Cindy Sherman

Biography
(personal site: www.cindysherman.com/) / Wickypedia

By turning the camera on herself, Cindy Sherman has built a name as one of the most respected photographers of the late twentieth century. Many art critics consider Sherman to be not only the most successful female photographer of the modern era, but one of the most successful artists of either genders in the late twentieth century with as much influence on younger artists as did Andy Warhol in his era. Although, the majority of her photographs are pictures of her, however, these photographs are most definitely not self-portraits. Rather, Sherman uses herself as a vehicle for commentary on a variety of issues of the modern world: the role of the woman, the role of the artist and many more. It is through these ambiguous and eclectic photographs that Sherman has developed a distinct signature style. Through a number of different series of works, Sherman has raised challenging and important questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art.

Sherman's life began in 1954, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City. Her family having moved shortly after her birth, Sherman grew up as the youngest of five children in the town of Huntington, Long Island. Unlike some budding artists, Sherman was not particularly involved in the arts as a young person. Sherman's parents were not involved in the arts; her father made a living as an engineer and her mother worked as a reading teacher. Born relatively late in her parents' lives, Sherman's father was retired by the time she was in fifth grade. Sherman has said that, ""It wasn't until college that I had any concept of what was going on in the art world. My idea of being an artist as a kid was a courtroom artist or one of those boardwalk artists who do caricatures. My parents had a book of, like, the one hundred one beautiful paintings, which included Dali and Picasso among the most recent artists." Despite her parents lack of artistic interest, they were supportive of her choice to enter art school after finishing high school, though, according to Sherman, her mother did caution her to "take a few teaching courses just in case." Thus, Sherman's exploration of art began at the State University College at Buffalo.

Sherman's career at Buffalo began much differently then it ended. As a freshman, Sherman set out to study painting until one day, when she realized that she had enough. Frustrated with the limitations of painting and feeling like she had done all that she could, she gave it up. Exposure to the innovative ideas of her colleagues, most notably her professor Barbara Jo Revelle and artist Suzy Lake, at the artists' space Hallwalls convinced her to switch to photography, a medium conducive to Conceptual art. Sherman has said that she felt that “. . . there was nothing more to say [through painting]. I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead." And this is explicitly what she did. In retrospect, Sherman has expressed that she never could have succeeded as a painter, stating that she is unable to react to painting in anything more than a visceral way. Lacking the critical connection needing to proceed with painting, Sherman turned to photography, which she studied for the remainder of her time at Buffalo. During this time, she met a person who was to become very important in her life: fellow artist Robert Longo. Together with Longo and fellow student Charles Clough, Sherman formed Hallwalls, an independent artists' space where she and fellow artists exhibited.

After Sherman's 1976 graduation, she decided to move to New York City to embark upon her career in art. Taking a loft on Fulton Street in lower Manhattan, Sherman began taking photographs of herself. These photographs would come to be known as the Untitled Film Stills, perhaps the most well known and recognizable work of Sherman's career thus far. In these photographs, begun in 1977, Sherman places herself in the roles of B-movie actresses. Her photographs show her dressed up in wigs, hats, dresses, clothes unlike her own, playing the roles of characters. While many may mistake these photographs for self-portraits, these photographs only play with elements of self-portraiture and are really something quite different. In each of these photographs, Sherman plays a type -- not an actual person, but a self-fabricated fictional one. There is the archetypal housewife, the prostitute, the woman in distress, the woman in tears, the dancer, the actress, and the malleable, chameleon-like Sherman plays all of these characters.

For a work of art to be considered a portrait, the artist must have intent to portray a specific, actual person. This can be communicated through such techniques as naming a specific person in the title of the work or creating an image in which the physical likeness leads to an emotional individuality unique to a specific person. While these criteria are not the only ways of connoting a portrait, they are just two examples of how Sherman carefully communicates to the viewer that these works are not meant to depict Cindy Sherman the person. By titling each of the photographs "Untitled", as well as numbering them, Sherman depersonalizes the images.

There are also very few clues as to Sherman's personality in the photographs - each one is so unique and ambiguous that the viewer is left with more confusion than clarity over Sherman's true nature. Sherman completed the project three years later, in 1980, when she "ran out of clichés" with which to work. This series gave Sherman much publicity and critical acclaim; she had her first solo show at the non-profit space, the Kitchen, in New York City. In 1980 Sherman also created a series of what she called "Rear-Screen Projections" in which, similarly to the Film Stills, Sherman dressed up and paraded against a projected slide background.

In 1981 Sherman was commissioned by the respected magazine Art forum to do a "centrefold" for one of their upcoming issues. Sherman proceeded to submit a series of images with a cohesive aesthetic look: the camera was placed above Sherman, who was often crouched on the ground or made to look like she was in a state of reverie. This series, as well as an additional series of Sherman in a pink robe, was rejected by Art forum’s editor, Ingrid Sischy, who claimed that these photographs "might be misunderstood."

Sherman went on to change her style almost entirely in what are often referred to as the Disasters and Fairy Tales series. For the first time in her public career, Sherman was not the model in all of the images. Shot from 1985 until 1989, these images are far more grotesque than Sherman's earlier work. Often intentionally dressing to look scary and deformed, Sherman sets herself in strange, indefinable settings which often feature oddly coloured lighting in shades of blue, green and red. At times, Sherman employs dolls parts or prosthetic body parts to substitute for her own and many a scene is strewn with vomit, mold and other vile substances. Sherman's intent is to explore the disgusting, yet these are things that she admittedly can find beauty in.

