The summer after I graduated high school, in 1989, I worked in a Subway sandwich shop and dated Sara Rushing. It took me years to realize I had never been happier, watching Field of Dreams with Sara and making out with her in the front seat of my car outside Ross Viselman’s house. But, when August came along, I broke up with her quickly and coldly. I was going to Harvard and my future awaited. That fall I had my first major depression. I was still in the midst of it when Cincinnati became national news because the sheriff arrested the director of the Contemporary Art Center for displaying certain photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

My first instinct on the Mapplethorpe affair was then, and still is now—as we look back on the heels of the 25th anniversary, and on the occasion of two simultaneous and coordinated retrospectives of his work—to stand with my arms folded, staring over from the coastal civilizations where I’ve lived as an adult to that old river town to say: What a backwards place. My first impulse is to tsk, or to quip, or to expound with my smart friends on the Things Stupid People Do. I want to enact some ritual to distance me from my provincial past. No, more than make distance, I feel the need to cast that place out, to perform an exorcism. And what better embodiment of the demon than a sheriff incarcerating a curator of the arts?

But I want to question that instinct, reconsider that scolding attitude. I want to critique it, even, though it’s a difficult critique, because I haven’t forsaken the practical attitude, i.e., opposition to censorship via state power. I’m all for Mapplethorpe hanging in a museum and I’m all for Howl coming across the borders in 1956 and I can see the straight line between these cases and modern China and Iran and Syria and Bangladesh, where artists have their fingernails pulled out and go to jail and may be killed.

So, yes, a clear stand on the Cincinnati case is in order.

But I still want to write a brief against tsking, make a plea against that cluck of tongue, because it misses the point of these conflicts, and, if I may say it, their value. We may look at Cincinnati and see backwards people come to halt progress, but if we stand in such an attitude, our arms folded, I think we miss the more fundamental human schism that the case brings to light.

Everyone has a threshold for disorder, above which they come to feel threatened. I take my understanding of this eternal dialectic from Gregory Orr’s Poetry as Survival, which argues that the basic pleasure of art has to do with stimuli bringing us right about to that threshold. The art puts before us some kind of disorder (in the way of raw emotion, or characters in conflict, or far-out existential questions) and then finds some way to tame it, restoring order, creating the sort of calm and relief we can only really feel when we have been excited and on the edge of danger.

If we apply Orr’s idea about the function of art to the Cincinnati case, we see—I think this is the more compassionate and clear-headed view—not stupid people opposing smart people, but two different kinds of people with different thresholds for disorder.

And by re-framing this conflict in such a way, we see that the clashes there are not ones to be won for all time, but, rather, indicators of the fundamental schisms that make us whole.

Every organic system, whether a person or a nation, has a variety of these internal schisms. Certain places, certain moments, are especially potent in bringing them into view.

For the modern U.S., Cincinnati is one such potent place. As Ohio goes in national elections, so goes the country, so we are all sailing, more or less, on the winds that gust through that town. Or I should say crosswinds, because what defines Cincinnati is its unusually awkward juxtapositions. Free and slave once juxtaposed in Cincinnati and gave us Uncle Tom’s Cabin (which was composed there) and Beloved (which was set there). German, Irish, and southern Anglo-Saxon juxtapose in Cincinnati. Cincinnati is a Jewish city, and an African-American city, and an Appalachian city, and a big banking city, and home to Procter & Gamble, the largest consumer products company in the world. Urban and rural juxtapose in Cincinnati with an unusual intensity, because a short drive from downtown and the hills above it—where there is a symphony, fine museums and parks, a conservatory, independent cinema, and five-star restaurants—you can be in horse country.

Art, like politics, thrives on these fissures. It jackhammers into the fault lines that separate us, and exposes and provokes the earthquake emotions.

Even 26 years later, these Mapplethorpe photographs provoke me still—especially the artist’s self-portrait with a whip up his rectum and his gaze turned toward the camera behind him; also, the little girl whose dress has floated up and exposed her genitalia. These shots make me uncomfortable. They give me a stitch in my gut. That’s great. That’s art. But if I have the capacity, in this instance, to hold that discomfort, to respond without reacting, I want to hesitate before I judge those who are pushed further.

