TV Reviews : Mapplethorpe Profile a Sympathetic Overview

“Arena: Robert Mapplethorpe” misses an opportunity to reveal the photographer whose work has fueled a controversy over government funding of the arts.

The BBC-produced portrait, airing Sunday at 10 p.m. on KCET Channel 28, provides a sympathetic overview of Mapplethorpe’s career in a collage of his pictures and interviews with the late artist, his friends and portrait subjects. But instead of offering insight, the film glorifies Mapplethorpe’s work beyond its actual importance and explains away his homoerotic images as a reflection of underground activity in a bygone era.

That era--the ‘60s and ‘70s as experienced by an experimental faction of New York’s gay community--is over . Mapplethorpe, who died last year of AIDS, is one of its casualties. But the tragedy of AIDS continues, demanding a larger social context and a more penetrating examination of Mapplethorpe’s motivations than the film provides.

It isn’t enough to hear the artist’s bored account of his Catholic upbringing in a conservative community or that he never meant to shock anyone with his sadomasochistic photographs--he was just indulging in self-exploration. It isn’t enough to hear that he had himself filmed while having his nipple pierced because it was “an interesting idea.”

The moment of greatest truth arrives when Mapplethorpe says, “I wanted to retain the forbidden feeling of pornography and make an art statement, to make something uniquely my own.” On his own terms, he was successful.