Sherman's second most known body of work came some time after the Film Stills had already been well received, around 1988-1990. In the History Portraits Sherman again uses herself as model, though this time she casts herself in roles from archetypally famous paintings. While very few specific paintings are actually referenced, one still feels a familiarity of form between Sherman's work and works by great masters. Using prosthetic body parts to augment her own body, Sherman recreates great pieces of art and thus manipulates her role as a contemporary artist working in the twentieth-century. Sherman lived abroad during this time in her life, and even though museums would appear to be the source of inspiration for this series, she is not a fan of museums: "Even when I was doing those history pictures, I was living in Rome but never went to the churches and museums there. I worked out of books, with reproductions. It's an aspect of photograph I appreciate, conceptually: the idea that images can be reproduced and seen anytime, anywhere, by anyone."

In 1992 Sherman embarked on a series of photographs now referred to as "Sex Pictures." For the first time, Sherman is entirely absent from these photographs. Instead, she again uses dolls and prosthetic body parts, this time posed in highly sexual poses. Prosthetic genitalia - both male and female - are used often and photographed in extreme close-up. Photographed exclusively in colour, these photographs are meant to shock. Sherman continued to work on these photographs for some time and continued to experiment with the use of dolls and other replacements for what had previously been herself.

In 1995, Sherman was the recipient of one of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowships, popularly known as the "Genius Awards." This fellowship grants $500,000 over five years, no strings attached, to important scholars in a wide range of fields, to encourage their future creative work.

Sherman's life and work has been populated by more than just conceptual photography. She has been married to video artist Michel Auder for over 16 years and has found time in her busy career to add work in motion pictures. In 1997, Sherman's directorial debut, Office Killer, starring Jeanne Tripplehorn, was released in theatres. A self-proclaimed lover of horror films, Sherman draws on the characteristics of this genre as well as the visual motifs established as a still photographer. Sherman also made an appearance in front of the camera, making a cameo playing herself in John Waters' 1998 comedy Pecker.

Because Sherman achieved international success at a relatively young age, her work has had a considerable maturation in value over the past decade. In 1999 the average selling price for one of her photographs was $20,000 to $50,000, a hefty sum for a female photographer. Even more ground-breaking was a 1999 Christie's auction in which one of the photographs from Film Stills sold for a reported $190,000. This bid was perhaps inspired by the Museum of Modern Art's lead: in 1996, they purchased a complete set from Film Stills for one million dollars. These prices are indicative of Sherman's huge level of success, both critically and financially. Sherman's popularity continues to grow around the world, as she has exhibited countries including Germany, Japan, France.

In 2006, Sherman created a series of fashion advertisements for designer Marc Jacobs. The advertisements themselves were photographed by photographer Jurgen Teller and released as a monograph on April the 4th by Rizzoli.

Recently, Sherman has returned to using herself as model. At a recent show at her New York gallery, Metro Pictures, Sherman displayed a series of portrait-like images of herself in the guise of women from California. These women are again simply types - The Personal Trainer, The Ex-Realtor, The Divorcee, etc. Sherman further manipulates the notion of portraiture through the use of conventional portrait signs including the setting of the figure against a neutral background. Unlike some of her early photographs, these are more straightforward images of created characters, not narrative fragments. Sherman continues these projects in New York City, where she currently lives and works.

A documentary, "Guest of Cindy Sherman" is currently in the works about the travails of artist/videographer Paul H-O and his relationship with the great artist (to air on the Sundance Channel in 2008). The feature documentary is directed by H-O and Tom Donahue.


Exhibitions

Solo

2000 Monika Sprüth/Philomene Magers, München, Germany

1999 Metro Pictures, New York

1999 Galerie Edition Kunsthandel, Essen, Germany

1999 Cindy Sherman: Retrospective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

1999 Museum of Contemporaray Art, Chicago

1999 Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague

1999 Cape Musée, Bordeaux

1999 Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

1999 *Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

1999 Monika Sprüth Galerie, Köln, Germany

1999 Metro Pictures, New York

1998 Allegories, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle

1998 Metro Pictures, New York

1997 Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills, Museum of Modern Art, New York

1997 Cindy Sherman: A Selection From the Eli Broad, Foundation's Collection, Museo de Bellas Artesy, Caracas, Venezuela

1997 Cindy Sherman, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

1996 Cindy Sherman, Museum Boymans-van Beunigen, Rotterdam

1996 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

1996 Sala de Exposiciones REKALDE, Bilbao

1996 Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany

1996 Cindy Sherman, Museum of Modern Art, Shiga, Japan

1996 Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art

1996 Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

1996 Metamorphosis: Cindy Sherman Photographs, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland

1996 Metro Pictures, New York

1995 Directions: Cindy Sherman-Film Stills, #Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

1995 Cindy Sherman Photographien 1975-1995, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany

1995 Malmo Konsthall, Sweden Kunstmuseum, Luzerne, Switzerlandn

1995 Cindy Sherman, Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

1995 Metro Pictures, New York

1994 Cindy Sherman, ACC Galerie Weimar, Weimar, Germany

1994 Cindy Sherman, Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester, England

1994 Cindy Sherman, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland

1993 Tel Aviv Museum of Art

1992 Museo de Monterrey, Mexico

1992 Monika Sprüth Galerie, Cologne, West Germany

1992 Metro Pictures, New York

1991 Cindy Sherman, Basel Kunsthalle, Switzerland

1991 Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich

1991 The Whitechapel Gallery, London

1991 Milwaukee Art Museum Center for the Fine Arts, Miami

1991 The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

1990 Padiglione d'arte Contemporanea, Milan

1990 University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley

1990 Monika Sprüth Galerie, Cologne, West Germany

1990 Metro Pictures, New York

1989 National Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand

1989 Waikato Museum of Art and History, New Zealand

1989 Metro Pictures, New York

1988 Monika Sprüth Galerie, Cologne, West Germany

1987 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

1987 The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

1987 The Dallas Museum of Art

1987 Metro Pictures, New York

1985 Westfalischer Kunstverein, Münster, West Germany

1985 Metro Pictures, New York

1984 Cindy Sherman, Akron Art Museum Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

1984 Museum of Art

1984 Carnegie Institute

1984 The Baltimore Museum of Art

1984 Monika Sprüth Galerie, Cologne, West Germany

1983 Musee d'Art et d'Industrie de Saint Etienne, France

1983 The St. Louis Art Museum

1983 Metro Pictures, New York

1982 Cindy Sherman, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

1982 Gewad, Ghent, Belgium

1982 Watershed Gallery, Bristol, England

1982 John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, England

1982 Palais Stutterheim, Erlangen, West Germany

1982 Haus am Waldsee, West Berlin, Germany

1982 Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneva Sonja Henle-Niels Onstadt Foundation, Copenhagen Louisiana Museum, Humleback, Denmark

