Mapplethorpe off the Wall

PHOTOGRAPHY

ARTS FAIR

Carol Squiers

The black-tie opening for the Whitney Museum's "Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism and Performance 1958-1964" should have been a celebration to kick off a terrific show. Many of the now famous artists who made the art—Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg— were there, along with the collectors and dealers who bought and sold their work ten to twenty years ago. And by the look of the pieces exhibited, which were fantastic, you could tell that the show's timing was right—for everything from Warhol's early copies of ad illustrations to Allan Kaprow's mixedmedia environment Words, an audiovisual barrage of disjointed pieces of language. But you don't go to openings to look at art; you go for the scene, and this one was strained and typically uptown. With the tamed personages and institutionalized artifacts of a former revolution upstairs and the drinks downstairs, the separation between high culture and common pleasure couldn't have been more emphatic or complete.

The very title of the show was problematic, too upbeat and silly for these cool and calculating times. Well mannered and well manicured, the throng at the Whitney looked subdued, watchful, and disconnected, and seemed confused as to where they were and why they were there. There was a hollow feeling at the core of the "Blam!" opening, as if the main event was happening somewhere else.

Maybe it was. With ironic timing, Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most successful young artist-photographers in America, was at Danceteria, a favorite art-world discotheque, doing a very sixties pop-style show with slides and music. Except that this is the eighties and Mapplethorpe knows it, which helps to explain why the ambience at Danceteria was so much juicier, more chaotic, and hungrier than the strangely awkward scene at the Whitney. The young crowd at Danceteria was studying up, for Mapplethorpe has become a role model—the artist-photographer who makes a good living and has a fashionable, slightly sinful social life to boot.

The heart of the contemporary art scene these days is in the East Village, where many of the people at the Mapplethorpe show live or hang out. And in the East Village the "business of art" has become a major art form, fueled by the alliances, acquaintances, and partnerships that are struck at gallery openings and in bars and restaurants. Most of the dealers, artists, and hangers-on are only in their mid-twenties, and they take their cues from SoHo and Fiftyseventh Street. They are the godchildren of pop. The East Village scene couldn't exist without pop—the Factory, the narcissistic superstars, the love-hate of popular culture, and the credo that Warhol espoused: "Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art."

The mob at Danceteria was predictably more lively and misbehaved than the terminally self-conscious group at the Whitney, although we wouldn't say that the younger set was entirely unselfconscious. Because without self-consciousness you don't have style, and without style you don't go to Danceteria—certainly not to an event like this one. Mapplethorpe has worked hard to reform his image as a bad-boy purveyor of elegant near-pornography, moving his pictures onto the walls of the better galleries, such as Leo Castelli's, and into influential museums, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, the Museum of Modem Art, and the Whitney Museum itself. Yet here he was in a downtown nightclub, showing what seemed to be an overly sensitive assortment of his celebrity and beautiful-people portraits, exotic-flower still lifes, and aestheticized black-male nudes to a bunch of kids he's left far behind.

Considering the audience, a show of Mapplethorpe's raunchiest hard-core photographs of men engaged in various sexual acts might have been more appropriate. Places like Danceteria and Area have become arenas for indulging in a lot of the naughty impulses that the art world would rather look at only in highly salable Neo-Expressionist paintings. But no one batted an eye at the unusual selection. The crowd stood obediently packed together in the dark on the dance floor, watching the flashing images. When it was over they applauded appreciatively and without missing a beat slipped into the jerky rhythms of youth-cult dancing, making an easy passage from "high" art to popular culture with no real concern about what was expected of them.

Mapplethorpe's work is highly adaptable, too. What is particularly striking about his pictures is the ease with which they make the journey from museum walls to nightclub walls and back again, equally effective as pristine prints or as transparent backdrops. (They are also being used, as exquisite limited-edition photographic lithographs, to decorate the chic new hotel called Morgans, owned by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, of Studio 54 renown.) Unlike most of his peers, who labor to maintain a strict distance between their art and the commercial and popular sectors, believing this to be the only way to ensure the acceptance of photography as a part of high culture, Mapplethorpe has successfully made photography's chameleonlike quality work to his benefit.

It is precisely photography's escalating pervasiveness in Western culture, a by-product of its infinite capacity for reproduction, that makes it so suspect as high art. Photography is everywhere, from video monitors in clothing stores to family snaps to mug shots at the post office. Anywhere a photograph goes it looks "natural," because whatever it shows is rendered inescapable and everyday, whether it's a news shot of a war or an ad for Wheaties—or a Mapplethorpe still life. But is high art supposed to look natural? Isn't it supposed to look "special," a precious entity to be viewed in isolation with appropriate awe, like the sixties art at the Whitney?

Robert Mapplethorpe has managed to have it both ways at once, high culture and low, publishing his work in every-

thing from small-circulation gay magazines to glossy art journals and Italian Vogue, and exhibiting in peripheral galleries and nightclubs as well as in prestigious museums. This may be the only way that art photography can survive— by acquiring an ability to move as easily through the culture as other photographic images do. And by refusing to make the museum wall its ultimate and only goal.