I’m not saying that we should stand down. I’m not saying that when they march into the gallery with their batons, that we ought not call our lawyers, marshal our defense, have it out. When I saw a video recently of the jury foreman announcing their verdict of not guilty in the Cincinnati case, I felt a primal surge of pleasure, of hope.

But to the same extent we wish to put down art’s opponents, I think we need to restrain our own haughty impulses. Let those arms come out of their defensive fold and hang down by our sides. Let the tongue’s tsk ease into a sigh. When we see wrong versus right out there, in the world around us, let’s look for a simulacrum of that struggle right here, in the world inside us. When we see people offended and protecting their idea of order, let’s not speak until we have searched and found an awareness of our borders that we would defend, with whatever means available to us, were they breached.

The irony is that Mapplethorpe, known now as art’s Avatar of Edge, was, in his methods and his aesthetics, such a formalist. His images of disorder were deeply romantic, his outré sex acts were shot in a studio, his wilding was classically composed. “I was a Catholic,” he once told the BBC. “I went to church every Sunday. The way I arrange things is very Catholic. It’s always been that way when I put things together. Very symmetrical.”

I’ll leave the subject of Mapplethorpe’s own schisms for another time. For myself, I know looking at his work, feeling such ambivalence about it, I can see that I am not a man who left a quaint past for a civilized future. I am trying my best to be wild-minded. But I am forever drawn, too, by the thatched huts of my provincial past, by the comfort of a car in a garage. Maybe I am a liberal with some reactionary in my heart. I want progress, difference. But I also want a time machine to go back to the front seat of my 1986 Nissan. I want to make out with Sara again, drop her off, and drive home to my mom’s house, where she cooks me French toast in the morning.

The post Why I Don’t Blame Cincinnati for Putting Art on Trial appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In June 1989, I was 22, a newly declared art history major at Northwestern University, about to start an internship at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The child of an art teacher and a psychiatrist who grew up in the small, accepting town of Lincoln, Massachusetts, I’d been going to museums in the Boston area, and making and looking at art, since I was young. I lived just a short distance from the de Cordova Sculpture and Gardens Museum, where I took my first art class and saw my first museum exhibition. Growing up, I’d known museums as refined places.

My assignment from the Corcoran’s education department was to give tours of their upcoming exhibition “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment.” What I knew of Mapplethorpe wasn’t much: His work was provocative; he’d died of complications from AIDS just months before.

Ajitto, 1981, Robert Mapplethorpe. Gelatin silver print.

 
When I checked in at the Corcoran’s security desk on my first morning, though, I immediately knew something was wrong. I was told to go straight to an all-staff meeting already in progress, and that I would meet my supervisor later. I quietly took a seat in the back of the auditorium, which was alive with tension and anger. People were yelling and storming out. I didn’t know a soul and had no idea what was going on.

What was going on, I learned later, was an explosion in the culture wars. In May, New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato and North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms had denounced a photograph of an inexpensive crucifix in a container of urine (Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ) as vulgar and undeserving of federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Mapplethorpe exhibit, which had also received NEA funding, got swept up in that obscenity controversy a few weeks later, when Congress found out that “The Perfect Moment”—which included photographs of very explicit sexual acts in addition to pictures of flowers and formal portraits—was about to open at the Corcoran. Fearing protests and loss of funding, the Corcoran’s director had decided to cancel the exhibition with less than three weeks to go before its opening. The exhibition would eventually be shown in D.C. that summer, but not at the Corcoran—it appeared at the Washington Project for the Arts from July 21 to August 13, 1989, to record-breaking crowds.

