Sexually Explicit Art, Feminist Theory, and Gender in the 1970s

Christian Liclair

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000564402
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Kunst
• Categoria: Kunstgeschichte der zeitgenössischen Kunst

Structured around sexual desire as the central analytical category, this monograph systematically approaches a heterogeneous array of artworks to purposefully examine the entanglements of art, feminist theory, gender, and sexuality.

This book considers the potential of sexually explicit art to challenge a socially constructed conception of sexuality as well as gender, and explores the sexually explicit as a means to (re-)claim agency for marginalized subjectivities and to emancipate desire from within the patriarchal and heteronormative system. In distinct case studies, the author focuses on works by four US-American artists – Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan Semmel, Betty Tompkins, and Tee A. Corinne – and situates them in relation to contemporaneous debates associated with the insurgent Sexual Liberation Movements of the 1970s.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies.

1 A Malleable BodyThe Intense Pleasures of Sadomasochism in Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio

DOI: 10.4324/9781003225614-2

A naked male figure, broad-shouldered and straddle-legged, faces us on the front page of New York’s self-declared “first homosexual newspaper,” whose concise and inciting title matches the liberationist moment of the 1970s just as much as the flowing and curved font in which it is printed (Figure 1.1) But, to be exact, its cover boy, accredited in the lower left to Robert Mapplethorpe, is not completely nude but accoutered in knee-high leather boots and his crotch is cloaked by a small red dot. And he is not exactly facing us either as his head is, just like the penis, shield from our prying eyes. Apart from the circle and the black rectangle, other geometrical shapes, too, interfere with this man’s presentation of his muscular body, such as the perforated structure to either side that is reminiscent of a partly dismantled wall of chain-wire fencing. And yet, the young man’s confident and assertive posture behind the partition seemingly defies these physical and visual attempts to confine him, to obscure or censor his (sexual) identity. He can be said to embody the self-affirmative and rebellious aspiration of this very publication – to understand one’s sexuality as a source of pride, resilience, and power: Gay Power, to be exact.

Figure 1.1 Cover of Gay Power, Volume 1, Number 16. Bull’s Eye, 1970 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

Edited by John Edward Heys, this community-based newspaper included coverage of local as well as national politics on issues around gay liberation alongside book reviews, columns, personal ads, and the reproductions of artworks and sexually explicit photographs. While Gay Power prides itself to be the first of its kind, it sure wasn’t the only one. As a matter of fact, numerous similar publications – with titles such as Killer Dyke, Fag Rag, or Come Out! – appeared in the early years of the 1970s and provided a hitherto unprecedented degree of visibility for the young and insurgent Gay Liberation Movement that was taking shape in the aftermath of the so-called Stonewall Riots.¹ These violent uprisings erupted in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, after officers of the New York City Police Department had raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street that catered to the poorest and most marginalized within the LGBT community.²

Agitated by the bar’s second police round-up in just one week – we have to remember that law enforcement routinely targeted establishments where homosexual solicitation was known to occur as all states but Illinois criminalized sex between men well throughout the 1960s³ – patrons spontaneously gathered outside to resist and fight back. Within hours, the intensifying battle, started initially by drag queens, trans folks, sex workers, and homeless youth, was joined by an ever-increasing number of rioters from the Greenwich Village neighborhood and beyond, continuing for days on end. Although it was not the first uprising against homo- and transphobic laws as well as police harassment – others occurred for example 1959 at Cooper Do-nuts in L.A. or 1966 at Compton’s in San Francisco – the revolts of 1969 nevertheless instigated an unparalleled mass mobilization and created a lasting momentum, which led to the almost immediate formation of militant groups like the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). While “respectable” homosexual activists had been organizing publicly for the two preceding decades, most notably in form of the gay-male civil rights organization Mattachine Society and its lesbian counterpart Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the GLF distanced itself from these rather reform-oriented, assimilative groups and was instead influenced by other contemporaneous, radical organizations, such as the Black Panthers, the New Left, or the Women’s Liberation Movement. Consequently, this self-described “militant coalition of radical and revolutionary homosexual men and women” conceived gay and lesbian oppression as structurally inherent to heterosexist institutions like, for instance, the nuclear family and further denounced the sexual morals and prudery of contemporary American society.⁴