1982 Cindy Sherman, *Deja Vu, Dijon, France

1982 Metro Pictures, New York

1981 Metro Pictures, New York

1980 Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston

1980 Metro Pictures, New York


Group
1999 Gesammelte Werke 1: Zeitgenössische Kunst seit 1968, Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg

1999 Notorious, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

1999 The Time of Our Lives, New Museum, New York

1998 Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self Representation, MIT List Center, Cambridge

1998 Miami Art Museum, Miami

1998 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

1997 Gender Performance in Photography, Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

1997 On the Edge: Contemporary Art from the Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

1997 Von Beuys bis Cindy Sherman, Sammlung Lothar Schirmer, Kunsthalle, Bremen

1996 L'Informe: le Modernisme a Rebours, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

1996 Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

1996 The Wexner Center for the Arts, Colombus

1996 Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome

1996 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

1996 Biennale di Firenze, Florence

1995 Projections, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto

1995 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

1995 Zeichen & Wunder, Kunsthaus, Zurich

1995 XLVI Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte 1995, La Biennale di Venezia

1995 FeminiMasculin: Le Sexe de l'Art?, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris

1994 World Morality, Kunsthalle, Basel

1994 Body and Soul, The Baltimore Museum of Art

1994 Jurgen Klauke - Cindy Sherman, Sammlung Goetz, Munich

1993 Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Kunsternes Hus, Oslo

1993 Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki

1993 Biennial Exhibition, *Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

1993 American Art of This Century, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin

1993 Royal Academy of Arts, London

1992 Post Human, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Pully/Lausanne, Switzerland

1992 Castello di Rivoli, Turin

1992 Deste Foundation, Athens

1992 Deichtorhallen, Hamburg

1992 *Israel Museum, Jerusalem

1991 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

1991 Metropolis, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin

1990 Culture and Commentary, The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington

1990 Energies, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

1990 The Readymade Boomerang, Eight Biennial of Sydney

1989 A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

1989 Bilderstreit, Mense Rhineside Halls, Cologne

1989 Image World: Art and Media Culture, *Whitney Museum, New York

1987 Avant-Garde in the Eighties, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

1987 Implosion: A Postmodern Perspective, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

1986 Art and Ist Double: A New York Perspective, Fundacio Caixa de Pensions, Barcelona

1986 Art and Ist Double: A New York Perspective, La Caixa de Pensions, Madrid

1986 Individuals: A selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986, *Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

1986 The American Exhibition, The Art Institute of Chicago

1985 Carnegie International, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh

1985 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

1984 Alibis, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris

1984 Content: A Contemporary Focus, 1974-84, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

1984 The Fifth Biennale of Sydney,

1984 Private Symbol: Social Metaphor, *Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

1983 Directions 1983, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

1983 Biennial Exhibition, *Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

1983 The New Art, The Tate Gallery, London

1982 Documenta 7, Kassel

1982 Eight Artists: The Anxious Edge, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

1982 La Biennale di Venezia, Venico


Awards

1997 Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis (Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig)

1995 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

1993 Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, Connecticut

1989 Skowhegan Medal for Photography, Mainc

1983 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship

1977 National Endowment for the Arts


Books

Film Stills
Retrospective
Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman
Photographic Works 1975-1995
Centrefolds
Early Work of Cindy Sherman
Essential Cindy Sherman
In Real Life: Six Women Photographers

Films

Office Killer: Directed by Cindy Sherman.
John Waters Collection (Hairspray / Pecker / Polyester / Desperate Living / Pink Flamingos / Female Trouble) (Cindy Sherman appears in a cameo role in Pecker.)


Books about Cindy Sherman’s work

Cindy Sherman: A Play of Selves. Hatje Cantz 2007
Johanna Burton: Cindy Sherman. 2006
Cindy Sherman: Working Girl. Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis 2006
Cindy Sherman: Centrefolds. Skarstedt Fine Art 2004
Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills. Museum of Modern Art 2003
Elisabeth Bronfen, et.al. Cindy Sherman: Photographic Works 1975-1995 (Paperback). Schirmer/Mosel 2002
Early Work of Cindy Sherman. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller 2001
Leslie Sills, et.al. In Real Life: Six Women Photographers. Holiday House 2000
Amanda Cruz, et.al. Cindy Sherman: Retrospective (Paperback). Thames & Hudson (1999) Essential, The: Cindy Sherman. Harry N. Abrams, Inc.2000
Shelley Rice (ed.) Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman. MIT Press. 1999

Film and Video

Cindy Sherman [videorecording]: Transformations. by Paul Tschinkel; Marc H Miller; Sarah Berry; Stan Harrison; Cindy Sherman; Helen Winer; Peter Schjeldahl; Inner-Tube Video. 2002, 28 minutes, Colour. NY: Inner-Tube Video.

References
Montclair Art Museum (2004-03-21), The Unseen Cindy Sherman: Early Transformations (1975-1976)

An Interview with Betsy Berne and pictures by Cindy Sherman, Tate Magazine

Exclusively for TATE, artist Cindy Sherman has photographed her own studio. Betsy Berne - painter, novelist and fellow pugilist - goes 15 rounds with her

Cindy Sherman, my sparring partner, is perhaps one of the great practical jokes played on the art world, a world well known for its jokers. She is an eccentric artist in the guise of an ordinary person, who happens to be one of the most successful and influential artists of our time. Sherman came of age with the Big Bad Boy artists of the 1980s, and, unlike some of her blustery comrades, she is still big and bad - in fact, the biggest and baddest of them all. And she's a girl! And a photographer: perhaps even the photographer responsible for photography's rise as an art form in the last two decades.

