19.09.1996

Dangerous desires

The current Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, situated at the Hayward Gallery in London, has become a focus for controversy and heated outrage. The now very familiar cry of “child pornography” has been directed against this collection of photographs by the notorious Mapplethorpe, who dedicated his life to shocking artistic and popular opinion. This he succeeded in doing admirably, before he died of an Aids-related illness eight years ago.

This is a strange furore, in many ways. This exhibition, “child pornography” and all, has already toured in a wide number of places, including Israel. Now, this is not a country normally associated with a love of hedonistic ‘degeneracy’, sexual ‘perversion’ and in-your-face explicit gay images. The exhibition managed to survive unscathed there. Yet when it comes to Britain all hell breaks loose and the tabloid press starts to work itself into a frenzy. How come?

Unfortunately for the Mapplethorpe exhibition, it arrived in this country just as alarm about child pornography and abuse, paedophiles and ‘sex perverts’ reached an all time high. Bad timing. The Hayward Gallery got caught in the moral crossfire and had to make a tactical retreat in the face of so much antagonism.

The offending picture, entitled ‘Rosie’, was taken 20 years ago and is of a girl wearing a dress but no underwear sitting on a pew. In 1976 it was considered completely harmless, but by 1996 it is regarded in an altogether different light. The police ‘advised’ the gallery not to show the picture, on the grounds that the climate surrounding images of children has changed since 1976. For the better or worse though?

It cannot be a healthy situation when the likes of Esther Rantzen, smug self-righteous guardian of bourgeois values, can shout “child pornography” and everybody automatically falls in line behind her. This can only lead to a diminishing of artistic expression and the manufacture of a hysterical, quasi-puritanical culture which fears the human body and ultimately cheapens our aesthethical appreciation of the human form.

Absurdly, the Hay-ward will be exhibiting many of Mapplethorpe’s ‘X portfolio’, which feature shockingly explicit photographs of gay sex - one of which shows a gay couple having oral sex and another treats us to an example of ‘fisting’. These pictures have been given the ‘OK-ish’, but ‘Rosie’ - probably the most ‘innocent’ and conventional picture in the entire exhibition - had to go, on the spurious grounds that it might excite ‘paedophiles’. This is the logic of the hypocrite and the policeman.

Suzanne Moore, in The Independent, posed the question:

“But does that mean that none of us can see an image because a tiny minority may find it arousing? Such a fundamentalist argument would eventually eliminate the human body and its dangerous desires from art altogether, something which Mapplethorpe fought against all his life” (September 12).

While Moore’s general point may be sound, it still assumes that anyone who has any sort of sexual response to ‘Rosie’ must automatically be a paedophile or pervert, regardless of how this “desire” is channelled or directed. I am reliably informed that some people, a “tiny minority” I am sure, find common household items - washing machines, hoovers, toasters, etc - sexually arousing. Pretty weird, but there you go. Do we therefore move to ban images of such items from art galleries and exhibitions? Moore, liberal-minded though she is on such issues, is still viewing the world, and art, through a handed-down ‘paradigm’ of what is normal and abnormal, healthy and perverted.

Whatever the merits, or not, of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre we should not allow the state, Esther Rantzen or the philistine media to act as art gendarmes, decreeing what we should or should not be be allowed to see. The decision this week to give the exhibition an X certificate is therefore a retrograde step, censorship slipped in through the ‘moral’ back door. How long before the art police turn their sights on records, as in America?

We need to raise the level of our own working class culture, so we can seriously judge art and develop new, higher art forms.

Frank Vincent