Constitutive to the political mobilization of the Gay Liberation Front and its members was the issue of visibility. In a decisive break from Mattachine or DOB, which advocated for the privacy of sexual life and thus favored the term “homophile” to take the sex out of homosexuality, the GLF stressed the necessity to be explicit and unapologetic about one’s sex life and sexual desires; to step out “of the closet,” this imaginary space of concealment and self-denial, and declare one’s homosexuality to the public: “Come out for freedom! Come out now! Power to the people! Gay power to gay people! Come out of the closet before the door is nailed shut,” as the group urged readers on the front page of their newspaper.⁵ Coming Out was about coming into existence. But it was also an act of radical courage since “being out” could very likely lead to unemployment, housing discrimination and homelessness, or the infliction of physical harm by the police or other civilians.

Against this background, the image that graces the sixteenth issue of Gay Power strikes us even more as a programmatic articulation of the demand to come out of hiding or anonymity and be provokingly explicit about one’s sexual desires. Being in all probability the first published artwork of the later on exceedingly visible and notorious artist, this cover image is based on a collage that Mapplethorpe had realized in 1969 during his final year at New York’s Pratt Institute. Titled Bull’s Eye, Mapplethorpe assembled a preexisting image, perhaps a clipping of a sexually explicit image from a porn magazine or from one of these contemporary gay magazines, with different materials. Unlike its reproduction in print, the red dot in Bull’s Eye is surrounded by a white circle, evoking, especially with regard to the title and the wound-like red traces across the figure’s chest, the association of a shooting target. These considerations add another, ambivalent layer to our previous interpretation of this exposed male figure. Accordingly, Richard Meyer sees Bull’s Eye as the mise-en-scène of a man’s body – and especially the penis, which is absent but nevertheless prominently emphasized as the focal point of both the body and the collage – as, on the one hand, an object of desire as well as, on the other hand, a target of (bodily) oppression and prohibitions on the basis of these very desires: as “both an object of censorship and a defiance of it.”⁶

As Meyer goes on to suggest, this work aptly exemplifies Mapplethorpe’s artistic interest in the nexus between desire, visibility, and control, which constituted an important aspect of the artist’s oeuvre during these early years of the Gay Liberation Movement. But unlike this discussion of Bull’s Eye has suggested, the correlation between desire and control, understood here as the imbalance of power relations, is not consistently imagined as being negative and restrictive, as a punitive power hierarchy that suppresses sexual desires and that needs to be contested. Other works by Mapplethorpe from this period shift the focus to conditions in which power imbalances (and even punishment) figure as a positive and productive factor, one that is itself desirable in its potential to intensify sexual pleasure. We can see this for example in a photograph from 1974 titled The Slave, which is now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (Figure 1.2). It captures an arrangement of three objects on a piece of plywood shown from above. The center of this composition is occupied by an open book that shows a photographic reproduction of a sculpture on either side while a kitchen knife is used to both weight down the pages and obscure the caption, which most likely provides information about the depicted sculpture. Instead, the only written reference within the realm of this picture is, besides the number 27 on the book’s right page (Mapplethorpe’s age in 1974), a transparent nameplate that spells out the artist’s last name in all cabs – thereby positioning him as the author or, in the sense of a crypto-self-portrait, as the very subject of this composition.

