Queer Culture

Robert Mapplethorpe at Sean Kelly is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik

Robert Mapplethorpe used old forms for forbidden content.

Who else could this shot be by than Robert Mapplethorpe? It’s a 1980 image titled “Leather Crotch”, and it’s in the Mapplethorpe survey now at Sean Kelly gallery in New York. I visited with a smart artist and an art-historian friend, and somehow we got caught up in the same-old Mapplethorpe debate: Is his aesthetic too conservative and Edward Weston-ish for its own good, or can we ignore that because of the radical subjects he shoots? Afterward, I realized the obvious solution to the (non-)issue: Mapplethorpe’s art matters most when it uses the old Modernist tropes to display his new subjects. Finding a new, radical language to show bondage gear would have been almost a capitulation to the sidelining that gay culture had suffered for decades; by using the established language of elite art, Mapplethorpe could insist on a retrospective insertion of gay culture into the aesthetic mainstream. He could be the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, while saying that wolfskin is in.

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