There was an eccentric woman in our church, who always dressed elaborately for Easter. She was a spinstress–tall–and dressed as if her frocks were sculpted out of the buttercream frosting on a wedding cake. That woman carried a huge Easter basket, filled with candy, which she gave to all us kids. If you spotted her, you knew you were getting candy. I can’t remember one sermon from church. But I still remember that eccentric woman with the Easter basket.

It’s funny what memories grip you–which cradle you, which return like a slap on the face.  I’m no longer much of a believer in the religion department but Easter Sundays, now, I like to go to the church of the mind:  the museum.  And look at the world the way that only museums teach us to look:  with clarity.

Recently, I was at the Getty Institute in Brentwood, doing some research in the archives.  And I popped over to the museum side during a lunch break to mill about with the tourists…and to take a quick peek at the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective–a retrospective that is also occurring simultaneously at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

For those who don’t know, Mapplethorpe was the bad boy of art:  provocative, shameless, teasing.  If you walk into a Mapplethorpe gallery, you might see images of men in leather pissing into each other’s mouths.  Or a large black penis issuing forth from the unzipped trouser of a polyester suit.  These are the images that caused conservative politicians to turn him into the poster child of cultural degeneracy; they called for the end of the National Endowment for the Arts, the institution that funded his art; and ironically, launched him into the long snaking path of fame.

I first encountered Mapplethorpe’s work, though, through a reproduction in the late 80’s:  an image from the album cover of the alternative band The Swans.  He was already a big name by then, but the album cover displayed none of the pornographic imagery.  Instead, it showed the image of beautiful tulips, shot up close to reveal their fabulous, vaulted architecture–their chambers–undulating and elegant.  But I knew it was a Mapplethorpe because the Ken, the turtleneck-wearing kid who showed me the album, told me it was a Mapplethorpe.

“That’s a Mapplethorpe.  Isn’t it awesome?”  And who was I to doubt the coolest kid in the freshman dorm–a kid who never went to class and hated his parents for adopting him and who was deliberately getting F’s in class so he could drop out and go to art school.

Mapplethorpe was edgy and he was bad and he was everything that an upper middle class white kid rebelling against his parent’s Costco tract house strip mall life wanted. We knew those tulips to be pornographic, even if they were simply beautiful, detached formal exercises of shapes and tones and colors–like something out of an experiment from the Bauhaus movement, or the glamour photography of the thirties.  Those tulips had all the luster of advertisements selling nothing–nothing but desires yet unknown.

That’s what I look for when I look for art:  to see a creation that beckons like a woman in buttercream frosting or an effusion of tulips that sing the siren song of the dangerous and forbidden.  I’m going to get my hair cut today–in honor of Easter, of course.  And then I will make my way to church:  the Los Angeles County Museum, to catch the second half of this amazing exhibition.

Happy Easter!