Cindy and I first met years ago at a boxing gym, and when I asked our teacher, Carlos Ferrer, to describe her boxing style, he said without hesitation: 'Fast and aggressive.' In the ring, she reminds me of a pit bull terrier. When it comes to her work, she's just as tenacious and ambitious. But she's the judge and her standards are her own, based on a singular intuitive visual intelligence. For all the theories about angry feminism, or gender/identity 'issues', or female/sexual 'victimisation' or whatever (don't quote me) about each and every series of Sherman's work, she's not playing that game. (Though she did let it slip that her 1999 series of misshapen dolls in various states of sexual depravity and distress was partly inspired by a sleazy, muscle-bound, well-connected pretty boy assistant who couldn't deliver film to the lab properly.)

Sherman's studio is as modest as she is: a large room that takes up roughly half her loft apartment in New York; a small shooting area with backdrops and desks strategically placed. Three months ago, this studio was so pristine you could lick the floor; today it's a disaster area with clown clothing and props everywhere. Cindy's making new work.

B: Is this is a feminist studio, then?

C: Oh yes [laughing]! See, I have breasts everywhere. I collect breasts!

B: How about the whole feminist thing?

C: [makes a face]

B: I always thought - even in my youth - that being a feminist was a given, that it was instinctive, so you didn't have to discuss it. And if you had to discuss it, then something's fishy. But maybe this is because we were at the tail-end of the generation that had to fight...

C: Right, you feel that guilt - that's how I feel about it too, but I don't want to have to explain myself. The work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.

B: When you were beginning, using yourself in the work, everybody made such a big feminist deal out of it. I had a photographer friend [the late Francesca Woodman] who also used herself in her pictures and she'd say, 'I'm the one who's always available and I know what I want.' Did it begin that way for you?

C: It was exactly like that. I did try using family members or friends, and once I paid an assistant. But even when I was paying somebody, I still wanted to rush through and get them out of the studio. I felt like I was imposing on them. Also, I got the feeling that they were having fun, to a certain extent, thinking this was like Halloween, or playing dress-up. The levels I try to get to are not about the having-fun part. I also realised that I myself don't know exactly what I want from a picture, so it's hard to articulate that to somebody else - anybody else. When I'm doing it myself, I'm really just using the mirror to summon something I don't even know until I see it.

B: The instinctive part is the great thing about making art. The surprises you find are what's interesting. Do you think you're an intuitive artist?

C: Oh, yeah, because sometimes in the past if I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn't make it. It was almost like it was made already - the challenge is more about trying to make what you can't think of.

B: How does an idea evolve for you - such as the clowns in your new work?

C: First I try to figure out the costumes, and then probably a wig - and the make-up for clowns.

B: When did you think, 'Oh, clowns!'?

C: Well, that [points to a pair of silk pajamas with big fur-like buttons] is an old thing that I got at a yard sale ten years ago, pajamas turned into a clown outfit; it's ugly and funky, but I liked it for that and it just helped everything come together. The reason I found it - you know how obsessive I was when I was trying to get started working - is that I was just cleaning every drawer and every closet in the studio trying to find some kind of inspiration.

B: Is that what you tend to do to get started? Clean and organise?

C: Yeah. Also, I know that once I'm working I don't want to be distracted by paperwork or emails, letters. So I try to get all those things out of the way too and the house cleaned so I can sort of...

B: Blast off?

C: Yeah, right. So I took out the pajamas and a couple of other eccentric things that I'd been saving, although I didn't have any particular thing I could apply them to. Then, when I started looking up clown pictures on line, I realised I could almost use anything, any item of clothing, T-shirts, jeans, and it could be a clown. And I had a couple of multicoloured wigs that I'd never used for a picture. So many things suddenly made sense for the clowns, for the whole idea. I'd been going through a struggle, particularly after 9/11; I couldn't figure e out what I wanted to say. I still wanted the work to be the same kind of mixture - intense, with a nasty side or an ugly side, but also with a real pathos about the characters - and [clowns] have an underlying sense of sadness while they're trying to cheer people up. Clowns are sad, but they're also psychotically, hysterically happy.

B: The funniest people are always the most miserable inside.

C: Yeah, I like that balance - that you could be painted to look like you're happy and still look like you're sad underneath, or the opposite too. The more research I did the more levels I saw. There are a lot of creepy, sad, different emotions that I really like.

B: Did you like clowns as a kid?

C: No, I never went to see them. I was about 30 when I first went to the circus.

B: I never went to the circus either. My mother said it was commercial bullshit, so I thought that's that. Another thing - how important is music when you work?

C: Really important. I can't work without it. And it has to be the right kind, because if it's not then I get into a bad mood. I work with a remote so that I can change CDs instantly if I need to. When I'm working I usually buy about 30 new CDs every couple of weeks.

B: Can shopping give you ideas?

C: [Laughs] I think it can - sometimes what I like, fashion-wise, is so theatrical I'll buy it even if I can't wear it. I do get inspired by how things are made, by fashion as art form.

B: Some designers think it's pretentious to equate fashion with art, but at least fashion is what it is. Appreciating it is part of being a visual person.

C: Right, right.

B: Now that I don't paint, creating an outfit can be my major visual highlight for the day. Or at least that's my excuse for buying too many clothes.

C: Except it's the same thing for me - and I'm still doing visual work [laughs].

B: How do you deal with the long periods when you aren't making work?

