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Commentary : The Art That Dares Not Speak Its Name : A line runs from today’s controversial images back through the works of Mapplethorpe, Warhol, Pollock and Benton

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Don’t breathe a word to the people of Cincinnati--you might find yourself under indictment if you do--but sex and sexuality have been central to art for at least 10,000 years, give or take a few. So let’s talk about art and sex for a moment, and especially about art and the kind of sex that dares not speak its name.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to discern that the ballistic missiles launched against the art of the late Robert Mapplethorpe have been fueled by a loathing for homosexuality. The artist was openly gay, and his work includes frank pictures. The furious objection to federal funding of their display is that it constitutes inappropriate government sanction for homosexual orientation.

The controversy is politics as usual. Nonetheless, something extraordinary is happening. The deftly orchestrated attack actually threatens to bring down an entire federal agency. The National Endowment for the Arts, whose whopping successes of the last 25 years stand virtually unparalleled amid the waste and corruption more typically left by bureaucracies, may not survive the year.

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By wide margins, polls show firm public support for federal funding of the arts, without content restrictions or direct congressional interference. Still, there’s a good chance that the agency will be fatally compromised, if not destroyed outright. This sharply contradictory state of affairs demonstrates two things. One is the fearsome power of prejudice as a political tool in the United States today. The other is the special status of homosexuality in our nation’s long and inglorious history of intolerance.

The relationships between American art and the politics of repression as it pertains to homosexuality are only just beginning to be studied. The body of scholarship remains small and fragmented, and no comprehensive thesis has yet emerged. Sometimes, though, the chance juxtaposition of those fragments brings a slightly larger picture into view.

That’s precisely what has happened in the last several months. The accidental coming together in Southern California of two exhibitions that have been traveling the country since 1989--one featuring Thomas Hart Benton, the other Andy Warhol--has conspired to tell us much about the history behind the travails of the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition and the National Endowment for the Arts. Add the January publication of an unusually insightful biography of Jackson Pollock and a good deal of light has lately been shed. The sweep of half a century of American cultural life begins to take newly coherent shape.

Visually, the work of these four artists couldn’t be more diverse. But chronologically, they form a chain of unusual interest. From the 1930s to the 1950s, Benton and Pollock are paradigms for the establishment of an American art scene that came from obscurity to international acclaim. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Warhol and Mapplethorpe were central participants in changing the direction of that art. The repression of sex and sexuality is pivotal to the story.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original” is a sprawling show. It chronicles the work of an artist who pompously cast himself as a modern Michelangelo for a democratic people but who in fact emerges as a skillful if unwitting caricaturist.

Often hugely scaled, his mannered, cartoon-like paintings are chiefly of interest as a record of the sorrowful nightmare haunting the American spirit, especially during the traumatic years of the Great Depression. Benton climbed to prominence in that troubled time. His robust misogyny and outspoken vilification of homosexuals, which are the stuff of legend, exploited the fearful insecurities of a nation in collapse.

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These oppressive values were pictured in Benton’s raucous paintings of everyday American life. They’re not so different from the values that opponents use against Mapplethorpe’s work today. How this turnabout occurred is dramatized in the aesthetic shift from Pollock to Warhol.

Benton’s most famous and significant pupil, and the artist who, more than any other, became a postwar symbol of American supremacy in the visual arts, is the subject of “Jackson Pollock: An American Saga,” an exceptional new biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.

The famous abstract drip-paintings that Pollock eventually made were radically different from Benton’s cartoonish images, which typically focused on the “men of action” who, in his parochial view, had been primarily responsible for building the nation. But Pollock’s idealized relationship with his teacher was crucial. Benton’s exaggerated masculinity, along with his artistic aspirations, brought together personality traits divided between Pollock’s own father and mother.

The severe repressiveness of the American artistic milieu of the period is important to understand. The authors recount a typical event. It turns on the marginal place of art in traditional American life.

On a summer day in the early 1950s, Pollock was relaxing at the beach near East Hampton, Long Island, with fellow painters Franz Kline and Syd Solomon. “We were bemoaning the lack of interest in art among most Americans,” Solomon told the authors. Someone joked that, if all else failed, they could “just chuck it all and go teach old ladies to do watercolors.”