Figure 1.2 Robert Mapplethorpe, The Slave, 1974. Gelatin-silver print. 19.25 × 15.5 in. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 1998. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

Being well-versed in the canonized history of art, one might be able to identify the sculpture of a young, muscular male in a languorous pose in Mapplethorpe’s photograph as Michelangelo’s Dying Slave from between 1513 and 1516 (Figure 1.3). Created initially for the tomb of Pope Julius II, the larger-than-life-sized marble figure was meant to be contrasted by another sculpture titled Rebellious Slave. Unlike his defiant pendant, who is captured in a motion to free himself from his restraints, the Dying Slave appears relaxed, almost as being in a state of ecstasy. His eyes are closed, his head is tilted backwards against the left arm while the figure’s right hand gently touches his chest. The splayed-out forefinger encompasses a loop formed by the rope that is wrapped around the chest in order to immobilize him. Considering the posture of this youthful, naked body that presents characteristics the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin has attributed to traditional representations of the female nude – namely “submission, passivity and availability” as opposed to a man’s “power, possession and domination”⁷ – some scholars have pointed out that Mapplethorpe’s adaptation can be regarded as an attempt to historically legitimize his homoerotic and sexually explicit artworks.⁸ The Slave could consequently be understood as the artist’s deliberate reaction to the difficulties he faced when trying to exhibit or sell his work. Although Mapplethorpe did seize several opportunities to present some of his art during the early 1970s apart from the aforementioned Gay Power cover, he was repeatedly rebuffed by art dealers unwilling to show his collages because of their explicitly gay content.⁹ In this sense, by recontextualizing images from a potential art history catalog instead of a male physique or porn magazine, The Slave proposes that the naked and potentially eroticized male body can be found throughout history and that representations of it have already been incorporated into the canon of so-called great art – all while comparing Mapplethorpe and his art, anything but modest, to Michelangelo.

Figure 1.3 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Dying Slave, 1513–1515. Marble, 84.6 in. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN – Grand Palais | René-Gabriel Ojéda.

But besides giving visibility to the artist’s gay identity or freeing homosexual desire from the closets of traditional art history, the seemingly enraptured expression on the defenseless, bare-chested, and pinioned man’s face can also be seen as a reference to ecstatic qualities that are associated with an abandonment of agency, with the voluntary abdication of power, with being held in constraints, vulnerable and at the mercy of someone else. Especially in the presence of the accentuated ropes, Mapplethorpe’s photograph appears as a homage to the possible pleasures of bondage as an erotic practice – beyond genital fixation or distinct sexual desires. Michelangelo’s doomed Dying Slave revives simply as The Slave; a term that is, as we will shortly see, widely used in the SM culture of Mapplethorpe’s contemporaries to address desired power exchanges during consensual, erotic encounters. According to this still relatively subtle and tame allusion to SM, The Slave already anticipates what would, by the second half of the 1970s, become a crucial – and explicitly depicted – part of Mapplethorpe’s photography, which received their hitherto biggest attention as part of his 1977 Pictures exhibition in New York or his Censored show the following year in San Francisco. In 1978, the artist furthermore created his X Portfolio, a limited edition of selected photographs about SM, and collaborated with the editor of the gay magazine Drummer on another (eventually unpublished) SM-themed coffee-table book titled Rimshots: Inside the Fetish Factor.

But even for those who did not visit Mapplethorpe’s exhibitions, SM was hardly unseen or unheard of at the time. Other gay artists, too, occasionally incorporated sadomasochistic scenes or practices into their works, like the New York-based photographers Arthur Tress, Alvin Baltrop, or Jimmy De Sana. And also beyond New York or California’s art scene, the practice of eroticized power exchanges was an increasingly visible force to be reckoned with. Coinciding with the rampant rise of sex-related businesses and the proliferation of commercial pornography since the late 1960s, SM became a central issue, or the manifestation of a larger problem, for contemporary feminists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, the tabloid press, and, especially since the early 1980s, politicians concerned with the alleged abasement of the nation’s moral principles. In the midst of manifold contemporaneous efforts to (re-)define notions of sexuality and gender, SM and its eroticization of power imbalances were seen by some as the expression or the cause of moral decline and misogyny or as an essential psychological disorder, while it signaled for others a possible route to disrupt prevailing notions of subjectivity and desire. The anchor points for the latter, for SM’s emancipatory potential, lie, on the one hand, in its theatricality to reenact certain power dynamics as well as, on the other hand, in the actual practices that change the body’s erotic cartography. Both aspects are, as we...