Originally appeared in The Boston Book Review
Q&A Arthur Danto: Porn, Light, & Mapplethorpe
Q&A Arthur Danto: Porn, Light, & Mapplethorpe
. . . one was in the
presence of a set of images that drove one away and drew one to them in some
kind of oscillation of will. One wanted to escape and one wanted a further
contemplation.
Arthur Danto, Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe
Arthur Danto, Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe
HB: The crucial
moment for you as an art critic, was it not, was the display of Any Warhol’s
Brillo Soapbox. If that was art, why? If other, seemingly identical objects,
real Brillo Soapboxes, were not art, why weren’t they? Art opened up as a
philosophical question for you.
AD: That’s true.
The exhibit was in ‘64, at the Stable Gallery, and I was stunned by it. I
really did feel for the first time that there was something philosophically
interesting in art. I had never known how to think about art philosophically
before.
I was interested in what it meant that there were those
kinds of objects, objects like Warhol’s Soapbox. I’m still interested, I write
all the time about it. But I had no intention of being an art critic in ‘64. My
interests remained straight philosophical. I never wrote again about art until
I began to write The Transfiguration of
the Commonplace. I thought I was writing a five volume system of analytical
philosophy, and that was to be volume four.
But I had changed in a lot of ways. The first three volumes
were Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge,
Analytical Philosophy of Action, and then, Analytical Philosophy of History. But I didn’t want to call this
new book the Analytical Philosophy of Art.
It wasn’t analytical philosophy of art. It was written in a very different way
from any of my other books. I think it had a postmodern feeling. But even then
I had no idea I was going to be an art critic. I still thought about myself as
a 19th century philosopher engaged in writing a very large system of philosophy.
HB: One of the
things we think about in terms of contemporary art, the blurring of genre, is
by this point a cliche.
AD: It is a
cliche by now, that’s right.
HB: But
nevertheless, applicable.
AD: Absolutely
applicable.
HB: I think it
applies to your work as well. I mean, you’re the analytic philosopher who
admires Nietzsche and quotes Heidegger, an analytic philosopher who absolutely
cannot resist Hegel.
AD: Hegel knew
that he was dealing with the structure of thought, the logic of the structure
of thought, and that’s very different from the structure of the physical world.
HB: Your view of
Robert Mapplethorpe in “Playing with the Edge” hinges on Hegel.
AD: On Hegel’s
notion of the aufheben.
HB: Maybe, with
roots in analytical philosophy, you can see Hegel afresh.
AD: My interest
in Hegel comes through his philosophy of history, as well, but primarily
through his “Philosophy of Art”, which was a stupendous book. It’s a ball of
fire.
HB: You allude to
it all the time.
AD: It’s the book
I always turn to when I’m stuck. And it was basically never taken up by
anybody.
The history of nineteenth-century aesthetics is very barren.
It’s because Kant was the dominating figure, and is still is in analytical
philosophy, and it’s because analytical philosophers have never been
comfortable with the problem of history. They never have the sense that history
becomes part of the identity of cultural objects or beings, cultural beings
like ourselves.
Hegel does have that sense. I don’t think anybody before
Hegel did, and after Hegel something happened to thought — it got swamped by
the return to Kant, by politics, by Marx, who really had a very mechanical view
of history.
HB: So we have a
book about Mapplethorpe that is also in a sense a revival of Hegel.
AD: I thought that
this funny idea Hegel has of aufheben was one way of thinking about
pornography. Hegel has the wonderful idea in aufheben of something that is
preserved, negated, and transcended all at once. I thought that fit
Mapplethorpe to a tee, at least those great photographs people talked about
without communicating to each other, as if they were seeing different objects.
Mapplethorpe’s photographs preserved what he was looking at.
They negated it in some way because they were so beautiful you could just see the
formal structure. The experts I challenge in the book could have been sincere —
“Penis? what penis? I just see a figure composition.” So you have the people in
the Congress who only see the penis, and the experts who only see the form.
They’re both there and they’re both transcended in some way, and that’s what
makes it art. You need all three dimensions of the aufheben in order to account
for the structure of the controversy.
You’re not going to get to the people in the Congress who
were against his work by giving them lessons in art appreciation, telling them
to think only in terms of composition.
HB: Because
you’re telling them to deny common sense, which makes them want to fund the
arts even less.
AD: The art
people, the formalists, that is how they’ve learned to talk about art. But I
was thinking about Baroque paintings — I have a great love for paintings like
Roman Charity — and Baroque painting were meant to transform the viewer in some
way. And that fit Mapplethorpe naturally.
