Analysis Of Robert Mapplethorpe's Untitled

A skinny black man sits on a pedestal, a platform mounted precariously high resting on a beam of worn wood which decreases in width as our eyes travel upward. The subject is curled, his legs clutched tightly to his chest and his spine bulging from beneath his skin. This is the image that greets us when looking at Robert Mapplethorpe’s Untitled (Phillip on a Pedestal), the photo could be described as beautiful or disturbing, or more likely both. One feels the need to ogle over the awkward bones protruding, at the figure we are immediately drawn to. When breaking down the image, the figure no longer becomes this singular being. Phillip becomes a metaphor, a symbol for an entire community that throughout America’s history has been forced to into …show more content…
In our reading of Lipsitz’ space we read “the intersection to race and space produced a radically restricted spatial imaginary, one that reinforced the rewards, privileges, and structured advantages of whiteness”, Lipsitz is speaking to the white exodus to the suburbs, gated communities, white spaces that took up so much of the total space that anyone who was not a traditional white American was left to create homes in the small subsections they were granted. In his cramped, confined position Phillip is a community forced into tiny hamlets in a sea of “white space” that a new type of segregation has created. Phillip is constrained on a most ridiculous sized platform for a person of his size, here Mapplethorpe is showing the dense populations that shouldn’t fit but did fit into the accepted urban spaces for people of color. It has only become more difficult for such communities to find places of their own, “White space” has a way of creeping in on everyone else’s space, just look to the gentrification of Brooklyn for a recent example. The early 80’s were a transition period, those who worked against the civil rights movement were still alive and were having children that were being raised with the same morals, at a time when legal segregation was not a distant memory as it is today. With a nation …show more content…
It isn’t hard to buy into this narrative, just as it was easy in 1980 to think that things would naturally improve over time now that on paper at least laws were equal. Art has a way of capturing the the feeling of a time period, the still Untitled (Phillip on a Pedestal) by Robert Mapplethorpe is a tribute to momentum, to a continuous battle, forced placement of not feeling comfortable in your own skin. Mapplethorpe’s societal critique in Untitled (Philip on a Pedestal) is still relevant even three decades