ART : A New View Finder : Robert Sobieszek--an expert witness at the Mapplethorpe trial--takes over the county museum’s photography department

This was Robert Sobieszek’s year to be called to duty. After 20 years at the venerable George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., he answered a call from Los Angeles and agreed to take over the photography department at the County Museum of Art. But before he could cram his belongings into a moving van and head West, he had to take care of a piece of legal business.

Nothing as routine as a traffic ticket, nothing as personal as his will or his income tax. This was important public business, nothing less than the art world’s trial of the year: the Cincinnati obscenity trial involving Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs.

A prominent curator, organizer of 52 photography exhibitions and author of four books and 12 exhibition catalogues on the history of photography, Sobieszek was summoned as an expert witness. He and three other photography specialists were asked to prove that Mapplethorpe’s photographs are art.

To the surprise of many in the art community, the jury took the word of the art experts. On Oct. 5, Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, were acquitted on charges of pandering obscenity and using children in nudity-related material.

“The trial was a democratic process and it worked,” the 47-year-old curator said, during an interview in his new office at the museum. “The jury hated the pictures, but the prosecution failed to prove that they lacked redeeming artistic, scientific or political value,” as required by the U.S. Supreme Court’s test of obscenity.

Was the trial a benchmark event, then? “It was just a skirmish,” Sobieszek said. “We won the skirmish, but the war is still out there. The self-appointed guardians of our morals are more organized and better funded than the art community. The only good thing to come out of the trial is that it might make our foes a little more hesitant to go to court.”

The art world is “vulnerable because we are considered elitist, dangerous and unnecessary,” he said. “It’s easier to fight us than to deal with real social and political issues that can’t be solved, like the homeless and the deficit.”

The specter of censorship has spread throughout the arts community during the past two years, and it has haunted the National Endowment for the Arts in a bitter fight about using tax monies to finance art that might be deemed offensive. Performance artists, painters, dancers and actors have all been involved in the struggle. “It’s an all-out attack,” Sobieszek said.

Even so, photography has been in the eye of the storm and photography curators are feeling embattled. This fact became clear at Oracle, an annual retreat for photography curators, held this year in Santa Rosa. “This was the eighth annual meeting of the group, and it was the most serious yet,” Sobieszek said. “The two main issues were censorship and audience.”

On the subject of censorship, the group decided that “it wouldn’t accomplish much for 80 photography curators to send postcards to Congress,” Sobieszek said. “Our primary responsibility is to take a close look at what we exhibit and how we exhibit it in terms of the public. Photography has taken off on a trajectory of its own and it has left the audience behind.

“It’s an interesting problem to try to communicate ideas about art to a genuinely lay audience,” said Sobieszek, who testified on videotape for the Cincinnati trial. “We talk about a lay audience at museums, but they have already indicated an interest in art by coming to museums. In Cincinnati, this was genuine laity. Only one member of the jury had ever entered a museum and that person had gone on a field trip in high school.

“One of the questions that had to be answered was, ‘Does art have to be pretty?’ We struggled to come up with a good example of art that is not pretty, but one that would be known to the jurors. Hieronymus Bosch is a good example because there are more horrific things going on in his paintings than in Mapplethorpe’s photographs, but the jurors wouldn’t have known his work. We thought of Picasso and Goya, but Picasso is considered a rampant example of errant modernism and elitism, and Goya is not well enough known,” Sobieszek said.

“We finally came up with Van Gogh’s self-portrait with his ear cut off. The only way Van Gogh could express the experience of cutting off his ear was to paint a picture of it--because he was a visual artist. In the same way, Mapplethorpe was trying to understand things that were going on in his life,” Sobieszek said, referring to a period during the 1970s when the late photographer frequented New York’s demimonde of leather bars and bath houses, and produced homoerotic and sadomasochistic images. Five of these photographs plus two works that depict partially undressed minors, were at issue in the Cincinnati trial.

Expert witnesses were charged with “establishing a definition of art as fundamental expression,” Sobieszek said. His specific task was to talk about the importance of context, and he had to admit, “Yes, if some of Mapplethorpe’s photographs were badly printed in a sleazy magazine in a porn shop, they might be interpreted as pornography. But when those images are beautifully composed, printed and framed and they are in a museum as part of a larger body of work and an integral part of an exhibition, it’s a very different issue.” It’s time for curators to reconsider “the issue of representation--what you are seeing, what exactly are you looking at when you see a photograph--while presenting wonderful images to an audience that already knows the answers to those questions,” he said.

The best strategy for educating the public is not installing didactic panels at museums, he said, but organizing small shows that address specific aspects of photographic representation, working with docents and going out into the community to give lectures on critical issues.

