied when it comes to judging Robert Mapplethorpe’s art work and also his life, which had been made more open to the public after the news about his illness broke and especially after his death. However, ‘no comparable cultural effort has been made to symbolize the loss caused by AIDS. Rather, the reverse is true: Ronald Reagan, for example, refused to enunciate the word "AIDS" in public until late 1987, by which point over 25,000 Americans had already died from the epidemic’. (Ibid, 1993: 98) No doubt, as result, this denial and unwillingness to admit the existence of this epidemic and to also acknowledge the fact that more and more gay men suffer from the killer disease brought very ambivalent views on Mapplethorpe’s art. Jesse Helms, who was an American Senator until his retirement in 2003, stated that Robert Mapplethorpe’s work was not art, but “immoral trash”, and was one of many who protested against his “obscene and indecent” photography in various ways. He also formed a campaign against public funding for one of Mapplethorpe’s exhibitions after the death of the author, which attracted a lot of political attention and controversy of Helm’s actions.  

Richard Meyer, an Art History Professor at Stanford University, wrote a piece called ‘The Jesse Helms Theory of Art’, where he discusses ‘the American culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s and…some of the ways in which his [Jesse Helms’s] political legacy continues to reverberate today’ (2003: 131) Meyer argues that ‘Helms's public discourse on Mapplethorpe might best be understood as an attempt to cordon off the visual and symbolic force of homosexuality, to keep it as far as possible from the senator and the morally upstanding citizens he claims to represent’. In addition to that, Helms also ‘collapses Robert Mapplethorpe's homosexuality and AIDS-related death and then projects both onto the thematics of the photographer's work (Ibid, 2003: 134). On numerous occasions the politician would call Mapplethorpe’s art “sick” that clearly creates ‘the symbolic link’ between the photographer’s sickness and HIV infection, latter then is ‘displaced from Mapplethorpe's body to the body of his work as his photographs are said to contaminate an otherwise clean American culture’ (Ibid, 2003: 137) However, during his continuous attack on Robert Mapplethorpe and his work, Helms repeatedly returns to homosexuality although the intention is to repress it. The proof of such a crude statement can be seen in some of his actions against Mapplethorpe’s art: ‘whether by photocopying Mark Stevens (Mr. 10 1/2) for his fellow senators, by repeatedly describing Mapplethorpe's pictures to the press, or by bringing The Perfect Moment catalog home to show his wife’ Jesse Helms ‘continually returns to it [homosexuality]’ (Ibid, 2003: 134)    

Mark  Stevens  (Mr.  10  1/2)  1976  Robert  Mapplethorpe

On top of that, as Meyer puts it, ‘Helms's attempt to restrict homoerotic art operates, however unwittingly, to provoke homoerotic fantasy, not least the senator's own’ (Ibid, 2003: 134) Throughout this ‘culture war’ against Mapplethorpe, where Helms played one of the key roles, it could be seen that his fixation on the artist was obvious and, as a result, this ‘fixation on Mapplethorpe reveals the paradox whereby censorship tends to publicize, reproduce, and even create the images it aims to suppress’.

In his essay, Meyer also talks briefly about Judith Butler and her ‘The Force of Fantasy’ (1990: 105-125), where she, using the same example of Helm’s censorship of homosexuality, confirms that

The effort to limit representations of homoeroticism within the federally funded art world-an effort to censor the phantasmatic -- always and only leads to its production; and the effort to produce and regulate it in politically sanctioned forms ends up effecting certain forms of exclusion that return, like insistent ghosts, to undermine those very efforts

Yet, although some political censorship could actually promote certain issues while the intention is completely the opposite, of course, there are still negative consequences of this censorship and repression of artistic freedom. ‘We need only to consider the changes imposed on the National Endowment for the Arts since the Mapplethorpe controversy-the elimination of nearly all grants to individual artists, for example, or the insistence that every work of federally funded art meet "general standards of decency"-to appreciate the material and legislative force of Helms's anxious fantasies’. (Ibid, 2003: 134) These political attacks on Mapplethorpe’s sexuality and his work did not only affect the art world negatively but there was also a radical change for the American community of HIV positive people. ‘In June 1987, Helms appeared on national television to call for a federal quarantine of people with AIDS’, and a few months ‘later, he successfully sought to prohibit the federal funding of any healthcare information that might "promote, encourage, or condone homosexual sexual activities or the intravenous use of illegal drugs”’ (Ibid, 2003: 138) Jesse Helms’s one of remarkably ignorant statement was that “every AIDS case can be traced back to a homosexual act” (Congressional Record, October 14, 1987, p. S14200 ff), therefore, the association ‘between gay male sex and epidemic sickness’ (Ibid, 2003: 138) that Jesse Helms had was striking and crudely evident. However, of course, these smear tactics that Helms employed resulted in counterattack of artists that fought for creative freedom. Mapplethorpe’s work then ‘came to symbolize freedom of speech and self-expression’ (Ibid, 2003: 138).

