Near where I live there is a resturant that put a Greek nude scupture outside. I didn't take offense, but there was a lot of flak in the local newspaper about it. The resturant left it up despite the fuss.
We'll I've only seen some of his flower photographs and his portfolio X at a show earlier this year. The images in X are rather cringeworthy as far as some subject matter but at least they are interesting and well executed photographs. I'm not quite sure I'd claim those images in particular were Fine Art Nude so much as fetish to shock the audience. Also I seem to recalled not all of the images in that portfolio are nude in any case. Even the infamous bull whip one isn't a nude.
So I somewhat decline to give a full opinion on all of Mapplethorpe's nude work.
Nice to know we have a peer of the realm amongst us. Pop over to Windsor often for tea in the Waterloo Chamber?
I wrote that rather late at night. In the cold light of day it occurs that it was possibly a bit obscure...
"Honi soit qui mal y pense" : Evil be to he who evil thinks (or summat like that)... Taken in context of the Order Of The Garter, it means do not go around assuming the worst of others.
I was suggesting it be taken up as a motto by those who can only attribute the most basest of instincts to all nude image making.
Well, I do live less than ten miles from Windsor Castle... Unfortunately, neither Her Maj nor Prince Chas has invited me around yet. There can only be (I think) 24 Companions of the Garter at any one time so I'll probably have to wait for Maggie Thatcher to drop off her perch before getting the Royal nod...
Mapplethorpe's work, especially the X portfolio, was very much about shock value, although much of it is highly informed by classical art - there was a book put out a year or two ago showing his nudes in the context of the 16th to 18th century engravings that inspired his photographs. Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition is the title, if you have the chance to look for it. Even the classical stuff, which is HIGHLY formal, has some of the shock value, showing a nude black male dancing with a clothed white female, for example, but that is as much a political statement about the times in which he lived and worked. In all, his work is very multi-layered, and if you allow yourself to look past the shock value, there is something there.
Somebody had a hilarious signature line here a few years back, something to the effect of: "Now you put your naked model next to a plinth or a column, that's the ticket. Art, you understand". Works for me.
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I just want to feel nostalgic like I used to.
I think geryyaum and Maris are on the right track with this. Our fascination with naked may be that it is a strong indication that we have no nature and we are interpreted all the way down by the culture be are born into. The culture specifies all the possible ways we can be human and we can only understand ourselves within this context. The fact is we are born men and women, but this fact is transformed into masculine and feminine by culture. Culture has taken over all our facts and transformed them into social interpretation. We can only be understood by ourselves after the transformation simply because we are concerned with such things, unlike a beaver who probably isn't concerned with his beaverness.
Naked is the juxtaposition of the fact of human and the facticity (or interpretation) of human. Although we use our facticity as our reference for self-referal and understanding we can never really be defined by it because we are misinterpreting facticity as our essential nature, (the mistake made by those citing our animal nature.) This misrepresentation is, so to speak, necessary because is grounds us in the world as an object with properties. It is unsettling to think we are without nature or meaning and everything about us is an interpretation. Again, naked brings us face to face with this strange characteristic of our existence.
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Chris Saganich
http://www.imagebrooklyn.com
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