Like most curators, Sobieszek is new to art’s battleground, but he is a veteran in the field of photography. He has held various curatorial posts at the George Eastman House since 1969, serving as director of photographic collections from 1981 until he resigned this fall. During that period he also held teaching posts at Cornell University and the University of Rochester. His exhibitions include “The New American Pastoral: Landscape Photography in the Age of Questioning” and “The Art of Persuasion: A History of Advertising Photography.” In addition to authoring such books and catalogues as “ ‘This Edifice is Colossal’: Nineteenth-Century Architectural Photography,” he has co-edited with Peter C. Bunnell a 51-volume publication, “The Sources of Modern Photography” and the 62-volume “The Literature of Photography.”

Going to work for the County Museum of Art is a big leap, however. The move from Rochester to Los Angeles not only took Sobieszek from the East to the West Coast, it removed him from a relatively small, specialized institution with a world-renowned collection of photography to a huge general art museum that’s a fledgling in the field of photography.

Reminded of the difference, Sobieszek rattled off some figures: The George Eastman House has 500,000 photographs; LACMA has 2,700. On the other hand, Eastman has a staff of 82; LACMA employs around 400. The annual budget at Eastman is $3.6 million tops; at the county museum it hovers just under $30 million. LACMA also requires a lot more paper work, Sobieszek observed after a few days on the job.

Sobieszek will direct the youngest of the museum’s 10 curatorial departments, which was established in 1983 with a $1-million grant from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. He succeeds Kathleen Gauss, who presided over a small but lively and increasingly visible program before resigning earlier this year.

Despite the come-down from 500,000 to 2,700 photographs, Sobieszek insisted that he isn’t starting from scratch. “I didn’t want to come to a hinterland outpost to defend the faith. Photography has evolved tremendously over the last decade in Los Angeles. It’s becoming a national center of photography,” he said, citing an increase of photography shows at the County Museum of Art, along with the J. Paul Getty Museum’s 1984 acquisition of 18,000 photographs and the collections of the Huntington Library Art Galleries, the California Museum of Photography in Riverside and UCLA’s Grunwald Center. The Museum of Contemporary Art got into the act with exhibitions of works by John Baldessari and Max Yavno, he added, but what he has found most surprising here is the growth of the gallery scene and photography’s prominent place in it.

The mixture of showcases contribute to a lively community, but there’s plenty of room for LACMA’s program to develop, he said. “Because of the museum’s location and its public draw, we may be able to reach a different audience.”

Photography leaders have speculated that Sobieszek’s arrival signals a heightened commitment to photography at LACMA and that the force of his personality will strengthen the Southern California scene considerably. “I’m really pleased about having Bob in the neighborhood. It bodes well for Los Angeles,” said Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego. “Anyone who knows him knows that you don’t invite Robert Sobieszek aboard if you don’t expect to have a very vigorous and aggressive curator. He doesn’t lie back and go with the flow. He has created powerful exhibitions and he is a great writer.”

Sobieszek isn’t about to lay out a grand new program until he has assessed the situation. He won’t say what his first big show will be, but he will admit, “I have managed to get the promise of two very important American photographers to do their retrospectives here.” None of his exhibitions will go on the walls until early 1993, however.

In the meantime, he has established three admittedly vague priorities: “First is to build a very respectable collection while refining and increasing the existing one. We will emphasize modern photography, particularly since World War II, but we will also buy older work. We don’t have a single Daguerreotype, but I don’t want one just to have an example. I want one or two spectacular Daguerreotypes. There’s no need to duplicate what the Getty has done and that would be impossible.”

His second priority is to review the kinds of exhibitions that the museum has done and assess the record. Third is to “try to define a set of programs and exhibitions that will respond to the varied community of artists, collectors and general audience. We need to look at what has been done and what response it has had--what went right and wrong--and build on the correct gestures,” he said.

Photography has had a very low profile at most general art museums until the past decade. But as photography has gained respect as an art form and wedged its way into museums and galleries, it has become so thoroughly assimilated into the larger picture of contemporary art that it can be as difficult to define a photograph as for expert witnesses to decide when a photograph is art. “All distinctions are blurred now. The challenge is to make some sense of this and to look at how photography has changed in the last decade,” Sobieszek said.

As for his move from a specialized photography center to a massive art museum, he said, “I don’t think photography should be treated as a separate medium. There was a time for separatism--at the point when it wasn’t seen as art. In the ‘60s only two museums, the Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House, were exhibiting and promoting photography. We’ve pretty well won that battle,” he said.

Bickering about definitions of art and photography continue within the art world, but Sobieszek isn’t very interested. “I don’t see any difference between Edward Weston and Hamish Fulton. Both are artists who use the camera to make art,” he said. “The person who wants to make silver prints of the landscape can co-exist with the one who makes monumental politically charged images. There’s room for the whole spectrum. There are not two worlds. There is one and it’s called visual art.”