Arthur Lubow

But how do his photographs stand up? Are they, to invoke Ezra Pound, news that stays news? A yearlong exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, which aims to lionize the photographer, instead suggests that his sexually explicit images, once shocking, now look like clinical illustrations in a textbook on fetishes, while his glorifications of black men feed into old, odious stereotypes.

“Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now,” on view through Jan. 5, is the second of a two-part presentation. The previous show comprehensively sampled Mapplethorpe’s own work for a new generation of viewers. This installment includes, along with his pictures, works by six gay and lesbian artists — Lyle Ashton Harris, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie and Paul Mpagi Sepuya — who have, in different ways, been influenced by him.

In his abbreviated career, Mapplethorpe consistently applied rigorous studio techniques to everything he portrayed. “I’m looking for perfection in form,” he said, whether with portraits, penises or flowers. “It’s not different from one subject to the next.”

He was essentially a fashion photographer. In leather bars and sex clubs he recruited his models, and he staged them performing acts that were bizarre and disquieting to a general audience. He photographed a man with a fist in another’s anus, or a subject urinating into his partner’s mouth, as coolly as if he were recording this season’s dresses. “It was almost like theater that was happening for the photo sessions — it wasn’t sex,” he said. The raunchiness of the scenes resonated dissonantly with the meticulous mode of the presentation. The sex pictures are very unsexy.

By the end of the ’70s, he had moved on to another of his erotic interests: the fetishizing of black men in portraits. Like a 19th-century academician, he directed his nude, muscular African American models to assume classical poses, perched on stools or configured within circles. Often he framed them as headless bodies or with their faces turned away.

During his lifetime he shot portraits of socialites and far too many of female bodybuilders. As he weakened physically, he produced still-life pictures of flowers — not as female receptors, in the manner of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, but underscoring their phallic shapes. Most of these pictures are pretty and some are interesting, but it’s the ones of sex and black men that established his reputation.

What made the sex photographs novel and controversial was their glimpse of uncharted and arcane S&amp;M; practices. With few exceptions, they read today like lifeless advertisements. The emergence of gay people into the mainstream and, more to the point, the ubiquity of internet pornography, have lifted Mapplethorpe’s kinks out of the shadows.

Even his pictures of genital torture, gruesome to behold, are less unnerving and far less thought-provoking than Opie’s 1994 “Self-Portrait/Cutting”: her naked back incised with a bloody stick-figure drawing, like something a child might do, of two women holding hands by a house beneath a cloud. The battle lines in the LGBTQ community have moved from sexual freedom to knottier questions of gender identity, social conformity and racial intersectionality. Not by chance, all the artists in the second half of the Guggenheim exhibition are black, female or both.

At a recent performance of an oratorio about Mapplethorpe at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, called “Triptych (Eyes of One on Another),” the once-taboo images of sexual activity provoked not a gasp nor a titter.

But the images that continue to make viewers uncomfortable, and rightly so, are the ones of nude black models. The most telling criticism of Mapplethorpe’s approach has come from gay black men. Harris’ self-portraits — such as his posing in whiteface drag in “Americas,” at the Guggenheim, or in female garb with his genitals exposed in the “Constructs” series — deliberately undermine the mythology of the virile, potent black man.

Ligon in the early ’90s undertook a project, “Notes on the Margin of the Black Book,” that collected texts, including his own, commenting on the issues raised by the Mapplethorpe photographs. Remounted at the Guggenheim, his installation touches on the unease felt by gay black men when they view bodies they find attractive in what they also consider to be dehumanizing depictions by a white observer.

He cites an essay by black film director and artist Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, now a professor of art history and African American studies at Yale: “Mapplethorpe appropriates the conventions of porn’s racialized codes of representation, and by abstracting its stereotypes into ‘art,’ he makes racism’s phantasms of desire respectable.” (Mercer later expressed more ambivalence, in part because of the ways that black gay artists, like Julien and Fani-Kayode, have made use of Mapplethorpe’s work.)

In one of the texts that Ligon includes, novelist Alan Hollinghurst writes that Mapplethorpe was not “unaware of the political implications of a white man shooting physically magnificent black men, and such implicit tensions lend a piquancy to these pictures.” But “piquancy” seems the wrong word to describe a work like “Thomas,” from 1987, a vertical diptych with a favorite model that combines a photograph of a classically posed naked black man with an egregious swatch of leopard-skin fabric. I don’t believe Mapplethorpe was being ironic here. The grandiosity of his ambition (he compared himself to Michelangelo) rarely allowed for humor.

