Robert Mapplethorpe - Lou, NYC, 1978
As stated, the value of offense can be found in its capacity to illuminate social values and generate discussion around those values. Depending on the content of the work and its relation to the society in which it was made, its offense can even instigate moral reckoning that directly and indirectly impacts the society on a legislative and normative level. One of the most well-known examples of such a confrontation is the exhibition of Robert Mapplethope’s explicitly sexual photo series, X Portfolio. However, the work’s societal value of broadening social and sexual ideas of what is acceptable by unabashedly depicting homoerotic sex acts was not contained wholly in the overstepping the prescribed acceptability of the society in which it was made, but in its exhibition and subsequent offense that it generated among the public. In other words, it was not just the content that made X Portfolio impactful, but the sociopolitical context in which it was shown.
When Mapplethorpe’s retrospective, The Perfect Moment, was exhibited in Cincinnati in 1989, it caused such an uproar that the director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, which hosted the exhibition, was arraigned for public obscenity.41 Indeed, one would be hard to think of an exhibition that was more at odds with the conservative American social values at the time. In his work, Mapplethorpe presents himself as Satan incarnate, posing in front of pentagrams in some photos and sporting a makeshift tail made from a bullwhip inserted into his rectum in others. Initially a major sensation, the exhibition had already been shown in New York, Boston, and Pennsylvania. This caught the attention of senator Jesse Helms, whose politically-motivated spectacle of righteousness led to the subsequent cancellation of the show in Washington after it was discovered that the institution that curated the exhibition, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, received a $30,000 government grant.
Regardless of the fact that Mapplethorpe neither applied for or ever received public money, the retrospective was later used in a legislative proposal sponsored by Helms to prevent the government-sponsored National Endowment of the Arts from giving any funding to institutions that “promote, disseminate, or produce:"42
1) obscene or indecent material, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasichism, homo-eroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts; or
2) material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion; or
3) Material which denigrates, debases, or reviles a person, group or class on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or national origin.
Here is the severity of the American moral sensibilities of the time manifested in a legislative proposal. As Robert Hughes pointed out in an article for Time Magazine,43 the Helms amendment was so broadly written that any work could have been defunded and removed from view from any government-sponsored institution on the grounds that it offended anyone for any reason. As result, the amendment was ultimately voted down due to its lack of applicability. However, just because the law was not ratified does not mean that it did not have consequences. Besides the chilling effect on institutions’ willingness to risk the display of controversial work, it is worth pointing out the irony if the fact that, although proposed by a right-wing senator famous for his fire-and-brimstone moral crusades, the third clause, in particular, has been adopted by those on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum as justification for censorship of works like Open Casket and The City I. Only now, the standard of what constitutes “denigration” includes not being a member of the proper demographic.
The Perfect Moment surely had consequences. It provoked a confrontation between the ingrained homophobia of the era and free artistic expression, and neither side came out unscathed. Even if the Helms amendment was not passed, it put the arts on the radar of conservative politicians looking to direct the outrage of their constituents at politically expedient targets, a practice that has been maintained up until and through the Trump Administration.44 But just as was the case for TAP and TOUCH Cinema, the offense that The Perfect Moment provoked drew attention to repressive moral standards, and this arguably merits the provocation. In addition, the events that followed the exhibition illustrate the inefficacy of formalism as it applies to the idea of offense, and the potential harm that can result.
During the trial in Cincinnati, the defense called on the expert witness testimony of the critic and former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Janet Kardon, to make the case that the more explicit photos in the exhibition should be considered art, and not pornography. When asked about a photo entitled Lou, NYC, which depicts a man inserting a finger into his own penis, Kardon responded, “It's a central image, very symmetrical, a very ordered, classical composition.” When describing the photo entitled Helmut and Brooks, which shows a close-up of a man’s fist fully inserted into another man’s rectum, she compared it to images of flowers.45
It is true that the photos display a knowledge of the craft, crisp black and white, well-framed, “classical composition” etc. But to attempt to qualify The X Portfolio as art by divorcing its formal qualities from its content comes across at best, ridiculous, and at worst, insincere. Kardon’s attempt to obscure the offensive nature of the photos with formal mystification does a disservice to the real value of Mapplethorpe's work and the public’s perception of the arts in general. Although the jury ultimately decided that the photos did qualify as art, the verdict seemed to come from a sentiment of bewilderment, not understanding. As The New York Times reported after the trial, one blue-collar juror stated, “I'm not an expert. I don't understand Picasso's art. But I assume the people who call it art know what they're talking about.”46
This juror’s statement perfectly exemplifies the need to establish and defend the value of offense. Without it, critics like Kardon must fall back on absurdly solipsistic formal analysis to justify the presence of works on the level of Helmut and Brooks. Again, there is value in such an image being displayed in public precisely because it does offend prescribed social norms. The Perfect Moment drew massive numbers of visitors in the locations it was displayed— the trials and controversy caused by the offensive nature of Mapplethorpe’s work doubtlessly contributing free publicity.47 The value of works like X Portfolio lie beyond the work itself, and fear of acknowledging this value only serves to further isolate the arts from a public that is not privileged enough to have an art education that allows them to see such testimony as obfuscation.
Perhaps the closest an expert witness came to stating the work’s true value during the trial came from Jacquelynn Baas, director of the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California. She testified that, “It's the tension between the physical beauty of the photograph and the brutal nature of what's going on in it that gives it the particular quality that this work of art has.”48 Still, what that “particular quality” was, exactly, remained unexplained. The jury eventually decided that the exhibition was indeed art and not obscenity, but as a defense49 attorney in the trial, Marc Mezibov, later stated, this had more to do with the failure of the prosecution to provide any expert witnesses of its own than any convincing explanations given by the defense. The Cincinnati trial narrowly avoided setting a dangerous president of censoring offensive art. If free artistic expression is to be preserved, better justifications for offense must be articulated.