Like others of their generation, these artists knew full well that most Americans regarded art as frivolous and unmanly--as old ladies’ business. “They had inherited an aesthetic world shaped by Victorian sentiment,” Naifeh and Smith write, “and administered, almost exclusively, by women. Men who strayed into that world were considered, at best, unproductive, at worst, homosexual, by those outside it.”

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From Benton on, aggressively macho posing functioned as a compensatory cover for male artists. So did the general expulsion of women--except for reputation-saving wives and girlfriends--from among the ranks of acceptable painters and sculptors.

And so did the rhetoric describing works of art such as Pollock’s energetic drip-paintings, rhetoric that was a paean to their muscularity, force, action and power. These were precisely the artistic attributes that Benton, too, had championed, albeit in figurative rather than abstract terms.

Laboring under Benton’s domineering parental shadow, Pollock’s painfully conflicted psyche was surely impacted by the likelihood of several youthful homosexual experiences, persuasively documented by Naifeh and Smith. Isolating specific psychological traits as the fuel for an artist’s particular forms can be risky. But there can be no doubt that, in his art, Pollock vigorously attempted to free himself from the constricting aesthetic bonds of the day. Riddled with the nervous energy of anxiety and alienation, his paintings escaped the one-dimensionality of his teacher’s art.

This struggle with restrictiveness and suffocating convention, a struggle embodied in Abstract Expressionist art, was the burden of history in the years that established the United States as global leader. And it was the very burden Andy Warhol began to shake off, with startling paintings that mocked the vaunted rhetoric of Abstract Expressionist painting.

The marvelous show of early graphic work by the late Warhol, seen this winter at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, focused on his award-winning commercial art of the 1950s. It laid the groundwork for the great Pop paintings of the 1960s, and its backdrop was the era marked by the stratospheric rise of Jackson Pollock’s reputation. (The brawling, hard-drinking, self-styled cowboy died in a gruesome car crash in 1956, at age 44.) The show made plain how Warhol, an effeminate homosexual artist who was denied entry into the bullish, macho realm of New York School artists, brilliantly managed to subvert the discriminatory milieu and usurp center stage.

Although celebrated and successful within the world of commercial art, which the Abstract Expressionist vanguard demeaned as low-culture kitsch, Warhol was no stranger to the deprivations of second-class status. Homely, gay, raised in a poor working-class family in Pittsburgh, he had scant reason to embrace Abstract Expressionist cliches of existential freedom.

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So, about 1960 Warhol began to employ the devices of advertising and mass media to represent those cliches, themselves noteworthy products of the American saga. Actual cartoons of men of action--Dick Tracy, Superman, Popeye--recalled Benton’s cartoonish style of representation, but honestly and without Michelangelo-esque pretension.

As eloquent assertions of personal liberty, Warhol’s disarming Pop paintings galvanized attention. The new American world of “high art” may have been exalted in the 1950s, but its celebration of ideal freedom had clashed with the vulgar reality of its exclusionary social milieu. Suddenly, the mantle of all-American original was his.

Many contemporaries were quick to dismiss Pop as mere surface glitz, but subsequent generations of artists grasped its deeper meaning. For photography, the young Robert Mapplethorpe was among them. His pictures managed a feat clearly derived from Warhol’s own.

Since the 1920s, the camera-work most celebrated in America had been an aesthetic sometimes called the new realism but more widely was known as straight photography. A crisp, precise, unmanipulated style of picture-making had been established as indispensable by Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Imogen Cunningham and others. Mapplethorpe mastered the style and echoed his predecessors’ work in exquisite floral close-ups.

He also turned their new realism toward an even newer reality. The triple focus of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s--blacks, women and homosexual men--are the principal subjects of Mapplethorpe’s photographic portraits.

How did the artist portray these marginalized people? His blacks are almost always prodigiously virile, and they sometimes are paired with white women. Typically, his women are strong and powerful. His homosexual men flaunt themselves, sometimes enacting their social bondage in sadomasochistic garb.

