Cincinnati vs Mapplethorpe

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Cincinnati vs Mapplethorpe

READER DISCRETION ADVISORY
This pop culture memoir contains sex, lies, greed, perversion, murder, deceit, infidelity, drugs, sex, immorality, scatology, ambition, equivocation, character assassination, slander, blasphemy, aspersion, betrayal, distortion, racism, ungodliness, sodomy – and that’s just the critics of Mapplethorpe.

'>-The first page of Jack Fritshcer’s book, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a deadly camera.

So I am asking myself, what is it about this guy Mapplethorpe that upsets everybody so much? My interest was sparked by an oral performance piece by Laurie Anderson entitled, “Large Black Dick” in which she says:

Washington, D.C.? It was a town that wasn’t big enough for the senator and the artist Mapplethorpe. Yeah, Jesse liked pictures of snowy landscapes, art that made you feel good. And Mapplethorpe? He was after big taboos, things like: What do sex and religion have in common? So the senator looked at the artist’s photographs and they were pictures of men with no clothes. And there were lots of chains and black leather and crosses. But the picture that bothered the senator the most was a very large black dick sticking out of a business suit. So he made a law that said:

WE’RE NOT GOING TO LOOK AT THIS, AND YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LOOK AT IT EITHER…And the issue of control, who controls what, has started to blend in with a whole new brand of puritanism. (Russell)

The incident that Laurie Anderson is referring to takes us back to a time not so long ago when most of us were wearing legwarmers and high-tops and being entertained by the likes of He-Man and Rainbow Bright. In the late eighties and early nineties, things that were once understood as the status quo became history; Women entered the workplace in throngs, single parent families proliferated and AIDS/HIV, an acronym that only years ago was totally foreign, were some of the hot topics of the day.

Unbeknownst to many students in my generation, mounting hostility towards public arts funding also marked the cultural and political climate of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Debates had escalated over a number of National Endowment for the Arts grants, targeted at artists who violated sexual and cultural norms in their art, whether it was in painting, oral performance, writing, or photography. Most famous of these NEA outlaws was gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photographs became the center of a national debate over the function of art, who should fund it, what is considered obscene and, as Laurie Anderson states, “the issue of control…and who controls what.

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