Although the court has now acquitted the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and Dennis Barrie, its director, of obscenity charges for exhibiting the photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe that many of us still consider obscene, the issues that brought an American museum director to trial for exhibiting such works of art have hardly been resolved.
Indeed, it has become clear that the havoc wrought by the Mapplethorpe affair is entering a new and perhaps more virulent phase. The chief lesson of the Cincinnati trial concerns the extent to which radical voices in the arts community—voices that have championed the Mapplethorpe ethos ever since his photographs of the sadomasochistic homosexual underworld became a public scandal some eighteen months ago—have managed to insinuate themselves into the arts establishment at large. A sensibility that was once confined to a fringe of the art world has forced itself into the mainstream and now exercises unprecedented influence. Abetted by liberal hysteria over the putative threat of censorship, this radical view of art, politics, and sexuality has begun to corrupt virtually all institutions concerned with contemporary art. A case in point is the venerable Brooklyn Museum, which—in addition to excellent exhibitions by the American artists Albert Pinkham Ryder and Milton Avery—is currently featuring a large installation by the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth called “The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unspeakable.”
“Unspeakable” is the mot juste in several senses. Occupying the Grand Lobby, just inside the front entrance, the installation is a melange of objects from the museum’s permanent collection—paintings, sculpture, photographs, furniture, objets d’art—along with a smorgasbord of quotations from wildly diverse sources emblazoned across the walls in various sizes of type. The objects range from ancient Egyptian artifacts to Renaissance religious paintings, from eighteenth-century Japanese prints to contemporary photographs by Larry Clark and—presumably as a kind of obeisance—Robert Mapplethorpe. One will find some Bauhaus furniture, some Hogarth prints, a marvelous sculpture by Gaston Lachaise, paintings by Matisse, William Glackens, Norman Rockwell, etc. The quotations feature tidbits from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from Leo Steinberg on the sexuality of Christ, from Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels on Nazi cultural policy, various anthropological musings, and forgotten denunciations of modern art from the Chicago Law and Order League.
Need it be said that Mr. Kosuth’s installation—which, incidentally, is funded in part by the NEA—is yet another meditation on the threat of censorship? Never mind that contemporary America enjoys greater freedom of speech—especially when it comes to artistic expression—than any society in history. It must be maintained that we are living under a dire threat of repression. The pretentious flyer accompanying the installation sounds the requisite tone of ominousness: “Whether we will be permitted to see such art in the future, Kosuth maintains, is brought into question by the assault on art going on in the United States today.”
But of course what is really brought into question is the Brooklyn Museum’s willingness to carry out its curatorial and educational mandate. “The Play of the Unspeakable” does not inspire hope. Like most so-called conceptual art, it deals not in concepts but in intimations and innuendos. To describe it as intellectually negligible would be an unwarranted compliment. Ever true to the methods of “conceptual art,” Mr. Kosuth neglects the difficult task of thinking through the issues. Instead, he relies on verbal collage to produce the desired imitation of thinking, what we might call the aroma of thought. Critical discrimination—an activity that museums once rather specialized in—is abandoned in order to hammer home the point about “censorship.” Thus Nazi manifestos jostle against philistine rejections of Matisse as if they were both equally noxious; pornographic photographs by Larry Clark are set next to sculpture by Lachaise in order to suggest that rejecting one is tantamount to rejecting the other.
The day we went to see the installation, a busload of school children was wandering around the lobby gawking at photographs from Teenage Lust, Clark’s graphic depictions of teenagers shooting up, exposing themselves, having sex in groups of two and more. Teenage Lust raises some disturbing questions about Mr. Clark and the propriety of his exploiting these scenes of degradation as a way of making “art.” Yet in some ways even more disturbing is the presence of such objects at an exhibition sanctioned by the Brooklyn Museum. For what they tell us is how far the art establishment, having capitulated to the cynical radicalism that exploded around Robert Mapplethorpe, has now ceded its authority, betraying both its cultural responsibilities and the public trust.
