COMMENTARY : Censorship and Photography’s 150th : Controversy over Serrano and Mapplethorpe works overshadows observances of the form’s sesquicentennial

Although no “Eureka!” accompanied the invention of photography, which literally took centuries to evolve, commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the medium’s arrival probably seemed like a good idea. Even arbitrarily chosen anniversaries or birthdays can serve as cultural speed bumps, usefully slowing the daily rush of living to open at least a momentary space for thought. And the selection of 1839 as photography’s official starting date--it was the year Henry Fox Talbot, in London, and Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, in Paris, announced nearly simultaneous technological breakthroughs--is certainly reasonable.

Yet, as the highly publicized sesquicentennial year comes to a close, it’s hard not to feel that opportunities have been missed. Despite the seemingly endless paeons to and probings of the subject, via exhibitions and books both here and abroad, it turns out that the most memorable and revealing event of all was wholly unplanned and virtually unanticipated.

I’m referring, of course, to the still-raging arguments over photographs by Andres Serrano and, especially, the late Robert Mapplethorpe. As recently as the beginning of this month, County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich fanned the political flames by throwing his support behind North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms and Long Beach Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who want to muzzle art, artists and museums that receive federal funds. Ironically, this fetid dispute discloses more about the complex revolution begun by photography’s nominal invention than have most any of the celebratory exhibitions specially organized to tell the tale.

Nationally, four shows have sought to encompass the full sweep of photographic history. Chronological surveys have so far been mounted by the J. Paul Getty Museum, a team composed of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and London’s Royal Academy, and another that paired Washington’s National Gallery with the Art Institute of Chicago. The quartet will be squared off in February, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art will weigh in with its version of “Photography Until Now.”

The National Gallery and Art Institute show, “On the Art of Fixing a Shadow,” has been traveling the year and opens Thursday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I haven’t yet seen the exhibition, but the capacious, profusely illustrated catalogue leads me to expect a resplendent exhibition stuffed with arresting images arranged in provocative and insightful ways--until, that is, its unbroken chain of Greatest Hits devolves into chaos and confusion somewhere around 1965.

Why then? Here’s a clue to understanding the mid-’60s crack-up in photography’s seamless story: “Andy Warhol: A Retrospective.” Yes, Warhol, the Prince of Pop. The painter.

Organized by MoMA, this mammoth exhibition was the single best historical show of photography I saw during the sesquicentennial year, and it came out of the museum’s department of painting and sculpture, not its department of photography. And that loopy dislocation is very much the point. While only slowly being understood, intricate and far-reaching questions about the relationships between painting and photography are crucial to grasp.

To make his paintings, Warhol built on the precedent of Robert Rauschenberg, who had been using a variety of printing techniques in his work since the mid-1950s. Warhol would begin by clipping an existing picture from a newspaper, a magazine, a sales catalogue or another published source. In short, he would begin by literally taking a photograph. Next, the purloined photo would be copied, enlarged and transferred onto a silk screen, creating a kind of crude negative. Finally, the image would be printed by hand onto the surface of a canvas.

Marilyn, Elvis, the electric chair, race riots, car crashes--from the 1960s on, Warhol’s art was about many things. Among the most important was the deadly tension it embodied, a tension between our culture’s hidebound commitment to aristocratic ideals and our proud declarations of egalitarian democracy. In Warhol’s work these twin poles are often represented by the painting’s subject--Elvis, say, who is both Southern white trash and “The King,” or Marilyn Monroe, the troubled orphan impersonating a goddess.

Yet, the poles are also represented by Warhol’s conflicted choice of mediums, which speaks eloquently of our conventional regard for painting as the highest of High Art and for tabloid and publicity photographs as the Peoples’ Junk. Photography, always a second-class citizen in the stratified community of artistic mediums, had long since occupied a seat at the back of the bus. And Warhol, who had grown up the gay son of Polish-Catholic, working-class immigrants in a rough, Pennsylvania coal-mining neighborhood, no doubt had developed certain intuitive sensitivities to matters of prejudice and social class.

Warhol’s 1964 painting, “Sixteen Jackies,” which repeats in nearly random arrangement six different photographs taken by the press on the day of the Kennedy assassination, has been included in “On the Art of Fixing a Shadow.” The show thus takes note of this odd fact of modern artistic life: In order for its implications to be fully seen and taken seriously, photography, the most pervasive form of imagery the world has ever known, necessarily had to masquerade as painting.

Before Warhol, you couldn’t see the photographic forest for the aesthetic trees. After, there’s not much point in trying. Given the cataclysmic bombshell that was pop art, any neatly ordered history of subsequent photography could be expected to crumble.