I got immersed in Baroque art. It’s not something that many
people think about. I lived in Rome for a while, and was reading the work of
Rudolf Wittkower, who’s my great hero, and a great art historian, and that put
me in a position to think about work like Mapplethorpe’s in a very different
way.
There was a show bracketing Mapplethorpe with Weston — but I
don’t think Weston ever rose to Mapplethorpe’s level. Weston sees highly erotic
forms in peppers but he never transcends into the domain of deep human meanings
you get in Baroque paintings or in Rembrandt and Caraveggio and you get in
Mapplethorpe.
HB: “Playing with
the Edge” plays with many edges, those between art and life, free expression
and artistic quality, participation and voyeurism.
AD: I think a
lot’s happened since the book came out, and that discouraged me a little bit. I
was reading over the galleys at the time of the Whitney Biennial, and suddenly
thought, this is all old hat now. I was struck, at the Biennial, by the
tremendous amount of what they call gender sexuality. Maybe fifteen artists
were in one way or another involved in cross-dressing or allusions to S &
M. And I became aware of all the energies and urgencies of queer politics, I
hadn’t known about, hadn’t dealt with.
HB: The edge you
are most concerned with is the edge between pornography and art. Some writers
about pornography say that the reason it was segregated off from the main body
of literature — in France, for example, it was quarantined in the section of
the Biblioteque National known as the enfer — is that it had immediate purchase
on the reader, a visceral, direct hold that violates what was taken to be the
contemplative distance of art.
AD: You’d take it
up and masturbate. It was supposed to arouse you that way. But it wasn’t art,
and that is the edge — how can we keep both?
That’s where the notion of transcendence comes in. It takes
it up into a realm of meanings close to those you get with great religious
paintings.
HB: How do you
justify comparing Mapplethorpe’s work to religious art?
AD: I would think
first of all of how he does it, for example, in the triptych “Jim and Tom,
Sausalito,” the way the shadows and the setting work, and the way in which the
two figures are engaged. You feel one figure conferring something on the other,
as if in answer to a tremendous wish. I thought about the theme of Roman
charity so popular in 17th century paintings: a man is in a Roman prison, and
his daughter comes in and feeds him her with his breast.
It could be prurient; it could be obscene, this bearded guy
suckling a young and luscious woman, and yet it’s very clear that more than
that is going on in these works. It is Roman charity; it is an act of love. The
paintings are set in the prison cell of a suffering guy, bound and shackled.
She comes in and it’s a visitation. These paintings make much of the notion
that Andre Serrano tries to make so much of — the sacramental character of
bodily fluids.
He had a genius, Mapplethorpe did, for light, and not just
the artificial light of the studio. In her biography of Mapplethorpe, Patricia
Morrisroe describes Patti Smith getting him a commission to do her first record
jacket, and he has this idea of what it’s going to be like. There’s a patch of
light on Sam Wagstaff’s terrace, and he wants to photograph her in that patch
of light. So they meet, he and Patti Smith, and they go drinking. Suddenly he
realizes, my god, we’ve got to hurry; the light will go. They rush to
Wagstaff’s and he puts her there, and does a tremendous photograph, I think for
“Horses.”.
He must have collected, in his mind, pieces of light around
lower Manhattan, and envisioned photographs in those terms. It would have been
like a Guide Bleu to light patches of lower Manhattan, to define the geography
of possible photographs.
HB: You write that
the beauty of his photographs nearly disqualified him from serious
consideration in an art world that had marginalized beauty, while the fact that
his lifestyle and photographic content were marginal made him central all over
again in an art world that was fascinated with marginality.
AD: Absolutely.
That’s one of the ironies.
HB: In the essay
“Aesthetics and Art Criticism,” you write, that “We aestheticize only when the
world is, so to speak, on hold. Where it is my view that if aesthetic
considerations are commingled with cognition, and cognition itself harnessed to
practice, contemplation is not the defining aesthetic posture at all.”
That opens up all sorts of possibilities.
AD: Because
you’re expecting people to be in involved in some way more than the
contemplative posture allowed for.
I just gave a talk about Clement Greenberg, and the way in
which you were supposed to look at a painting. You cover your eyes, and then
you say, are you ready? Then you uncover your eyes, and the eye is flooded. The
thing was to see before thought could intervene, so you’d have a purely visual
experience, without the contamination of theory, ideas, or anything of the
kind. Hoving did the same when he went to buy a Velasquez. He’d say, “Hit me!”
and they’d turn on the lights and “Aw!” That was it, he knew it was a great
painting. People thought that it was about putting everything out of play
except the eye.
