Mapplethorpe's Flowers

Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe [1946-1989] was a well-known and controversial American photographer, working within the fashion and fine art metiers in New York from the late 1960's until his death. His work became the focus of censorship disputes, for his depiction of nude male imagery, and certain sado-masochistic fetish pictures, yet the broad scope of his work, usually challenging in the traditional sense, was not particularly offensive. It was almost always, however, suggestive, and it explored areas of interest usually avoided by earlier generations of photographers and artists.

His work is frankly homosexual, even provocatively in your face about it. The belligerence and outrage implied in his pictures pushes the envelope of the permissible in the fine art/gallery context. But the power of his vision is undeniable, especially when what you are seeing may seem pernicious or naughty.

For my own part, I was never much preoccupied with the "pornographic" material in Mapplethorpe's oeuvre, though it seemed to me, in keeping with my growing skepticism regarding government funding of the arts, that to argue in favor of such support, particularly when publicly perceived "offensive" content was at issue (as with Mapplethorpe), was a proof of the ethically questionable nature of public philanthropy itself. In any event, it seems quite naive to insist that any art which finds its audience (and its market) through deliberate shock and provocation needs the public's official approval, much less its financial support. Like much successfully "naughty" art, Mapplethorpe's was destined to achieve notoriously rich valuations and collectibility. Whether it deserved that encomium or not, is not the public's business.

Of course, his defenders will always argue that it's most beautiful when at its most "prurient"--a position which foregrounds definitions of art as propaganda, or liberated/persecuted difference. All of which has a grain of truth. There is no doubt that offering the public his most private and "suppressed" sexual fantasies constituted a sort of personal liberation for Mapplethorpe, though why it should ever have been taken as a revolutionary aesthetic is as much a tribute to his ability and calculation, as to any exoticism of point of view. If showing a picture of yourself pulling a braided leather whip out of your asshole is a meaningful statement of anything but distasteful provocation, perhaps it is to flesh out the full range of your aesthetic message. But you get the feeling, looking at Mapplethorpe's work, that its camp strategy has several ironic angles to it, not the least being mischievous humor.

But in his "straight" photographic work--the portraits, the still lifes, the abstract framed studies--the disruptive or transgressive qualities are more subtle, or at least less peremptory. Mapplethorpe's flower studies are superficially not unlike those of, for instance, Irving Penn, say, or Imogen Cunningham. Penn's images in particular, which are roughly contemporary to Mapplethorpe's, seem no less flamboyant and obtrusive, though in the older artist's hands the style is more obviously fashionable and fawning; whereas in Mapplethorpe's, something else entirely is happening.

Penn

Whereas in Penn's flower images, the compositions are passionate and declarative, in Mapplethorpe's there's a calm, deliberate concentration, a poised turning inward which is insistently at odds with emotional swish. They're monomaniacal in their intensity, which is part of what makes them so riveting. When you look at one of Mapplethorpe's flowers, you think "this is pretty straightforward, no fuss, no distraction, just steady focus on a single aspect." But the more you look, the more puzzling this apparent simplicity seems.

Penn

In Penn's studies, there is no visual context or orientation, no stage-props or "nature" lurking in the background. They're as much about the structure of plants as they are about wild natural beauty--all white background, nothing to distract. In Mapplethorpe's flower compositions, there's always a backdrop, or a surface, or some countervailing line of reference. Gravity and context works the same way in this world as it does in the real one we're in. Penn is drawn to his flowers, wants to get as close as necessary to savor the tinted fibrous cellulose and powdery pollen dust spread across the anthers. It's a sensual enrichment.

Penn

In Mapplethorpe, it isn't intimacy he's after, but an alignment, a certain quiet poise, like the feeling you get looking deeply into another person's eyes. There's an unwavering hold on your consciousness that is like an electric current, a sparkler's pixilating grains sticking to your forearm, evoking tiny pin-pricks of sensation. But such sensual impressions aren't really what I'm after here. Clearly, there's a difference, a distance maintained and demarcated between ourselves and a Mapplethorpe composition, a purity of conception that cannot be disturbed.

Mapplethorpe

We know that flowers cannot be said to "pose"--since they have no self-consciousness. And yet, flowers have been selected over eons of practice and testing to in fact be seen as posed objects, attracting their pollinators, or (in the rare case of carnivorous plants) their prey. Unable to move across the landscape through locomotion, plants can only migrate through the deposition of their seed, or by root travel, or by being moved physically by another force (transplantation).