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If these compositional choices sound stereotypical, or cliched, that’s because they are. Mapplethorpe used straight photography the way Warhol used mass media. He pictured, with clarity, oppressive stereotypes created by the dominant, or “straight,” society.

Perhaps the most irrational and outrageous of those stereotypes is pictured in his now infamous self-portrait with a bull whip that protrudes, tail-like, from his rectum. A target of hysterical disdain in the current NEA controversy, this picture is indeed ghoulish. But the image has special meaning for the censorship drama that has been unfolding for the last year, a meaning that so far has been ignored.

Uncannily, the photograph conjures the vile and demeaning slur faggot . The origin of the slur is the French word for a bundle of sticks, or fagot , piled as fuel at the base of the stake when “devil-possessed” heretics were burned by religious clerics in medieval Europe. The photographic image assembles familiar motifs--eyes glaring, smile leering, goatee pointed and punishing “tail” unfurling--to create a picture of the devil incarnate. The stereotype pictured by Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait is that homosexuals are cursed by Satan.

Cruel irony therefore surrounds the use of that photograph today in condemnations of the National Endowment for the Arts. The explicitly political drama of the Mapplethorpe affair has been generated by the religious right, by way of a direct mail campaign to Congress and clergy, led by a Methodist minister from Tupelo, Miss.; a bully pulpit exploited by a U.S. senator who has long been chief Washington nemesis of gay men and women; and a fundamentalist cable television network, which has repeatedly broadcast evangelical opinion on the subject.

The timing of the assault is unsurprising. The evangelical right, which rode higher during the early period of the Reagan era than it ever has before, has suffered a precipitous decline in political power in the last few years as sex scandals wracked its hierarchies. To repair an image ruined by hypocrisy, a “moral war” was needed to fight--and win.

The reliable bugaboo of “godless homosexuality” made a useful battleground, especially as the equally tried-and-true bogeyman of “godless communism” had evaporated. When the Rev. Pat Robertson rails against the NEA for supporting Mapplethorpe he can appear to be diligently casting out the same sins that disgraced Jim Bakker, his felonious predecessor. Sacrilege, or the intentional desecration of a sacred idea, was candidly alleged in the attack on Andres Serrano’s photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in urine, but it applies as well to a pious rejection of homosexuality.

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Mapplethorpe’s photograph gave shocking visual form to the demonized image fabricated for homosexuals by an oppressive society. Medieval Europe is long gone, but the continuing relevance of this insightful work of art is succinctly demonstrated by an April 19 editorial in the Arizona Republic. Dennis Barrie, director of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, was indicted in April on charges of obscenity for showing Mapplethorpe’s photographs at his museum. The editorial speaks to the charge of using minors in pornography, a charge which arose from separate photographs of a naked boy and a partially clad girl.

Beneath a biblical quotation from II Corinthians--”Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”--the artist is rhetorically burned at the stake for the crime of pedophilia. “Mr. Barrie may think that putting kiddie porn on display is a matter of artistic integrity,” the editorial concludes, “but the truth refuses to go away; and the truth is that Mr. Mapplethorpe, a man of undeniable skill, exploited small children, for which he conceivably might have been prosecuted had he not died of AIDS.”

It is difficult to say whether the editorialist’s “truth” would also condemn Edward Weston to the flames--or Imogen Cunningham, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Harry Callahan, Jan Saudek, Minor White or any other great artist who has photographed undraped children. But Mapplethorpe is distinct from most in the history of photographers: An open homosexual, he can be tarred with the scariest lie of all, which falsely claims gay men as inveterate child molesters.

The editorial’s final, gratuitous reference to AIDS is telling. From the start, this medical condition has been superstitiously portrayed by the evangelical right as divine retribution for unspeakable sins. Its invocation is wholly superfluous to the editorial--try reading the sentence without the last two words--but its inclusion subtly reinforces the prejudice.

As the Great Depression did for Benton, the well-documented panic over AIDS is what has created fertile ground for today’s exploitation of deeply entrenched homophobia in the United States.

A controversy over art that, in the all too recent past, dared not speak its name, puts freedom of expression squarely on the line. In the Cincinnati courts and in the halls of Congress, a longstanding American drama of personal liberty continues to be played out.

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