C: When I do work, I get so much done in such a concentrated time that once I'm through a series, I'm so drained I don't want to get near the camera.

B: It sounds like writing. Do you think you're telling stories without knowing it?

C: I try to get something going with the characters so that they give more information than what you see in terms of wigs and clothes. I'd like people to fantasise about this person's life or what they're thinking or what's inside their head, so I guess that's like telling a story.

B: Which is worse: when you're working or when you're not working?

C: What's worse is when I'm not working when I want to be working. The worst part of it for me is when I go to functions and feel like I have nothing to say because I can't say what I'm working on. When there's no focus with the work I feel I can't communicate with people.

B: Work is a great excuse to be alone. Would you say that you're a loner?

C: Oh, yeah, Paul [her boyfriend, director Paul H-O] and I both are.

B: Do you think your work has more humour than it gets credit for?

C: I think it's more funny than scary.

B: How do you get past all the crap critics often write about you?

C: Sometimes I've read stuff that never occurred to me. Elizabeth Hess once said something about 'deconstruction' [laughs]. It was when I used [fake] body parts in the work instead of myself; maybe I appear in the reflection of some things. Hess said that 'I' was gradually moving out of the work and so she analysed the 'deconstruction' of it. I'd never thought of that [laughs]! That's the only time a light bulb went off. Because to me I was just trying to see if I could make pictures that I wasn't in.

B: Do you resent people reading your personal life into your work?

C: I just think it's funny.

B: What about everybody saying you're so nice? Is it just easier that way?

C: [laughs] Yeah, well, some people I really like. Then mostly with other people I'm polite because my mother told me to be polite, to 'be a good girl'.

B: It's simplistic, but if you're raised to be a 'good girl', your work is the only private place where you can do whatever the hell you want and rebel.

C: Right, that's true, because it's an outlet for anger and lots of other things.

B: In one of the early articles about you, you said, 'I'm doing one of the stupidest things in the world and they're actually falling for it.' Do you still feel that way?

C: Well, I was feeling guilty in the beginning; it was frustrating to be successful when a lot of my friends weren't. Also, I was constantly being reminded of that by people in my family making jokes like, 'Oh, yes, she's still just dressing up like she did when she was a kid,' or 'It doesn't take any brains to be doing what she's doing.' So I guess I was thinking, maybe I am still just dressing up, because I don't theorise when I work. I would read theoretical stuff about my work and think, 'What? Where did they get that?' The work was so intuitive for me, I didn't know where it was coming from. So I thought I had better not say anything or I'd blow it.

B: Do you think viewers like a challenge or prefer to be told what to think?

C: You know what? I don't really care.


The Photography Encyclopaedia

Sherman, Cindy (b 1954): Famed American art photographer

In Sherman's distinctive self-portraits she is dressed up and made up to portray hundreds of different women and occasionally men, but never herself. She says her art deals with female stereotypes, and they are portraits not of how she sees herself but how she sees men seeing women.

Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, she studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo (Bachelor of Arts, 1976). As a teenager she began to wear makeup to look more glamorous and found that she could turn herself into a different person by changing her appearance. In college she started making photo narratives starring herself.

She moved to New York in 1977, when she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Early recognition came in the late 1970s with a series of black and white photographs called "Untitled Film Stills," showing Sherman as a B movie actress in various poses. She continued pursuing her art and earned her living at the Artists Space gallery. When the Metro Pictures Gallery opened in 1980, Sherman had one of the first shows, of her early colour photos. It was the beginning of her success, and today Sherman is one of the highest earning female artists.

Over the years her repertoire of images has included movie stars, centrefold nudes, fairytale characters, victims of disasters, and historical figures. Some of her portraits have produced comic or grotesque effects with plastic body parts, dolls, and her own made up body. Her work has been exhibited worldwide in numerous groups and one person shows at such venues as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Among the collections holding her work are those of the Metropolitan and Brooklyn museums in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London. A selection of her photographs, Cindy Sherman Retrospective (1997), was published in conjunction with a major travelling exhibit.


The Bulfinch Guide to Art History

Sherman, Cindy (b 1954)

American photographer. She studied at the University College of Buffalo in New York, where she became interested in photography and began exhibiting in 1976. From the beginning, she used photography to challenge the images and myths of popular culture and mass media. Initially, in her series of 'Film Stills', she made herself up in the role of characters from 'B' movies, and she followed up this theme in later series of photographs such as 'Back Screen' (1980) and 'Freaks' (1986). Increasingly, she turned to Old Master paintings for inspiration and created a series of photographs in which she dressed herself up as figures in famous works by Caravaggio, Raphael and others. These photographs crossed the boundaries between post-modern playfulness and the exploration of self through portraiture. Sherman has received mixed reactions from feminist viewers who question whether she subverts the codes of female subjugation or perpetuates those same codes by constantly using female stereotypes.


American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America

Identity art did yield some images of real intensity, such as Cindy Sherman's often ferociously ironic photographs starring herself in different roles. Sherman (b. 1954) began with small black-and-white prints in the late 1970s, showing herself in fifties outfits, enacting fragments of an otherwise indecipherable narrative as housewife or glamour girl, modelled on film stills of Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren, and exploring the various stereotypes of women. These had a quiet, ironic grip on the theme of identity-as-construct, the sense that when a person's costumes and props are taken away, there is (as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, California, where she grew up) no there. Later in the 1980s Sherman's work expanded into the baroque horrors of the vanitas. She made huge Cibachrome prints in which, grotesquely made up and extravagantly costumed, she parodied images from art history. An element of sexual terror entered some of these.


Biography from Guggenheim gallery

b. 1954, Glen Ridge, N.J.

