Picture Imperfect
Race, sexuality and portraiture
By Evan Moffitt in opinion, 12 May, 2016
Featured in Issue 179
Twenty-five years ago, a portrait sparked a national debate about sex, artistic expression and censorship that galvanized the cultural politics of the United States. That portrait was Robert Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit (1980), a close-cropped photograph of a black man’s penis hanging exposed from his open fly. It was a key piece of prosecutorial evidence in an obscenity trial filed by the City of Cincinnati over the exhibition ‘The Perfect Moment’, which had travelled to the Cincinnati Art Museum after its planned run at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. was cancelled by Republican congressmen. The photograph was not the only controversial work on display there but, unlike the others, it managed to offend everybody, from white religious conservatives to black gay liberals.
Mapplethorpe framed and lit all his subjects – from flowers to sadomasochistic sex acts – so they appear abstract and pleasing to the eye. Both rose and rectum received the same refined classical formalism. In the Cincinnati trial, curator Janet Kardon described
Mapplethorpe’s Lou, N.Y.C. (1978), a photograph of a man sticking a finger into his urethra, as a work of artistic value because: ‘It’s a central image, very symmetrical, a very ordered, classical composition.’ The consistency of this approach also constituted its radicalism, at a time when alternative sexualities were less accepted and, in some states, homosexuality was still censored and criminalized.
( … ) At the 1983 African-American Day Parade in Harlem, Lorraine O’Grady helmed a parade float bearing a massive gilded picture frame and a skirt emblazoned with the performance title Art Is … down New York’s Seventh Avenue. At various points along the parade route, O’Grady and fellow performers bearing empty picture frames jumped off the float and invited members of the crowd to pose inside them. Photographs documenting the event show joyful people eager to become works of art. O’Grady’s performance acknowledges the frame’s ability to restore the power of self-representation to those historically deprived of it. ( … )