Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe [Hardcover]

Arthur C. Danto (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 1995

Arthur Danto's assessment of the achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe is a lucid and graceful introduction to a controversial artist by the most distinguished philosophical critic of the arts in our time. While fully addressing the most public dimensions of Mapplethorpe's career--the branding of his work as pornography and the legal and censorship issues that surround the exhibition of his photographs--Danto's essay breaks with common responses by offering a fascinating and deeply sympathetic account of Mapplethorpe's aesthetics.
In Playing with the Edge, Arthur Danto returns the discussion of Mapplethorpe to a consideration of his artistic legacy. He refuses to retreat from the sexual content of Mapplethorpe's images, claiming that the content and the artistic character of the photographs simultaneously invite and deflect the charges of pornography and together define the importance of Mapplethorpe's work. Danto discerns the images' uniqueness in the relation of trust between the photographer and his subjects.
Through a fascinating exploration of the relation of Mapplethorpe's images to those of other artists (Titian, Sherman, Winogrand, Cartier-Bresson, Golub) Danto presents a compelling argument for Mapplethorpe's enduring position in the history of art, no less than the history of our times.
FROM THE BOOK:"There is a tension at the heart of Robert Mapplethorpe's art, verging on paradox, between its most distinctive content and its most distinctive mode of presentation. The content of the work is often sufficiently erotic to be considered pornographic, even by the artist, while the aesthetic of its presentation is chastely classic--it is Dionysiac and Apollonian at once. The content cannot have been a serious possibility for a major artist at any previous moment in history. It is particular to America in the 1970s, a decade Mapplethorpe exemplifies in terms of his values, his sensibilities, and his attitudes."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The erotically candid photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989, became the focus for the controversy over federal funding of the arts. Danto, professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia and an art critic for the Nation, proclaims that Mapplethorpe produced "some of the most shocking and indeed some of the most dangerous images in modern photography, or even in the history of art." While acknowledging the ostensibly pornographic content of many of Mapplethorpe's photographs, especially his sadomasochistic pictures, Danto argues that the work transcends pornography because of the "moral relationship between subject and artist," a core of trust that made his photographs explorations, risks and revelations. Mapplethorpe's subjects, he writes, are touched with a beauty and transcendence that lift them above their tawdry surroundings. Danto won the 1990 National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism for Encounters and Reflections. Illustrated.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Describing and dissecting Mapplethorpe's oeuvre and place in art history might be given as an entrance exam for aspiring critics. Perhaps no other contemporary photographer has been so widely written about, yet virtually no one seems capable of addressing the whole of his work. Supporters too often ignore the uncomfortable content or discuss the beauty of contradiction, while detractors make little effort to go past a superficial reading or ignore the work altogether to focus on the individual. With characteristic lucidity, Danto, art critic for The Nation, brings the whole of the man and his multifaceted works into focus in the title essay here. That essay is a reprint from Mapplethorpe (Random, 1992), however, brought together with a brief introduction discussing the National Endowment for the Arts-controversy and a 1988 (read precontroversy) review of a Mapplethorpe show. Libraries already owning the Random House illustrated book need not purchase this title for the addendum; libraries that lack that catalog should purchase it to give patrons a chance both to see what the fuss is about and to read Danto's illuminating words.?Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (October 20, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520200519
• ISBN-13: 978-0520200517
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 8.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,255,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughful discussion of controversial body of work, May 25, 2000

By 

Timothy K. Parker - See all my reviews

This review is from: Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe (Hardcover)

The three essays here, along with 29 of Mapplethorpe's photographs, provide an invaluable opportunity to address the work in a reasoned and engaged manner. In some important sense, it is no longer possible to experience the work of Robert Mapplethorpe as directly as one might have in 1988, for now "the images have become celebrities," made notorious, even, by the legal and moral controversies that have so prominently surrounded the work. (5) More importantly, however, Danto attempts to answer the question of how to look at art, particularly difficult or "awkward" art such as Mapplethorpe's, without oversimplifying what is seen. (93)