Cindy Sherman was born January 19, 1954, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. She emerged onto the New York art scene in the early 1980s as part of a new generation of artists concerned with the codes of representation in a media-saturated era. Having graduated from State University College, Buffalo, New York, in 1976, she moved to New York the following year, at a time when the authority of the Modernist paradigm was coming under increasing scrutiny. Amid debates surrounding authorship and the role of originality, the condition of the photographic image, and the increasing co modification of art, Sherman’s work was quickly embraced in the early 1980s and framed within the contemporary feminist critique of patriarchy.

Sherman’s reputation was established on the basis of her Untitled Film Stills, a series of black-and-white photographs from the late 1970s in which the artist depicted herself dressed in the guises of clichéd B-movie heroines. In photograph after photograph, Sherman was ever present, and yet never really there—her ready adaptation of a range of personae highlighting the masquerade of identity. Her appropriation of the space on both sides of the lens destabilized the traditionally gendered opposition between artist and model, object and subject—one that had been theorized by film critics in terms of spectatorship and its gendered codes of looking.

If the Untitled Film Stills elicited debate concerning the construction of woman-as-image, the photographs Sherman made throughout the mid-1980s served to perpetuate this discourse. Her Centrefolds (1981) and Fashion (1983–84) series elaborated the codes of what film theorist Laura Mulvey termed the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of female representation. Emulating the signifiers of the centrefold, the closely cropped photographs reveal a body that is available to the camera and bathed in a vivid light. Sherman’s choice of gendered genres compounds the voyeuristic impression established in the works.

Feeling pigeonholed by the feminist discourse that surrounded her work, Sherman gradually dispensed with representations of the female, often removing herself from the picture and moving toward more fantastic and lurid imagery, as in her Fairy Tales and Disasters series from the mid-to-late 1980s. The ever-increasing market for her photographs also prompted this turn, challenging her to attempt to create work that was “unsaleable” due to its visceral depictions of vomit, body parts, and grotesque fairy tales. Simultaneously, she instilled the works with a heightened sense of artifice created by garish colours and gaps that reveal the fiction behind the illusion.

Throughout her career, Sherman has appropriated numerous visual genres—including the film still, centrefold, fashion photograph, historical portrait, and soft-core sex image—while disrupting the operations that work to define and maintain their respective codes of representation. In addition to numerous group exhibitions, her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1982 and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1987. A retrospective organized by the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, travelled throughout Europe in 1996 and 1997. Sherman lives in New York and is at work on a feature-length horror film.


Retrospective – Cindy Sherman

Movies, Monstrosities, and Masks:
Twenty years of Cindy Sherman

Along with our parents, the mass media raised us, socialized us, entertained us, comforted us, deceived us, disciplined us, told us what we could do and told us what we couldn’t. And they played a key role in turning each of us into not one woman but many women – a pastiche of all the good women and bad women that came to us through the printing presses, projectors, and airwaves of America. This has been one of the mass media’s most important legacies for female consciousness: the erosion of anything resembling a unified self.
Susan J. Douglas

Cindy Sherman began her now famous series Untitled Film Stills twenty years ago at the end of 1977. Those small black and white photographs of Sherman impersonating various female character types from old B movies and film noir spoke to a generation of baby boomers women who had grown up absorbing those glamorous images at home on their televisions, taking such portrayals as cues for their futures. With each subsequent series of photographs, Sherman has imitated and confronted assorted representational tropes, exploring the myriad ways in which women and the body are depicted by effective contemporary image-makers, including the mass media and historical sources such as fairy tales, portraiture, and surrealist photography.

Untitled Film Stills 1977-80

Upon graduation in 1977, Sherman and Longo moved to New York. She continued role-plying in different guises and began photographing the results in the apartment, as in Untitled Film Still #10 (plate 10); in outdoor locations ion New York City, as in Untitled Film Still #21 (plate 22); in Long Island in Untitled Film Still #9 (plate9); and in the Southwest in Untitled Film Still #43 (plate48). Sherman took most of the photographs, but some were shot by friends and family. The complete series was first exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC in 1995, and in the brochure for that show, Phyllis Rosenzweig discusses the relationships between the works. Similar characters appear in several photographs, resulting in mini series within the larger group. For example, the first six images feature the same blonde actress at different points in her career. In each picture, Sherman depicts herself alone, as a familiar but unidentifiable film heroine in an appropriate setting. The characters include a floozy in a slip with a martini glass in Untitled Film Still #7 (plate 7); a perky B-movie librarian in Untitled Film Still #13 (plate 14); a young secretary in the city in Untitled Film #21 (plate 22); a voluptuous, lower class woman from an Italian neo-realist film in Untitled Film Still #35 (plate 39); an innocent runaway in Untitled Film Still #54 (plate 58). In works such as Untitled Film Still #15 (plate17) and Untitled Film Still #34 (plate 35), Sherman appears as a seductress. Speaking of one such image, she has said, “to pick a character like that was about my own ambivalence about sexuality – growing up with the women role model that I had, and a lot of them in films, that were like that character, and yet you were supposed to be a good girl.”

Numbering 69 in total, the Untitled Film Stills present an array of types, which, according to Judith Williamson in Consuming Passions, “force upon the viewer that elision of image and identity which women experience all the time: as if a sexy black dress made you be a femme fatale, whereas ‘femme fatale’ is precisely an image, it needs a viewer to function at all.” Williamson goes on to say that Sherman’s work implicates the viewer in the construction of these identities while gazing at the images but, by offering so many characters, Sherman undermines this attempt to fix her image according to our desires.

Arthur Danto comments “The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told.”

As photographic records of self-performances, the Untitled Film Stills are related to the feminist performance work of the 1970’s by artists such as Eleanor Antin and Adrian Piper, who Sherman has identified as early influences.
Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills are not only photographic records of performances but, inversely, performative accounts if filmic images. Sherman ended the series in 1980, when she realised that she was beginning to duplicate some of the stereotypes.

