Debate has been centered around whether or not Mapplethorpe's intentions, in his portrait work with black male nude models, are to create "pornographic" photos to "shock the bourgeoisie". The debate seems to be stuck in a sort of binary; is the art porn? or is it art? and is it fine art? By examining Mapplethorpe's style and technique, it is evident that the artist uses the conventions of both fine art photography, and pornography. This combination, and perhaps contradiction, creates ambivalence in the works and in interpretations of it, which viewers experience. Kobena Mercer struggles with these interpretations in his original thoughts on Mapplethorpe, which he moves on to reevaluate.
The major use of fine art conventions evident in Mapplethorpe's photography is that of sculptural code, or the use of the Greek ideal body and pose.
Mapplethorpe takes the black male nude and places him in the ideal form of the Greek muscular body. As shown above, placing the subject on a pedestal, literally, as well as in the notion of high art. Within the discussed binary, there are two interpretations that Mercer covers. At first, this technique can be seen as using the stereotype of the black muscular man who society is afraid of. The sports star that no one wants to play against; "the idealized physique of a classical Greek male statue is superimposed on that most commonplace of stereotypes, the black man as sports hero, mythologically endowed with a ‘naturally’ muscular physique and an essential capacity for strength, grace and machinelike perfection: well hard" (M p. 178). Upon reflection, Mercer points out the subversive element of this tactic that he obscured in his earlier argument; “…the potentially subversive aspect of the homoerotic dimension in Mapplethorpe’s substitution of the black male subject for the archetypical white female nude was underplayed…” (p. 191). Indeed, by using the Greek ideal as the model for the black male subjects, Mapplethorpe shatters racist assumptions that the black male cannot be ideal, beautiful, and within the definitions of fine art.
In contrast, Mapplethorpe also uses techniques of pornography to send a message to viewers. The most obvious being the fragmentation of body parts; “the body-whole is fragmented into microscopic details- chest, arms, torso, buttocks, penis- inviting a scopophilic dissection of the parts that make a whole...The camera cuts away, like a knife, allowing the spectator to inspect the ‘goods’" (p. 183).
This photographic device is also used in pornography. A way of focusing on the items to be consumed, i.e. breast, penis, penetration, ect. In Mercer's first reading, he sites arguments anti-porn feminists have used against this strategy to show his frustration with putting the parts of black male men up for grabs; “the cropping and fragmentation of bodies- often decapitated, so to speak- is a salient feature of pornography, and has been seen from certain feminist positions as a form of male violence, a literal inscription of a sadistic impulse in the male gaze, whose pleasure thus consists of cutting up women’s bodies into visual bits and pieces” (p. 183). But again, upon reconsideration, Mercer discovers that perhaps he himself was caught up in the ambivalence of identifying with both the male models being looked at, as well as a gay black man looking at the models; “…the element of aggresivity in textual analysis-the act of taking things apart- might merely have concealed my own narcissistic participation in the pleasures (and anxieties) which Mapplethorpe’s text makes available, for black spectators as much as anyone else” (p. 193). In this dual dissection, Mercer was frustrated by the fragmentation of the male black bodies, but more so by his anxities at perhaps enjoying this gaze as viewers of pornography so often do.
When all is said and done, I think it is important to remember that the "hype" over Mapplethorpe's work had a lot to do with the moral panic at the time in the U.S. surrounding HIV/AIDS. Mapplethorpe and many of his models have passed from the disease, making Mapplethorpe's work an important reminder to our history, and to their lives. Indeed, Mapplethorpe's combined strategies were succesful in adding the subverssive voice to this history; “Mapplethorpe’s ironic juxtaposition of elements drawn from the repository of high culture-where the nude is indeed one of the most valued genres of the dominant culture- with elements drawn from below, such as pornographic conventions or commonplace stereotypes, can be seen as a subversive recoding of the ideological values supporting the normative aesthetic ideal” (p. 198-199).
Kobena Mercer, "Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe" Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1994, 171-219.
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