A protest rally held outside the Corcoran on the evening of June 30, 1989, the night before The Perfect Moment was to have opened, marked a key moment in the political reclamation of Mapplethorpe's work. During the protest, several Mapplethorpe pictures, including Embrace (1979), American Flag (1977), and Self-Portrait (1980) were projected onto the museum (Meyer, 2003: 138)

This rally took place as an aftereffect of the banishment of Mapplethorpe’s exhibition The Perfect Moment in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, because of the ‘indecency’ of the artist’s photography. ‘The protest indicted the Corcoran's cancellation of The Perfect Moment by reenacting the museum's official function-the exhibition of art before a public audience’ (Ibid, 2003: 138). So, at it was argued earlier in this chapter, ‘censorship functions, then, not simply to erase but also to produce visual representation; it generates limits but also reactions to those limits; it imposes silence but also provokes new forms of responding to that silence’ (Meyer, 2003: 140). The perfect example of this response to the silence that Jesse Helms aimed for was newspapers and magazines publishing the protest that took place outside the Corcoran Gallery. However, ‘censorship is not overcome in these instances, but something of its own reliance on the imagery it aims to snuff out is revealed’ (Ibid, 2003: 144).

Hence, Jesse Helm’s fixation on Mapplethorpe and homosexuality in general had an inverted effect that resulted in shaming some politicians and protests against some of government’s policies.   To conclude briefly, ‘the Jesse Helms Theory of Art teaches us that censorship cannot resist the images it claim to despise, and that efforts to suppress art are typically fueled by its recirculation’ (Ibid, 2003: 144).

Conclusion:

When every arguement, that was discussed in this paper is taken into account when judging and analysing Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men, it becomes quite clear that Mapplethorpe was hardly trying to emphasize his superiority over black men that he photographed. On the contrary, he identified himself with them through the camera, through his gaze and felt compassionate towards his black subjects partially because they were, just like him, dying of AIDS. Therefore, despite of the common belief that Robert Mapplethorpe was racist and that his art mocks the blacks and their culture, it is not the case. Vivid examples were provided to illustrate and prove this point. It is not a secret, that this particularly negative view on Mapplethorpe’s work was shaped by the government that was trying to censor any homosexual propaganda. However, of course, you can get caught up in proving something so fragile and so personal, that you can also lose your way in defining what is good or bad, high or low culture, pure or polluted. Hence, this definition of what is right and what is wrong, especially when it comes to fine art, still remains a very personal matter. There are many decisive factors like gender, race, religion, background and so on. As a result, these findings can be biased and cannot be taken as the universal truth. But, nevertheless, this dissertation was put together to shed some light on important social issues that play a big part in modern Western world, such as racism, sex discrimination and censorship, and how oneself can be found in a state of ambivalence when it comes to understanding yourself, let alone artists’ true intentions.

Bibliography:

Evans, Jessica, and Stuart Hall. Visual Culture. London: SAGE Publications in association with the Open University, 1999. Print. Mast, Gerald, and Marshall Cohen. Film Theory And Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print. Berger, John. Ways Of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corp., 1973. Print. Mercer, Kobena. Welcome To The Jungle. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Bhabha, H. K. 'The Other Question...'. Screen 24.6 (1983): 18-36. Web.

Kleingeld, Pauline. 'KANT's SECOND THOUGHTS ON RACE'. Philosophical Quarterly 57.229 (2007): 573-592. Web. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. Race And The Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997. Print. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, 1986. Print. Freud, Sigmund, James Strachey, and Angela Richards. On Sexuality. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977. Print. Christies.com,. 'ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE (1946-1989) | Thomas And Dovanna, 1987 | PHOTOGRAPHS Auction | Christie's'. N.p., 2015. Web. 9 Apr. 2015. Rogers, J. A. Your History. [Baltimore], Md.: Black Classic Press, 1983. Print. Bryson, Norman. Visual Culture. Hanover NH: University Press of New England, 1993. Print. Baker, Houston A, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H Lindeborg. Black British Cultural Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print. 'The Psychoanalysis Of AIDS'. October,Vol. 63 (Winter, 1993), pp. 83-116 (1993): n. pag. Web. 29 Mar. 2015. Meyer, Richard. 'The Jesse Helms Theory Of Art*'. October 104 (2003): 131-148. Web. Butler, Judith. "The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess." in: differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Vol. 2, No. 2, Summer 1990, pp. 105-125. (English) Congressional Record, October 14, 1987, p. S14200 ff,. Print. Mapplethorpe.org,. 'The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation - Biography'. Web. 11 Apr. 2015.