But there is one notable image that arouses humor and uneasiness with a punch that still stuns. Arguably his best picture, as well as the most notorious, “Man in Polyester Suit” depicts a large penis that flops out of the fly of a cheap business suit. Impeccably staged, the photograph excludes the model’s head (Milton Moore didn’t want to be identifiable). The cropped format might have been a department-store suit ad, except that here it is instilling desire for the body part and not the garment. Indeed, the condescension toward the suit — and, by implication, the man who has selected it — contributes greatly to the disturbing sense that this faceless man has just one thing to offer. “It is supposed to be shocking,” wrote critic Arthur Danto.

Usually, however, Mapplethorpe romanticizes the black body, at times going so far as to include touristy, tribal accouterments like face paint or leopard skin. Two African-born photographers in the Guggenheim show, Fani-Kayode and Muholi, demonstrate more informed approaches.

After making many portraits of queer people in her native South Africa, Muholi has turned the camera on herself. Working in her own tradition, sometimes she wears feathers and cowrie shells; other times she contrives headdresses out of cleaning tools used by domestic workers like her mother. In the darkroom she intensifies the black tones of her skin so that the whites of her self-assertive eyes, gazing at the viewer, radiate in high contrast. She is very adamantly an actor, not an object.

Born in Nigeria to a prominent Yoruba family, Fani-Kayode died of AIDS in London in 1989. Like Muholi, he would sometimes pose his models with African artifacts, but to produce something profound and mysterious. In “Bronze Head,” a Yoruba copper-alloy bust is positioned between the buttocks of a naked black man. Is this penetration, defecation or childbirth? In “Tulip Boy II,” he depicts a proud man with a parrot tulip clenched in his mouth. Compare that to Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Dennis Speight naked, holding a spray of calla lilies like a floral ejaculation. Speight’s tentative, apprehensive expression reinforces the sense that his sole purpose is to please the photographer.

The artist in the Guggenheim show closest to Mapplethorpe is Sepuya, who photographs nude men — including himself — in sexual poses in the studio. At his last New York exhibition at Team Gallery, a portrait showed the photographer holding a camera in one hand while flanked by two men. He has one man’s penis in his mouth and another grasped in his free hand. This is an outrageous, but not very interesting, Mapplethorpe setup. The only difference is that the photographer was black and the genitals were white.

Most of Sepuya’s recent work uses mirrors, cloths and other studio apparatus to occlude the image. Mapplethorpe also relied on a bag of tricks — in his case lifted from 19th- and early 20th-century photographers. From Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden’s portrait of a Sicilian boy, “Cain,” Mapplethorpe took the pose for his black model, Ajitto, on a stool. The incongruity of posing a socially marginalized couple in a bourgeois home came from Diane Arbus. His theatrically posed male nudes were antedated by George Platt Lynes’.

But his chief debt was owed to Man Ray. “He kicked around photography in a way that hadn’t been done before,” Mapplethorpe told an interviewer. The radical foreshortenings and inversions that make buttocks resemble hillocks, the light that sifts through window blinds and casts patterns on a torso, the self-portrait in drag, the photographing of people to look like statues and statues to look like people — all, and much more, came from Man Ray (and his collaborators, Marcel Duchamp and Lee Miller). But in all of these borrowings, Mapplethorpe’s version is less compelling than the original source. When Man Ray used slatted light, for example, the bands of light and dark gloriously dematerialize the woman’s skin with whirls of illumination. In Mapplethorpe, the stripes are as monotonous as prison bars.

Mapplethorpe’s most prescient move may have been his dedication to staged studio work. That practice is now prevalent among younger photographers, but when he was coming up, street photography ruled in artistic circles. John Szarkowski, the influential photography director at the Museum of Modern Art, did much to enforce that bias. He considered Garry Winogrand, whose compressed, off-kilter pictures found poetry in chaos, to be “the central photographer of his generation.” As Mapplethorpe noted, his own pictures were “the opposite of Garry Winogrand’s.”

In 2003, Szarkowski told me that Mapplethorpe “was a pretty good commercial photographer who photographed things people weren’t accustomed to seeing in mixed company.”

“It’s not photographically interesting,” he added.

Put a little more generously, Mapplethorpe had the canniness and the guts to exhibit pictures that framed his sexual obsessions with a formal elegance that allowed them unprecedented entree into galleries and museums. He aligned perfectly with the historical moment, but that moment has passed.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/design/robert-mapplethorpe-guggenheim.html" id="75cddf98-2014-31d3-a5f0-0ef4a24e8543">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Thirty years after Robert Mapplethorpe’s death, the legend still obscures the photographs. His demise at 42 from AIDS, during the height of the American epidemic, gave a tabloid stamp to the authenticity of his sexually transgressive art. And right at that time arose the political controversy that enshrined him as a martyr to artistic freedom: a congressional uproar over a traveling exhibition and then a grandstanding criminal obscenity case in Cincinnati. His place in political hi...

Has Mapplethorpe's Shock Worn Off?

