| dc.description.abstract | As a celebrity in the history of American photography, Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) is famous for his nude and sex photographs. Bold and controversial contents in his oeuvre are rendered with a formal beauty and classical aura. His homosexual identity also makes him a significant figure in contemporary art field and gay community. However, in regard with his works preserved nowadays, many of them are not of homosexual content, and can hardly be categorized as formal or classical in terms of techniques and contents. Furthermore, although scholarly literature on his photographs is abundant, those on his early collages and drawings, which are not restricted to homosexual subjects, are rather few. His multifaceted concerns expressed in his works require a new understanding.
The first chapter of this thesis, “Demons”, deals with his early works, in which he appropriates images of demons to illustrate outcasts, or marginal subjects, intolerable by the traditional order, such as unchaste women, people engaging in homosexual act, and the deformed (e.g. of freak show). In addition, he deconstructs Catholic icons and develops his own lighting system, in which saints are replaced by those marginal subjects; by virtue of this, he challenges the power relations in religion and makes those marginal subjects and their conditions be seen by viewers. The second chapter “Violence” continues this concern of the marginal subjects and focuses on his SM photographs. Leather clothing and sexual act of SM, as the byproduct of masculinity rebuilding in the postwar era, are the focus of these photographs. Mapplethorpe was not only an observer, but one of the participants who recorded their needs of masculinity and filthy sex. This becomes what I call “queer masculinity” aesthetics and reveals the artificiality in masculine Camp. These photographs are based on surrealist photographic practices, and are also infused with elements in SM visual material, and thus of ambiguous nature between art and pornography. The last chapter “Specters” focuses on his exhibition situation in the 1980s and his position in some works on photographic history. With introduction of some gallerists, Mapplethorpe’s works met the need of aesthetic discourses of photography and entered into art museums and large scale exhibitions. Mapplethorpe has been since then regarded as an art photographer to date. Descriptions on his styles derived from these exhibitions recurred in later writings on photographic history, and became the main sources of our understanding of his oeuvre. The first two chapters re-examine some of his works in attempt to demonstrate his concerns about the marginal subjects. The last chapter elaborates how these subjects “have disappeared” to highlight the insufficiency of aesthetic discourses, and thus a new understanding is required. | en_US |