As well it should. From Julia Margaret Cameron and Nadar in the 19th Century to Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus into the ‘60s, not to mention the countless important stops in between, a compelling case could be made-- has been made--for photography as a distinct, self-enclosed medium marked by issues wholly unique from any other tool an artist might use. Such a history of the first 100-odd years could plausibly be written because, right from the moment of its inception, photography was branded an unfavored stepchild among artistic mediums, as battles raged over whether or not it was really art.

As surely as any innocent kid disfigured by youthful trauma, photographic history was marked. It’s pretty late in the day to be pressing those formalist arguments now, and I’m not saying that’s what any of the four big surveys have actually attempted. But neither has any one of them used the anniversary platform for a full-scale overhaul based on post-formalist points of view.

Two shows that coincided with photography’s sesquicentennial did indeed recognize the full scope of this rupture. Both took an expansive view of post-1960s developments in the revolution initiated by the camera and didn’t limit themselves by medium.

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s big summer show, “A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation,” did a good job in sorting through the mixed-up landscape of camera-images that has turned our culture into a mesmerizing hall of mirrors. In New York, meanwhile, the Whitney Museum’s current “Image World: Art and Media Culture” gets hopelessly lost trying to traverse the tangled field.

Still, in their difficult assessments of the nature of art in the age of mechanical and electronic reproduction, both shows refuse to segregate photographs and video from paintings and sculptures. The abundance of strong work made each an embarrassment of riches.

“A Forest of Signs” was significant for another reason. It made a persuasive case for the number of women who, as artists coming to maturity in the 1970s, critically used the typically disenfranchised medium of photography as an aesthetic parallel to their own second-class status as women. Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger and others have turned their art toward sharply outlining certain ugly contours of our culture’s deeply held, but nonetheless enslaving, conventions. Men, we’re still content covertly to believe, are seminal producers, while women are rather like the lowly camera: Their chief function is to re produce.

Clearly, the revolution that surrounds the invention of photography is complex. Among its more simple, and therefore more profound, transformations was a radical alteration in the profile of precisely who could make and circulate pictures. Before photography, most all images were made by working artists--which is to say, artists who worked for patrons, and who made pictures according to those patrons’ tastes.

After photography, and especially in the “Instamatic” world we now inhabit, anyone can (and does) make pictures.

The unruliness of post-1960s art, and of photography’s place within it, is in some respects simply a final echo of this earlier transformation. Peace and prosperity reigned, at least for some, when imagery chiefly represented the authoritative class that held the power. Photography opened the door to the disheveled and unruly mob. Suddenly, the face of Everyman could enter into art’s exalted picture alongside representations of earlier Medicis and Popes. So, one good way to keep the riffraff discredited and at bay was loudly to proclaim: Sorry, but photography isn’t art.

Things have gotten more sophisticated, or at least more cleverly disguised, since then. Last summer, when the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs came under attack for including pictures described by Sen. Helms as homoerotic, the neoconservative critic Hilton Kramer denounced the pictures as pornography, then turned heel and upheld their status as art, albeit “failed art, pernicious art.” Kramer, who has assumed the burdensome duty of becoming the Tipper Gore of modern art, is apparently convinced that these photographs will scare the horses.

“What has made them a public issue,” Kramer wrote in the New York Times, “is the demand that is now being made to accord these hitherto forbidden images the status of perfectly respectable works of art, to exhibit them without restriction in public institutions, and to require our government to provide funds for their public exhibition.”

Forbidden, status, respectability, restriction ... of all the moralizing words Kramer chose to define the social aspects of the issue, the most revealing, I think, are in the closing volley, where our government is faced with funding their exhibition. It’s us against them, Kramer plainly suggests, and it’s easy to see who is who. The argument is political. It’s neoconservative status vs. forbidden liberalism. And, given Mapplethorpe’s photographs, it’s heteroerotic respectability vs. homoerotic restrictions.

This latter battle is what lies at the heart of the appalling compromise legislation in Congress, whereby the National Endowment for the Arts has been barred from funding art they consider “obscene,” including works depicting homoeroticism. Drawing a legislative equation between obscenity and homoeroticism is flatly repugnant and tantamount to a legal sanction for gay bashing.

That passage of this legislation was greeted by the art world with some relief is also a sign that, as 1990 looms, it’s still perfectly respectable for at least one group of American citizens to be the official object of public prejudice. As photography’s sesquicentennial party comes to an end, with the Mapplethorpe scandal the most memorable event, it’s not a pretty picture.