Rear Screen Projections 1980-81

Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative. And it is representative, through its appearance and cultural circulation that denotes issues and raises questions. Is it possible to construct a way of looking which welcomes the presence of pleasure and escapes the deceptions of desire?
Barbara Kruger

Sherman’s next series was her first work in colour, which she continued to use to increasing effect. If the black-and-white Untitled Film Stills contain the nostalgia of an old movie, the Rear Screen Projections exude the artifice of a television show. Dictated by a desire to work at home rather than on location, Sherman photographed herself in front of a screen on which she projected slides of outdoor and indoor scenes. The backgrounds in these photographs are obviously fake. The very realistic and sometimes quite closely cropped images of Sherman contrast with the blurry and insubstantial settings, heightening the artifice of the entire scene.

The resulting images are more contemporary than the previous series, reminiscent of the late 1960s and 1970s rather than the 1950s. Sherman is still role playing, but these characters are decidedly more up-to-date in their demeanour. Rather than victims or femme fatales, the women in the Rear Screen Projections appear more confident and independent. In untitled #76 (plate 72), a young urbanite drinks a beer outside, and a mysterious woman in a straw hat gives a knowing look in Untitled #72 (plate 71).

Sherman’s appropriation of the media’s forms in order to critique it has its parallel in the work of Barbara Kruger. Having worked in advertising, Kruger expertly mimics the look and imagery of ads and inserts disjunctive texts to expose their manipulations. She has similarly created works that deal with the media’s representation of women but with none of the nostalgic allure if Sherman’s early series; Kruger’s approach is much more confrontational.

Centrefolds or Horizontals 1981

“While Sherman may pose as a pin-up, she still cannot be pinned down”
Craig Owens

In 1981, Sherman was asked to create a portfolio of images for an issue of Artforum. Inspired by the magazines horizontal format and the request for a two-page layout, she produced a series of works that refer to the photo spreads in pornographic magazines. Large enough to be life-size, each image is in colour, with Sherman as a different young woman or teenage girl looking off to the side with a vacant or pensive look. The figure fills the frame, cropped and in close-up, in a technique that she has continued to use often. She keeps background details to a minimum.

…When the series was shown, Sherman was criticised by some as having created images that reaffirm sexist stereotypes and Artforum eventually rejected the pictures. The most potentially suggestive of the works, Untitled #93 (plate 76), depicts a woman with messy hair and smudged makeup in bed covering herself with black sheets. She looks toward a light that shines in her eyes. Although some critics read this as a scene after a rape, Sherman has stated that she was imagining someone had just come home in the early morning from being out partying all night, and the sun wakes her shortly after she has gone to bed. The controversy underscores the power of the frameworks created by the media and the risks of appropriating those strategies for purposes of critique.

…As with the Untitled Film Stills and Rear Screen Projections, in the Centrefolds Sherman mimics and repeats mass media modes, thereby diffusing their potency.

Pink Robes 1982

Truth wants to give herself naked… That Hopeless striptease is the very striptease of reality, which disrobes in the literal sense, offering up to the eye of gullible voyeurs the appearance of nudity. But the fact is that this nudity wraps it in a second skin, which no longer has even the erotic charm of a dress.
Jean Baudrillard

In the following series, Sherman responded to her critics by switching to a vertical format in an attempt to do away with the vulnerability if the character implied through the use if the horizontal format. Yet she continues to imitate the stance of porno models, posing only in a pink chenille bathrobe.

…Peter Schjeldahl has interpreted the series as being the most revealing of “the real Cindy” (his quotation marks) betraying a desire to find her true identity within the myriad guises she has assumed.

…She has said “I divide myself into many different parts, my self in the country…is one part…My professional self is another, and my work self in the studio is another.”

…Concurrent with the Pink Robes is a group of works that depict an array of characters that look contemporary and are striking because if their normal appearance.

…For Sherman, these images functioned as “colour tests” that allowed her to experiment with coloured lights and gels. She gradually eliminated the amount of light throughout the series so that the photographs gradually appear darker.

Fashion 1983, 84, 93, 94

The major accomplishment of the mass-fashion industry was its ability to plumb the walls of popular desire.
Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen

Sherman has produced four groups of works that quote from fashion photography. The first was commissioned by shop owner Diane Benson in 1983 for a spread in Interview magazine.
The second commission came from Dorothée Bis, a French fashion company, which asked Sherman to produce photographs featuring its designs for French Vogue.

…In 1993, Sherman created works for an issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Less dark than the works for Vogue, these images are fantastical and make full use of the clothes as costumes to completely transform Sherman and turn backgrounds into theatrical settings. She produced the most recent fashion shots for the Japanese fashion house Comme Des Garçons in 1994.

Fairy Tales 1985

In horror stories or in fairy tales, the fascination with the morbid is also, at least for me, a way to prepae for the unthinkable…That’s why it’s very important for me to show the artificiality of it all, because the real horrors if the world are unmatchable, and they’re too profound. It’s much easier to absorb – to be entertained by it, but also to let it affect you psychologically – it it’s done in a fake, humorous, artificial way.
Cindy Sherman

…Sherman took the disturbing aspects of the Fashion works to a higher level in Fairy Tales. It is at this point in her career that her images become truly strange and surreal, as if liberated from the confines of reality she can now transform into any manner of being.

…The exceptions are the works illustrating one of Grimm’s fairy tales, which she produced for a children’s book entitled Fitchers Bird (1992). Her croppings are especially severe in these photographs, with much of the images cut out, presumably so that children cannot see the very frightening whole picture.

Disasters 1986-89

Since the Middle Ages, Western culture has represented the body, with increasing frequency, as an architectural metaphor of the society at large.
Joanne Finklestein

…In it emphatic yet beautiful display of the disgusting, Sherman’s Disasters series is indistinguishable from the Fairy Tales. She employs the same theatrical devices and hallucinatory imagery to construct equally outlandish scenes. In these works, the body is besieged.
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…An analogy can be drawn between these pictures of excess and revolt and our contemporary condition of violence and apparent chaos. While the body politic is under attack, we are obsessed with our individual physique and its fitness. In her analysis of the body as a metaphor for society, Finklestein asserts that in Western culture, bodily control is a sign of status.