<h1>SAN FRANCISCO — Pamela Kramlich clearly didn’t know what she was getting herself into when she bought her first work of video art in 1987. Having seen a deliciously zany video, “The Way Things Go,” by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, she thought it might provide amusing dinner-party entertainment at her house in the Presidio Heights section of San Francisco.</h1>

She telephoned the Sonnabend Gallery in New York to inquire how to obtain it. “That’s easy,” the gallery’s director, Antonio Homem, told her.

She supplied her Mastercard number and a short time later, as she recalls, “a videotape with a funny sticker” arrived in the mail. Produced in an edition of 300, the tape of “The Way Things Go” cost her $350.

That cheap, simple buy has led Kramlich and her husband, venture capitalist C. Richard Kramlich, down a costly, rocky path.

Over the last three decades, the couple, married for 37 years, have assembled an unsurpassed collection of time-based media art — video, film, photographic slides, audio and computer art that unfold to a viewer over time. Because much of the work demands large, uncompromising exhibition spaces, the collection inevitably outgrew their 1927 home. To display and live with the art, they commissioned a three-level weekend house from Herzog &amp; de Meuron, the Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm best known for the Tate Modern in London.

Although there are a handful of other serious collectors of video art, the Kramlichs have opted to incorporate their holdings into their daily lives. “What makes Pam and Dick’s house and collection unique is the way they integrated it,” said Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney Museum.

(The new Kramlich residence in the Napa Valley wine country is the subject of a monograph to be published by Hatje Cantz in April.)

At the entry to their city house are apple-shaped bronze doorknobs, artistically insignificant but symbolically potent. They commemorate a 1977 private offering of Apple Computer shares in which Richard Kramlich, who is now 83, cannily participated. “It’s helped us to live the life we live,” he said.

Just inside, Pamela Kramlich, 75, likes to point out a print of the famous 1960 staged photograph, “Leap into the Void,” of Yves Klein diving out a window. “That’s what I felt we did — jumping into an unknown territory,” she said.

In the early years, she was fortunate to be shopping for work that few competitors sought. “I didn’t have the money to buy masterpieces and I wanted to live with masterpieces,” she said.

In the San Francisco townhouse, the art is placed everywhere you turn, in spaces public and private. Snaking up the staircase is Dara Birnbaum’s five-channel video installation of news coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Holding forth in the master bedroom is a Reinhard Mucha work of 1994-95 that features a cheap equipment stand for a 16-millimeter film projector, its speakers duct-taped to the poles. The projector beams a looped video of Mucha’s toddler son repeating the word “auto,” opposite a light box image of the artist as a young boy. “It made us think about our family histories and how important our relations are with our children,” Pamela Kramlich remarked.

Owning a time-based media work poses extraordinary exhibition and conservation demands that the Kramlichs fully appreciated only as they moved forward. In 1997, recognizing the dearth of institutional support for this kind of art, they established the New Art Trust, which they run in concert with three museums — the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Tate — and to which they have promised 35 art works as gifts.

Their purchase in 1995 of James Coleman’s projected-slide installation, I N I T I A L S, which came with strict regulations on display area and acoustics that prevented it from being shown in their San Francisco house, sharpened the couple’s ambition to build a home for art that would also be a weekend retreat.

In Napa, their friends Christian and Cherise Moueix, who had commissioned Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron to construct the Dominus Winery, arranged in May 1997 for the couple to meet the two architects for dinner. The Kramlichs departed with the conviction that they had found their design partners. What they couldn’t know is that from commission to completion, the process would take 18 years.

There were site changes, forcing the architectural scheme to be rethought. The exigent demands of California code regulations added to the costs. And the successive wallops of the tech bubble collapse (Richard Kramlich specializes in Silicon Valley investments) and the wider recession that followed the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, made the couple question whether to continue.

“We thought, why do this homage to ourselves?” Pamela Kramlich said. “Let’s just do a display space for the art work.”

The budget was escalating without clear constraints. “We had no idea whether it would be $10 million or $200 million,” she recalled. “Dick was always saying, ‘You’re pouring money down a rathole,’ because I was spending it and he wanted to invest it.” In March 2002 they suspended the project, then revived it in 2004. Richard Kramlich added: “I remember my dad asked me, ‘Can you afford this?’ I said, ‘I think so.’ That was one-seventh of what it cost.”

(Of the final budget, they would only say it came in somewhere between the $10 million and $200 million.)

For Herzog &amp; de Meuron, the evolving Kramlich residence afforded a drawing pad for research that might be incorporated elsewhere, much as Frank Gehry’s imagining of an unbuilt home for insurance tycoon Peter Lewis in Lyndhurst, Ohio, materialized in the Guggenheim Bilbao. In early renditions, the Kramlich house was a glass pavilion where video art could be displayed on curved glass walls and the natural setting would filter through.

