The Explanation For Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity

4. Coffee Table Sex

4 Coffee Table Sex If nothing else, the furor occasioned by The Perfect Moment, the still notorious Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, has served to delimit the scope of the conservative mania for deregulation. Good government may now mean virtually no government at all, but the museum, the ultimate arbiter of value in the modern art market, remains fully the object of anxious scrutiny and control. It is not surprising , then, that museum existence, albeit in the form of a traveling exhibit, should have been the focus of the Mapplethorpe controversy. Or not-quite museum existence. To date, U.S. courts have been reluctant to judge a museum or exhibit show obscene, so absolute is the museum in conferring aesthetic worth. (The law defines obscenity as lacking in “serious artistic content or redeeming social value,” but museum existence is itself proof positive of that value.) The Cincinnati Arts Center, which exhibited The Perfect Moment without NEA funding, came perilously close to being an exception, due in part to the unprecedented decision by the courts to distinguish between “gallery” and “museum” existence. (The center was legally demoted to the status of a gallery, the better to foster the illusion that the museum, unlike the gallery, is innocent of market forces.) Both the center and its director were, happily, vindicated in the courts, but the efficacy of the anti-obscenity laws brought against them is in no 82 way dependent on their legal enforceability. The legal challenge itself, moreover, testifies to the difficulty of recuperating Mapplethorpe—even the Mapplethorpe granted entry into the aestheticizing space of the museum—for the category of the aesthetic. There are other Mapplethorpes. The work that so troubled the walls of the Cincinnati Arts Center also graced the pages of gay porn magazines, also without NEA funding, but also without legal challenge. Context is determining. Porn magazines are not conventional venues for the disinterested contemplation of beauty, but the museum is, and if Mapplethorpe troubles, it is because he refuses to con- firm the highbrow art consumer in the experience of freedom that the aesthetic is conventionally said to afford. The specious (and therefore much insisted upon) distinction between the pornographic and the erotic is a matter of context, not content, and Mapplethorpe plays knowingly on the relation between the two. The force of the sexuality depicted in the work—in what follows, I focus primarily on Bill, New York, 1976–77, The Slave (1974), and Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979)— is inseparable from the conditions under which it is displayed, disseminated, and consumed. D. A. Miller speaks of “the identity of the liberal subject who seems to recognize himself most fully only when he forgets or disavows his functional implication in a system of carceral restraints.”1 It seems unlikely, however, that the literally carceral subjects depicted in many of Mapplethorpe’s photographs—say, the cuffed and manacled Ridley of Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter—could ever forget their somewhat different implication in a system of restraints. In The German Ideology, Marx observes that “in all ideology, men and their relations appear upside down, as in a camera obscura.”2 The men who appear in Mapplethorpe’s camera, however , particularly those who appear in manacles and chains, reverse this idealist inversion: at the very least, they render problematic the opposition between the apparent freedom of the museum-going art consumer, he or she who views the photographs, and the apparent unfreedom of (what once would have been called) Mapplethorpe’s “inverts.” Miller’s understanding of the “liberal subject” is clearly Foucauldian, and Foucault is frequently dismissed as a fetishist of power, the theorist (or fabulous artificer) of a panopticism from which there is no exit, against which there can be no resistance. But the carceral subjects who populate Mapplethorpe ’s work suggest otherwise. Disciplinary power cannot survive its theatricalization : when openly embraced as bondage and discipline, the disciplinary is no longer itself. This is not to advocate kinky sex as a form of new age political activism, COFFEE TABLE SEX 83 although the suggestion is no more bizarre than what frequently passes for political engagement in the academy. But neither is it to evacuate Mapplethorpe’s work (and this is perhaps more to the point) of its perversity. Everyone knows that only the good bourgeois is ever shocked, and to register disgust or fascination before (yet another) photograph of (say...