Yet flora have been domesticated for centuries, and new hybrids are being developed as we speak. It's a fairly rapid process. But the essential nature of reproduction in the plant kingdom is ancient. What we see when we look at a flower is a kind of natural aesthetic, which occurred without any conscious intervention by a higher power. Plants developed their flowers on their own, through trial and error. This "unself-conscious" beauty of flowers is the very quality which makes them so fascinating. But how humankind responds to flowers is very different from how birds and moths and bees do. With our higher brains, we can assign imaginative values and qualities which go well beyond the pragmatic purpose which flowers are intended to fulfill. Our imaginative appreciation of the beauty of the natural world is an imposition upon a system whose primary volition is endurance and replication. We have learned how to influence and manipulate some of those systems through cultivation and hybridization, but we have unconsciously (or accidentally) influenced all life on the planet through our unwise overexploitation or through secondary effects (primarily pollution).

In a purely philosophical sense, there is no right and wrong about any of this. As life forms jostle and co-opt each other for position and supremacy, the resulting balance or imbalance becomes a new phenomenon. Flowers may be symbols for nature's beauty, or for our own reproductive sensations. Love, as a concept, is a relatively late invention in civilized culture. Not friendship, not eroticism, not cupidity, but a higher affection comprised of all the other kinds of attraction with an additional element of loyal devotion. Poets have been using flowers as short-hand references for millennia--so much so, that the cliché has now overshadowed the original effect. Gertrude Stein thought that her little line "a rose is a rose is a rose" was so innovative that it made the rose red "for the first time in 500 years." How jaded can our language have become if the mere repetition of a simple noun can be more evocative than Shakespeare?

Mapplethorpe

But when we look at a flower, a strange kind of hypnotic aesthetic symbiosis occurs. For most people, that is probably as true now as it has ever been. But seeing a flower in the context of the plant itself is different from the manipulated setting of a still-life photograph made in a studio under controlled conditions. There is something almost clinical (or scientific) about how we may regard the details of a flower's structure, its color, its contours, its overall shape, its "character." When a skilled photographer sets up a flower shot, fineness of perception and response become the measure of creative expression. Successful studio work is built out of deliberate, crucial arrangements.

Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe's homoerotic preoccupations seem ultimately to find a parallel analogue in his flower studies, just as they do in his portraits of nude black men, for instance. One of his more innovative approaches is exploiting the horizontal or pendulous aspect of stems seen in recline, or drooping. The symbolic implications of the "drooping" sexual organ seem almost gratuitously obvious, but such implications were uncommon in the "language" of still life before Mapplethorpe. What he "sees" in flowers is a more decadent aspect, the vicarious remove from sexual fulfillment, overflowing with suspended fecundity. It's a studied appreciation, a sensuality at a remove. Rather than a penetration of desire, there's a long, pensive prolongation which feels hypnotic. How this is achieved, through centering, unresolved tension, isolation, contrast, stillness, suspension, etc., is the business of technical analysis.

Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe

What I feel when I look at a Mapplethorpe study like the one below is a perception of the weight and interlocking of forces held in perfect tension, like leaning over the edge of a precipice. The drama is heightened by the subtle gradation of increasing light towards the bottom of the frame. The bud and the flower both are pointing towards something which we cannot see. Flora typically orient towards sunlight (or light), but the point here seems less about inherent tendencies than about the bendings or muscular expressions in organic structure.

Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe seems above all to be a designer of preference, for whom each vision is an idealized version of an extemporaneous principle, a gratuitous take. He may begin in perception and intuition, but he moves naturally into a kind of graphic determinism to arrive at a constructed stasis. The tension created by these kinds of locked dualities (below) are highly artificial, or staged. But unlike traditional still lifes, the setting is so tightly controlled that there is no historical or social context to refer to. They are all about design and shape.

Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe

Is this an attempt to "tame" nature, or to fix it into a structure that heightens our awareness of its unconscious yearning or helpless code-driven unfolding? Aesthetic arrangements may be a metaphorical analogue of our desire to shape nature in actual ways (as with genetic engineering). Framing the sexual organs (flowers) of natural forms into idealized visual icons may be an expedient vicariousness, but Mapplethorpe's power in conveying the intensity of his regard through technical apparati is a kind of victory over chance and the expected.

Mapplethorpe

The use of the blue and gold tinted vase, here--as with the clear (blue) one above--turns the spray of individual blooms into a dialectic with available space, with the fallen branch below as the casualty of dying fall, now slightly darker (and more elegantly golden in their demise).

Mapplethorpe

If Mapplethorpe is a decadent artist, he is also an honest one, seeing in different situations and contexts the same kind of pregnant (or priapic) richness, which in visual terms suggests an aesthetic climax. His preference for strongly suggestive dark purples, blues, blacks, burgundies etc., primarily as backdrops, queues this as a ritualized symbology. They're decorative provocations, pristine and inviolable. Having once experienced them, you will return again and again to sample their unique and intense flavor.