Tag Archives: porn

Mapplethorpe: Look at the pictures

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Scandal suited Robert Mapplethorpe. He wore it proudly, like a scarlet cloak. . .

That notoriety has evolved, these days, into a hushed, academic reverence. His photographs are not produced in court on charges of obscenity now, but hang on the walls of major galleries around the world (the National Gallery of Australia owns over 60 of them). The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation sells tasteful notecards and Limoges porcelain decorated with his images of flowers. Despite this latter-day respectability, we should never ignore the power of his images to brutally shock and challenge how we view our bodies and ourselves. A new documentary film from Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, released in Australia this month, is an important reminder of his importance as an artist who used a camera.

Mapplethorpe was a complex, ruthlessly ambitious figure: an egoistic pansexual charmer, more than willing to use relationships to further his career. This is as nothing, however, next to his mastery of photography. Whatever his subject, the image – always in black-and-white – creates a still space around it, compelling the viewer’s contemplation and challenging us to see it (and our response) afresh.

Mapplethorpe first came to prominence for portraits taken when he was living with Patti Smith at New York’s Chelsea Hotel in the 1970s: not only of Smith’s fellow-musicians like Iggy Pop, Deborah Harry, and Laurie Anderson, but established figures, including Truman Capote, William Burroughs, and Susan Sontag. He was soon a sought-after portraitist. There were his exquisite photographs of flowers too, familiar now from ubiquitous calendars and posters. It was photography of the human body, though, which Mapplethorpe commanded as his own terrain.

Between zoology and pornography lies – sprawls – the art of the nude.

Mapplethorpe refused to acknowledge any distinction between these categories, judging the tasteful ‘artistic’ nude a hypocritical fiction which denied an essential part of our humanity. As Sir Kenneth Clarke acknowledged in his seminal study on the topic, ‘No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow – and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals’.

There is often more than ‘vestigial’ erotic feeling aroused by Mapplethorpe’s nude studies, mostly of beautiful, young black men.

‘Photography and sexuality have a lot in common,’ he explains. ‘Both are question marks, and that’s precisely what excites me most in life.’

Friends and lovers, dancers, porn stars, and body builders (including Arnold Schwarzenegger) were all called before his camera to create images full of this questioning. Whatever is pictured – however shocking – has an anatomical exactitude emphasised by the lighting, by the precision of black-and-white film, and most of all by Mapplethorpe’s skill with the camera. Each image invites contemplation. The poses are often reminiscent of classical statuary, with an abstract beauty of form, heads cropped out so that a face does not distract from our focus on the naked body. The studies of body builder, Lisa Lyon, are typical. Lisa is sexually provocative as she poses naked but for a wedding veil or coating of dried mud, yet also challenges the viewer’s reaction as she simultaneously flexes her enormous muscles. Is this art? A porn shoot? A bodybuilder’s catalogue?  The only answer is yes to all, and more . . .

Many of Mapplethorpe’s images are far more overtly erotic. Acts of sexual penetration and nudes with erect penises are recorded with the same skill, dispassionate curiosity, and artistic gaze as Mapplethorpe gives to the unfurling petals of an orchid. Patti Smith comments on these photographs, ‘As Cocteau said of a Genet poem, “His obscenity is never obscene”‘.

In 1989, the refusal of Washington DC’s Corcoran Gallery to display an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs sparked a national controversy in the US about art and obscenity. Senator Jesse Helms fulminated publicly about the images, dismissing them as ‘blasphemy’. In the following years, reproductions of his photographs were periodically confiscated as illegal pornography, including a seizure by South Australia Police in 2000. In all cases, the photographs were eventually judged to be not ‘obscene’ and returned. In response to this condemnation, some critics have described his images in defensive, highly aesthetic language, rhapsodising in precious terms about how they resemble Renaissance paintings.

The perceptions of Mapplethorpe’s photographs as both pornographic and deeply serious art are actually both true. He intended these images to be challenging. ‘He loved to get a jolt out of people,’ recalls a friend in the documentary. In doing so, he dares us to contemplate these scenes innocently, without judgement, and to examine our own tumble of responses: shock, arousal, curiosity, awe, and even humour. In the words of Roman dramatist, Terence, Mapplethorpe’s challenge to the viewer is, ‘I am human; nothing human is strange to me’.

