Explicit homoerotic images. Depictions of sadomasochistic practices. Fetishized black male bodies. Totalitarian iconography. Overtly sexualized imagery of children. The work on the Robert Mapplethorpe: The Controversy CD-ROM contains something to upset everyone.
I can't quite deal with pictures of men with arms inserted into their anuses. Or men urinating into each others' mouths. Other images, with their flawless skins and superhuman perfection, excite me. Some others make me angry, curious, or afraid.
It's easy to get wrapped up in the politics of Mapplethorpe's imagery - so much so that you almost forget the technical skill it takes to make a picture of a flower erotic, or a photograph of a penis so abstract and extraordinarily captured that it looks like an orchid.
Mapplethorpe takes the darkest, nastiest, most problematic aspects of sex and makes them beautiful. Conversely, he can photograph traditional objects of beauty and strip them of any comfortable aesthetic: he exploits the tenuous boundary separating art and pornography. As a viewer, you become a conspirator in his fantasies. A host of personal and political issues rush in, demanding to be addressed.
Accompanying the images on The Controversy is a multimedia presentation that tries to counter the howls of protest from Mapplethorpe's critics. Sadly, the CD-ROM lacks the courage of the material it discusses. So consciously justifying these pictures as high art, in melliéuous Disney-documentary tones, smoothens their ambiguity and all the confused and sometimes unwelcome feelings they provoke. Calling Mapplethorpe's work "an art of perfection, forming exquisite moments and capturing them for eternity" ignores the fact that it is also an art of pain, revulsion, degradation, and desire.
Even so, The Controversy is a beautiful CD-ROM, containing rich detail about an important artist. Ignore the words and look at the pictures. Just don't expect to remain uninvolved.
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Controversy CD-ROM: US$89.95. Digital Collections Inc.: (800) 449 6220, +1 (510) 814 7200, e-mail dcinc@applelink.apple.com., on the Web at www.ipac.net/dci/.
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