The current show at the Guggenhiem in New York, Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical tradition: photographs and mannerist prints unusually displays it faults, virtues and idiosyncrasies clearly in the title (not entirely uninhibited by the serious scholarship soundingness of it). Its obviously an ambitious show - viably having the words 'mapplethorpe', 'classical', and 'mannerist' in the lexical petri dish isn't easy. Before looking at the central rationale of the comparison of mapplethorpe to a body of prints, lets momentarily pick at the use of terms classical and mannered.

Classicism, a idea which embodies the notions of harmony balance, order, but mannerism which, although not a total collapse of classical virtues is definitely a mutagenic order different. Mannerism emphasises drama in its composition and overwraught exaggeration in its figuration. This is quite clearly distinct, yet the title of the show is either trying to gloss over these differences, or perhaps reading more generously, point the viewer to a more heterogenous exhibition, where the various works of Mapplethorpe are placed somwhere along this line. No mean amount of Mapplethorpe's work viewed through these terms can be split into these two camps reasonably easily and with relative success. Some of his works such as this piece have all the hallmarks of a contemporary classicist in action: beautiful rendering of tone and skilled lighting, in its distribution of form, simplicity of composition, celebration of admirably athletic but not absurdly steroidal muscular bodies and so on. Its undeniably beautiful, and very clearly classical. As is this, as is this. Even when you get work such as this with its blend of acceptable clarity and oh, hello!, the member is positioned so precisely with the balls intersecting the line of the table, and the just-so-clean silhouette, activating the negative space around the little fellah and the legs, its hard not to see a basically classical sensibility at work. There's no pr0nish absurdity that you might associate with mannered composition, but a refined, and neatly timed, um, introduction. Yeah, sure its got the domesticated leather clad s&m thing going on, but that hardly swings either way on the classical-mannerist pendulum; and the some of the more obviously stylised propositions (par example), are, in this case, still determined by a careful arrangement of limbs inersecting, creating relations and selected harmony.

However, the basic conception of pitching the prints against the photographs is neatly done, albeit sometimes a little superficially. It works best when done very directly - in the first alcove-room up the ramp there are actual sculptures of mercury and so on compared with Mapplethorpes rendering of them, and the lack of pretense in this is really quite informative and enjoyable. Mostly its encourages the viewer to start to look closely because the comparison is undeniably transparent, and you can embrace working out how RM made the translation rather than working out if there's anything beyond the juxtaposition other than the trite "see - they're both circular", which was dangerously close to derailing my credulity into cynicism.

Both the seductive photographs and the florid prints are enjoyable unto themselves, and both benefit (here and there) from the comparison, although what stands out most is mapplethorpe's love of beauty and the mannerist confusion between a body's muscle groups and something with more undecided lumps than a Gehry reject.