When Jesse Helms waved a sheaf of Mapplethorpe’ photographs in the US Senate, excoriating their obscenity, he shouted, ‘Just look at the pictures!’ as though this were enough to condemn them. In a fitting irony, film makers, Bailey and Barbato, have taken Helms at his word, and used the phrase as the title of their new documentary.

Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures is showing at Palace Cinemas in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide during May and June 2016, as part of the Essential Independents: American Cinema Now series.

 

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Image: Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

STARS WITHOUT MAKEUP

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For five year-old Nahla Berry, going to school in the morning is an ordeal.
It’s always stressful and sometimes frightening.

From their front door to the schoolyard, she and her mother are regularly harassed by photographers crowding around them and calling out their names. Nahla calls them simply ‘the men’.

Nahla’s mother is Hollywood actor, Halle Berry. She recently testified before the California State Assembly, supporting a bill to protect children like Nahla from the attention of paparazzi. I don’t fancy her chances in the land of the free. The photographers’ real target is the actor herself, of course. And the reason they follow Berry on the school run is to get a picture of her without makeup, looking as much as possible like – well – a real person. This is now a regular feature in supermarket magazines and a host of websites are dedicated to ‘shocking, nearly unrecognisable pictures of your favorite stars’.

What lies behind the bizarre public fascination with ‘stars without makeup’?

The obsession with ‘stars’ (actors and others who work in the public eye) has been around since at least the 1930s. They are treated like gods in ancient Greek mythology: powerful, beautiful, flawed creatures who act out our inner lives in a magnificent, neverending melodrama. Archetypes abound. The Good Mother. The Loveable Bad Boy.The Ice Queen. The Jealous Wife. The Strange One. (I leave you to fill in the names.) Hollywood stars are chimerical like the gods: despised one week; forgiven and embraced the next. Their bodies, too, seem to shrink and expand fantastically on a regular basis (if the cover of New Idea is to be believed.) It can be hard to remember that these are ordinary people, albeit with a very public way of earning a living.

milakunisMila Kunis

‘Stars without makeup’ is a cruel refinement of this obsession. There’s an element of schadenfreude here. A bitter pleasure in seeing that the mighty have feet of clay – or at least, bags under their eyes and spots on their faces at times, just like everyone else.

There’s a curiosity about the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ juxtaposition. It fascinates to see that glamorous creature from the Oscars out shopping in her tracky dacks. I’m reminded of a hologram card I had as a child, on which Superman flickered into dull Clark Kent then reverted to the superhero as you turned it back and forth. Intrusion into private lives is turned into a spectacle, a masque in which the mighty are brought down and thrown up again on a weekly cycle.

sharonSharon Stone

There is a sadder, more poignant aspect to this modern preoccupation. ‘This could be you . . .’ the pictures whisper. ‘You’re as good as they are.’ As with the strange manifestations of reality TV, a hollow aspirational message is conveyed that – given a chance – anyone can be famous (regardless of talent, hard work, or appearance). Look, the pictures say: these people aren’t that much different to you in the harsh light of day. You too can be a star.

It is, of all people, Karl Marx who suggests a partial explanation for this obsession. In a consumerist society, he argued, many of our natural attributes are alienated from us into products which we have to ‘buy back’. We no longer produce our own music, but buy it as MP4 files. Sexuality is ‘alienated’ as a natural attribute, and sold back, commodified through pornography or ‘sex toys’. Dignity is put on with a dress or a suit. With the right accessories. The right mobile phone. We feel incomplete without a panoply of products and brands which help to define us.

umaUma Thurman

The unearthly standard of beauty in popular magazines reminds the lowly readers daily of their supposed inadequacy and the need to buy more. This is not simply due to the dynamics of capitalist society however. Like the urge to shop, this dissatisfaction only responds to a deeper, underlying anxiety about who we are. ‘Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is,’ wrote Camus.