In the main body of the book, the critical essay of the same title, Danto's seriousness avoids no questions, but thankfully acknowledges the ultimate futility of asking whether such work is art or pornography. This false disjunction results from the failure to hold together both form and content when looking at art. For Danto, art is the transcendence of form and content; it is both and neither, for it moves beyond both while in some sense preserving them in the work. Although Danto needlessly complicates matters with his use of the terminology of Hegel's dialectic to articulate this transcendence, his discussion is clear enough otherwise. This is best seen in his analysis of the respective testimonies of the legislators and the experts at the Cincinnati trial in which the Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, were ultimately acquitted of pandering obscenity and child pornography. Danto shows that while the legislators saw the content and ignored the form, the art experts for the defence saw the form and ignored the content. Though this resulted in the acquittal, Danto rightly emphasizes that for Mapplethorpe, the work was all about making pornography that was art; he "literally became a pornographer with high artistic aims." (78) In Mapplethorpe's words, a work can "be pornography and still have redeeming social value. It can be both, which is my whole point in doing it-to have all the elements of pornography and yet have a structure of lighting that makes it go beyond what it is." (89-90) This attempt to "go beyond what it is" both illustrates Danto's conception of art as transcendence and defines Mapplethorpe's work in particular as a "playing with the edge." (77)

Danto identifies trust as the constant attribute of Mapplethorpe's work which allows the form and content to remain together. "The moral relationship between subject and artist was a condition for the artistic form the images took. The formalism was connected to the content through the mediation of that moral relationship." (79) This trust is attested to by the formal quality of the images, in that they are titled with the subjects' names, posed and lighted in formal abstraction, and clearly constitute something the subjects have allowed, thus presenting the subjects as themselves, but not candidly, rather as they have agreed to be presented. (39) This is why acts of sex are themselves generally not depicted, for here the formalism cannot be maintained. In Mapplethorpe's work, however, there is always the danger of losing this formal control and going "over the edge." (79) It is not just a question of sex and the vulnerability inherent therein, but of danger and violence. For Danto, "a presumption that one's partner could be trusted . . . is the basic connection between sex and love." (41) He ties this trust to "the spontaneous human appetite for feeling danger and being protected at once . . ." (42) The combination of sex, danger, and violence, when contained by formalism through trust, is evident not only in the overtly sexual or violent works. Indeed, Danto is perhaps at his literary best in his discussion of these elements in relation to Mapplethorpe's flowers, fruits, vegetables, and finally the portraits of statues.

Danto's discussion of Mapplethorpe's work is frank, clear, and engaged. In neither oversimplifying the seriousness of the issues nor avoiding the questions raised by the work, he nonetheless leaves open its moral status. This is a great benefit. When it is a matter of "playing with the edge," different people will ultimately experience such an encounter differently. Indeed, this frames what may be the most problematic aspect of looking at Mapplethorpe's work: "It is supposed to be shocking. When morality changes so that it is no longer shocking, Mapplethorpe's intentions will fall away into incomprehensibility." (112) Although his assessment of the historical importance of this work--and that of the seventies in America generally--will surely not persuade everyone, the main achievement here is that Danto gives the reader solid handles by which to grapple with a difficult body of work.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Take care!, September 29, 2003

By 

Jane A. Knisely (ASHEVILLE, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe (Hardcover)

Danto is a perceptive and knowledgeable art critic whose text is worth the price of this book. The photos are well printed and carefully chosen to illustrate the essays. As an introduction for newcomers to Mapplethorpe this book is perfect. HOWEVER I purchased this book used on this website and found upon receipt two of the plates of the more controversial prints had been RIPPED, not cut, out of the book with great force, loosening the binding. If the jerk who did it ever reads this: Arthur Danto's descriptive talent almost compensates for the visual loss so you should have defaced the words as well. And shame on the bookseller who I believe knowingly sold this damaged volume without disclosure. My decision to keep this book comes from my bibliophilic heart- a book damaged in just this way epitomizes our society's heavyhanded sexual prudery. It's a collector's item, almost a sculpture. Now if the brute had only signed it...