Inside the museum, employees were shaken and angered. Outside the museum, protestors decried the cancellation, projecting images of Mapplethorpe’s work on the museum’s walls. In July, Helms introduced a law in Congress to prohibit the National Endowment for the Arts from funding “obscene” art. When the Mapplethorpe show later traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, both the Center and its director were charged with obscenity.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand why people were so upset. I knew that Mapplethorpe’s artwork tested our social boundaries, but I wasn’t offended by it. I knew that Jesse Helms was a powerful, conservative politician. But I was young and idealistic, and didn’t fully understand how Mapplethorpe and this politician were connected. I certainly didn’t know how a museum could find itself caught in the crosshairs of the culture wars.

I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by great art and creative people all my life. As a student and in my personal life, I’ve long been immersed in photography and its history. My in-laws (Richard and Ellen Sandor) let me explore their amazing photography collection. To this day, going through their house feels like a creative journey. They introduced me to—among other things—the power and beauty of Mapplethorpe’s portrait of the female bodybuilder, Lisa Lyon.

And that summer I was in Washington, I had just enjoyed a great traveling exhibition called “On the Art of Fixing A Shadow: 150 Years of Photography” that happened to be at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. the same time I was. That show helped me to learn more about great photographers, and to equate Robert Mapplethorpe’s compositional abilities with those of such artists as Edward Weston.

After the Mapplethorpe exhibition was cancelled, I don’t remember many conversations taking place within the office about it. I think staff members—and the entire organization—were exhausted. The days and weeks after the cancellation seemed all about the future, not the past.

The cancellation of the Mapplethorpe show was a blow for the Corcoran, but it was a strange stroke of luck for me. I was no longer tasked with giving prescribed tours; instead I was invited to help prepare the Corcoran’s next show, “Japanese Photography in America, 1920–1940,” the first major exhibition of work by Japanese-American photographers. As I recall, this exhibition was already scheduled to be at the Corcoran, but they moved up the opening date. The museum needed all hands on deck, and I did more than most interns ever get to. I helped unpack the works of art. I researched and wrote copy for the wall panels. I stood by curators and educators as they hung the show. It was an incredible learning experience.

Carnival of Onions, Early 1930s, Midori Shimoda. Gelatin silver print.

 
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Mapplethorpe show and what might have been. I knew the show was travelling to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston the next summer, so in 1990 I applied to—practically begged—the ICA to take me as a curatorial intern. My official assignment was to conduct research on an upcoming exhibition, but my real goal was to see how the museum responded to the Mapplethorpe show under its roof.

Tension was high. Nothing could be done or said about the exhibition without direct authorization from David Ross, the ICA’s director. From the curatorial offices we watched men stage kiss-offs in support of the show as motorcycle cops cruised by, preparing for unrest. But despite the anxiety, there was no incident. For visitors and staff, the previous controversy about the show was simply a non-issue.

Politicians seemed to have moved on, perhaps because they had had some success with condemning “obscene” art. Congress got what it wanted with an anti-obscenity clause in October 1989. While the Corcoran Gallery of Art was located only a few blocks from the White House, Boston had the advantage of not being, geographically speaking, in the center of the controversy. I like to think that Boston, my hometown, enjoyed a moment to show off its newfound tolerance.

My summers with Mapplethorpe were an unusual introduction to an arts career. But rather than putting me off, they revealed to me that museums are interesting, dynamic places that can alter people’s perceptions of the world. I suddenly understood how the arts and the humanities are living forces in our culture, tied up intimately with politics and policy.

By a remarkable coincidence, Los Angeles, my new hometown, is bringing the two guide-stars of my career into alignment again as “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium” comes to the Getty Museum and LACMA and “Making Waves: Japanese American Photography, 1920–1940” comes to the Japanese American National Museum this summer. I’m looking forward to visiting with these pictures again and thanking them for what they gave so many years ago.

Untitled, 2016, Jack Ludden. Digital photomontage of Self-portrait, 2014 (left), Self-portrait, 1989 (right), and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1989.

 
*An earlier version left out Lisa Lyon’s name.

The post How a Museum Cancelling a Controversial Mapplethorpe Exhibition Changed My Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.