It is essentially human to be discontented with who we are and what we have. For all of us, nothing is ever quite good enough. We want more. We want newer. We want better.

‘Stars without makeup’ reflects this yearning. It reminds us in a very personal way of the spotted reality of our lives, and the icons of perfection to which we aspire in so many ways. Even urgings to ‘embrace the present’ ironically express the longing for a different life. This innate dissatisfaction – the constant desire for something better – can often be depressing to contemplate. At other times, though, it seems exciting – the root of all progress and improvement in society and ourselves. We are all stars without makeup.

Lolita’s Jacket

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‘HOW DID THEY EVER MAKE A MOVIE OF LOLITA?’ asked the publicity for Kubrick’s 1962 movie adaptation The challenge for publishers has been can you ever illustrate the jacket of a novel about paedophilia?

I’ve been writing a review of Brian Boyd’s Stalking Nabokov recently. It took me back to when I spent two whole years relentlessly taking Lolita apart, word by word, before putting it back together in different ways. I felt like one of those guys who lovingly, obsessively takes his motorbike to pieces, lays out out all the components neatly, checks and cleans them, then reconstructs the bike again.

For all the fame (and notoriety) of the novel and film versions, one fact seems curiously misunderstood: the relative ages of Humbert Humbert and Lolita. When they meet he is only 37, not the ageing, avuncular figure he assumes to the reader. And Lolita? She is not a long-legged 17 year-old – as she appears in Adrian Lyne’s 1997 movie (above). She is not even a precocious 15 year-old whom Humbert can tell himself is  ‘barely illegal’.

Lolita is twelve.

This is the most important and shocking fact in Nabokov’s novel. Lolita (‘Dolores on the dotted line’) is just a year 7 student when she meets Humbert, the stepfather who drugs, kidnaps, rapes, and repeatedly abuses her for years.

Lolita was a succès de scandale and remains one of the bestselling novel of all time (50 million copies since publication). Over half a century later, it remains a terrifying and appalling story as well as a work-of-art of genius. Despite my love for it as a novel, the emotional brutality described still turns the blood cold, and this, of course, is part of the high risk and deadly serious game Nabokov plays with his reader.

Jacket design is a crucial element in marketing fiction.

The cover is part of a book’s ‘body language’. It tells the potential purchaser what type of book to expect, hints at genre, winks to indicate the great read they’re going to have, and seduces as an attractive, desirable commodity to have around the house. The challenge for publishers of Lolita has been to fulfill these functions while respecting the sensitivity of the subject matter. Looking back over the history of the jacket designs, three very different approaches can be seen.

Soft porn

It is hard to believe the designers of these jackets ever read the novel. Lolita is presented as barely-clothed or naked – a frankly lubricious ‘come on’ to exploit the book’s reputation as a saucy read among readers who would not normally buy a literary novel. Perhaps these editions made a few converts, but regardless, their design ignored Lolita’s age and vulnerability – ultimately insulting the text, the subject matter, and the reader.

Complicity

A second group of Lolita jackets suggest her youth more accurately, but in a way that is more disturbing. The child portrayed has part of her body exposed, or shows her legs in a short skirt, being pawed by man. The  crude literalism of the design also invites the reader to be complicit in viewing little Dolores Haze as a sexual object. This approach reflects the concern which critic Lionel Trilling had about the novel, when praising it on publication: ‘We find ourselves the more shocked when we realise that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents … we have been seduced into conniving in the violation.’

Challenging the reader

A final group of jacket designs get it right, respecting the subject matter – the abuse of a child – while challenging readers to respond to the novel as a work-of-art, recognising and negotiating Humbert’s attempt to seduce them through his prose. On these covers, Lolita’s face stares out, beautiful but clearly still a child. Her legs are shown, but they are a young girl’s knock-kneed legs, rendered as vulnerable rather than suggestive.

This is the Lolita we come to recognise in the novel: the lonely, orphaned child who weeps at night, then creeps into her abuser’s bed because, as Humbert says:

‘You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.’