But when, in the sixties, you begin to get things like the
happening, the performance — what I call disturbatory art — you are asking from
art that it do something more than establish distance from a viewer engaged in
a purely visual relationship to it. And I think that’s true with Mapplethorpe.
With Mapplethorpe, the edge lies somewhere between the contemplative and the
engaged. You’re involved both ways at least; you can’t settle on one.
Everything is negated and preserved at the same time, that crazy Hegelian idea.
We don’t have very many things that we an use the notion of
aufheben with, except something like this. To my knowledge no great artist had
ever used sexuality as the provocative force. It’s maybe more central to
Fragonard than to any other painter. And there’s the Courbet, “The Origin Of
The Universe.”
HB: In “Manhood,”
Michel Leiris describes going through the art at the Louvre as if it were his
private pornography collection when he was growing up. He saw through the
formal qualities, right to the erotic, right to the masturbatory. Mapplethorpe
said, here, it’s not hidden; it’s absolutely central. No need to leer.
The discourse has moved on, as you put it, partly because of
Mapplethorpe. The discourse on S & M has spread. There is a graduate level
seminar at Cornell on sadomasochism. There’s Madonna and MTV.
AD: We were just
in Europe, in Cologne. Down these streets lined with fairly opulent looking
shops, there were several which sold S & M costumes — mannequins in the
window, male and female, handcuffed together wearing black leather and so
forth. I looked in and it was like people were shopping for ski apparel.
Even funnier, at the hotel in Amsterdam they hand you a
little booklet about what’s happening, the exhibitions, the shows. There was a
page of ads for escorts: “S&M mistress, and S&M fitted room.” You could
pay with a VISA card. You can’t go much further in the banalization of the
marginal. Put it on your credit card. Advertise it in “Hello, Amsterdam.”
HB: You describe
yourself as never having interest in this form of sexuality, whether
heterosexual or homosexual. Nevertheless it holds you; you find it arresting in
some way.
AD: Who knows
what it means when you’re arrested by images of that sort? I’d never seen art
like that. There are things you see that do hit you very hard. I remember
seeing Flemish primitives, scenes of martyrdom, and those images really hit you
and you can’t get them out of your mind. That certainly doesn’t mean it’s
something you aspire to in your own life or would ever want to be part of.
It wasn’t even a fantasy. Fantasies don’t work like that. I
talked to Lynn Davis, who was close to Mapplethorpe at the time when he was
actively involved in sadomasochism, and she asked him if this was something he
dreamt about doing all his life. He said, I didn’t even know it existed until
last night. Fantasies are repetitive, you keep going back and back and back and
back. But these guys evolved a form of life that was a kind of creativity if
you had the guts to participate in it.
That was never a part of my outlook on life, or on
sexuality, or on love, which, after all, Mapplethorpe didn’t have. He was
looking for love at the end of his life. He was looking for a different kind of
relationship. Of course, he never found it. He was looking for it in a very
strange way.
HB: Do you feel
that coming at art from philosophy has been a good angle of approach, that
you’ve been able to open yourself in a way someone trained more traditionally
might not?
AD: Yes, but let
me put it this way: I really did begin by thinking I was going to be an artist,
and studied philosophy as a collateral thing. And I do think that having had
studio experience was very valuable, not something art historians necessarily
have.
But I don’t think it would have helped me in dealing with
the kind of art I began to find philosophically instructive, with the Pop Art I
would never have wanted to make as an artist. I grew up as a romantic. Somebody
who came up as an artist in the fifties was still in that world of Abstract
Expressionism. That wouldn’t have helped me be sensitive to Pop Art. It would
have made me hostile to it. I had given up on art before I was hit with Pop Art
and began to see Pop Art as the improbable messenger of a very important
thought.
So, yeah, I think philosophy does put you in a way of
thinking that’s very valuable for approaching art at this particular moment.
HB: You’ve
written, “I happen to take special pains with writing, I think not common in my
sprofession.” How so?
AD: I think
philosophical writing has gotten worse and worse. The standard paper is modeled
on the scientific paper. Quite early on I decided to be a literary writer,
which meant that I wanted my pieces to be a pleasure to read. And I tried to
make imaginary examples really absorbing and not silly, like so many
philosophical examples get to be. Beyond that there an energy which came into
my writing in The Nation for which I have no explanation at all.
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