Photography

By Richard Lacayo

Robert Mapplethorpe's boys-in-bondage photographs made the right wing snort and paw the ground. But the left has its own kind of puritanism lately, which submits depictions of the human body to a test of political correctness. A 1964 work by Sol LeWitt failed the test of Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian's NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART in Washington. LeWitt's piece -- part of a touring show of work inspired by the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge -- is a long black box with 10 portholes. A viewer passing from one to the next sees successive shots of an advancing naked woman. Broun compared the work to a peep show and removed it from the walls, until the resulting uproar compelled her to put it back. Broun says she wasn't practicing censorship but insists that she isn't obliged to give a public stage to work she finds "degrading." Substitute the term "tax dollars" for "public stage," and you have Senator Jesse Helms' argument against $ government funding for art he doesn't like. The message from both sides to artists? Stick to abstraction; it's safer. R.L.