“There would be no boundaries,” Herzog said in a telephone interview. “It would be a total blur.”

To counter the impression that this was a modernist transparent box on a lawn, like Mies van der Rohe’s landmark Farnsworth House, the architects exhaustively investigated ways to construct an undulating roof composed of a Teflon-coated woven-fiberglass membrane.

But after the project was revived, the roof shrank into a thin aluminum carapace, and most of the media art was relegated to the cavernous lower level, which required the excavation of thousands of cubic feet of earth. Three teams of German architects and engineers fabricated flexible spaces that are sonically and visually discrete, allowing video art to be exhibited with a purity that museums can’t provide. The final phase of the construction was supervised by Aebhric Coleman, director of the Kramlich Collection, who was once the studio manager for his notoriously exacting artist father, James.

With their multilayered ceilings of fiberglass and acoustic plaster, the underground galleries define the state of the art. “This does not exist elsewhere,” Iles said. “Acoustic isolation is prohibitively expensive for most museums to build into any new building. The Kramlichs have worked really hard to create conditions where you can really slow down. It’s surprising how rare that fully embodied experience is.”

Currently, access to the house is restricted to museum patrons, art scholars or Kramlich friends. (For the public to be admitted the zoning designation would have to change.)

A visitor starts up a piece by using an iPad. For Richard Mosse, whose infrared 16-millimeter film “The Enclave,” on rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is displayed on six large screens in the downstairs galleries, the exhibition quality exceeds anything he has known before, including the piece’s premiere in the Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The installation is so uncompromising that he worried. “What I noticed is, it was bloody loud,” he said. “Pam is in her 70s, Dick in his 80s — maybe we should turn it down.”

Explaining why she and her husband were attracted to “The Enclave,” Pamela Kramlich observed, “We were fascinated with Richard’s use of infrared film and its naturally pink imagery, how it combined the beauty of the place and the horror of what was happening in the Congo in such a powerful way.”

The collectors continue to acquire pieces that — to put it mildly — pose exhibition challenges. They recently bought Joan Jonas’ “They Come to Us Without a Word,” a sprawling installation of videos, sculptures and drawings, commissioned for the United States pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. To show it would take up much of the 8,000 square feet of themain gallery area on the lower level of the Kramlich house.

“When somebody takes a work of that size, you can’t help but be pleased, it would be neurotic not to be,” Jonas says. “I’m not talking about the money, but finding a home for it.”

Herzog &amp; de Meuron designed a monumental spiral staircase to connect the vast lower level and a smaller glass pavilion at the top, with a mezzanine floor in between. Along with an enclosable terrace, the mezzanine contains what was intended to be one guest bedroom, which the architects cropped into an eccentric shape so the house wouldn’t jut out from the slope. Pamela Kramlich chose this room as the master bedroom. “It’s too open,” she said of the spectacular glassed-in upstairs bedroom. “I didn’t want to be exposed all the time.”

The top floor pavilion has a Nam June Paik piece in a corner, but it is not, as it was in the earlier schemes, the primary place to view art. Its mirrored and glass interior walls and the transparent skin combine to refract and complicate the beautiful views of the oak-dotted hilly landscape. Inspired by the pavilions of artist Dan Graham, the architects created an environment in which, Herzog says, “the viewer is being reflected — is viewing and being viewed — and what you see is not the same as what I see.”

Its enormous steel-framed glass doors, designed by an engineer who worked for the Lockheed Martin aerospace firm, open to allow direct contact with the natural setting and a horizon-edge pool. Someday, these doors may also serve as projection screens.

For now, though, the translucent space feels like an art installation itself, a sensation enhanced by the way you ascend to it. Entering the house, through a narrow passageway between mud-colored, sprayed-concrete walls, you find yourself in what Herzog describes as “a large underworld.” From there, you progress to the light-saturated top floor. It is, he says, “a wholly psychological experience — even if you are in the glass house, you feel the underground.”

When the images penetrate and bounce off the glass,you feel your perception of reality shift. To devotees of video art, this is a familiar and welcome sensation. “It is not a dead space, ever,” Pamela Kramlich said exuberantly. “It is moving pictures that are reality.”

As if a pause button has been pressed, your clock is reset. You can return to the underground space and give to the time-based art what this kind of art too seldom receives: the time to slow down and watch.

This article originally appeared in <a id="74f05400-0792-4807-86a2-cce0a634410b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/arts/design/kramlich-video-herzog-de-meuron.html">The New York Times</a>.

She telephoned the Sonnabend Gallery in New York to inquire how to obtain it. “That’s easy,” the gallery’s director, Antonio Homem, told her.

The ultimate video art retreat

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Arthur Lubow

Articles written by the author

Has Mapplethorpe's Shock Worn Off?

The ultimate video art retreat