History Portraits 1989-90

There is something liberating in the way in which Sherman takes aim at the sheer weirdness of Old Master art.
Amelia Arenas

In her next series, Sherman created thirty-five works that are her own unique renditions of historical portraits. She returns as a sitter in this series, using props and wearing lush costumes, wigs, fake appendages to assume the character of the various nobles, mythological heroes and madonnas that have been depicted by court painters.

…The idea for these works originated in a commission Sherman received in 1988 from Artes Magnus to create works in porcelain for the French film Limoges. Sherman used the original eighteenth-century models for Madame de Pompadour’s designs to produce new works, such as soup tureen, with decals on them that contained images of Sherman dressed in period costume. Sherman enlarged one of the images to include them in a group exhibition at Metro Pictures in 1988. A year later she produced a series of works with characters from the French Revolution for an exhibition in Paris at Chantal Crousel Gallery during the French bicentennial. After a two-month stay in Rome during 1989, Sherman returned to her New York studio and produced another group of historical prtraits, including Untitled #224 (plate 121).

…Just as the Untitled Film Stills are not pictures of any specific movies, the History Portraits (for the most part) do not reproduce any particular paintings. Like the untitled Film Stills, they depict types from the genre. Sachiko Osaki has identified possible sources for some works in the series, but Sherman has singled out only three images that relate directly to actual paintings. They are Untitled #224 (plate 121), which is modelled after Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus (1593 – 94), Untitled #216 (not in the exhibition) after Jean Fouget’s Madonna of Melun (ca. 1450), and Untitled #205 (not in the exhibition), based upon Raphal’s La Fornarina (ca 1518-19).

…Sherman masquerades as a man in works such as Untitled #213 (plate118) and Untitled #227 (plate123), and in this gender reversal she relates to Marcel Duchamp and the famous image of himself n drag as his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy. Sherman creates the most memorable and humorous images, however, in her portrayals of women.

…The sheer ridiculousness of these works suggests that Sherman is mocking the Western canon and its seemingly endless depictions of extravagantly dressed royalty, clergy, mistresses, and religious figures. Although this series may at first seem like an anomaly in a career that has simulated the methods of the mass media, the History Portraits likewise deal with a representational system that refines a particular ideology, albeit a more dated one.

Sex Pictures 1992

But what can porn do in a world pornographed in advance?...Except bring an added ironic value to appearances? Except trip a last paradoxical wink – of sex laughing at itself in its most exact and hence most monstrous form, laughing at its own disappearance beneath it most artificial form?
Jean Baudrillard

…From the civilized milieu of the History Portraits, Sherman next turned to the raunch of the pornographic. Using anatomically detailed mannequins and body part from medical catalogues, she constructed hybrid dolls. Rather that having sex, these figures proudly show their sex.

…Sherman created these works in response to several issues. She had been considering how to incorporate total nudity into her work for a long time. She also wanted to respond to the series of photographic works by Jeff Koons that depict the artist and his then wife, Cicciolina, in sexual poses. The controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the debates over what constitutes obscenity in art, which were occurring at the time, were a further inducement to produce the series. Sherman’s rebuttal to the threat of censorship are images that, though contrived, are genuinely pornographic; they objectify sex. The complexity of the issue of pornography is such that, as Ellen Willis point out, it units feminists and extreme conservatives in an unlikely alliance against the exploitation of women and immoral behaviour.

…The Sex pictures have been compared with the Poupée series of photographs by Hans Bellmer.

…As strange depictions of the fragmented body they also relate to the work of the French artist Pierre Molinier.

…The correlations between Sherman and Molinier extend to their working method. Both artists photograph themselves in the privacy of their own studios, transformed by clothing into other personas, which then become public. The impetus for their role-playing, however, is vastly different. Sherman is motivated by the external influence of the media, and Moliner was moved by his own desire.

Horror and Surrealist Pictures 1994-96

The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dappled in blood – and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
Edgar Allan Poe

In the subsequent group of works, Sherman returned to images of horror, which she had begun with the Fairy Tales series.

….She eventually changes her focus from the full body to the face, retaining only the masks from the barrage of artificial body parts she had used in the Sex pictures. Shot up close, these images present an array of manipulated masks.

…For the first time, in works such as Untitled #303 (plate139) and Untitled #311 (plate 142), she employs photographic techniques such as double exposure that were favoured by the surrealists. Rather than customarily manipulating the objects she photographs, in these works he uses the technology of the camera to manipulate the image.

…Sherman has stated that these recent works are related to the horror film she directed, Office Killer, which was scheduled for release in late 1997.

…From the Untitled Film Stills to an actual film and works that inspired it, Sherman’s career has come full circle. The myriad masks and guises she dons allow her to undergo transformations that explore the workings of representation. That Sherman uses herself or surrogates in all of her work is significant, as we track her pursuit for a unified self-image, only to discover the futility of such a search. From her earliest pictures, Sherman has played to our desire. The allure of the Untitled Film Stills continues to her more recent images of disgust and horror, which she presents in full-colour, attracting and repulsing our gaze.


Cindy Sherman
Photographic Work 1975-1995
Edit by Zdenek Felix and Martin Schwander
With essay by Elisabeth Bronfen

During the 1980s, Cindy Sherman became perhaps the most important personality in recent art…Personally combining the roles of director, leading actress and photographer of her work, she uses her body to convey images, staging her body and photographing herself in every conceivable role and disguise. Initially, she imitated 1950s film stills and exposed our fantasies through her stereotypes. Soon she turned to imitating models posing in front of the artist’s easel – figures of rulers, saints and heroines – exposing the artificiality of art in an ironic exchange with the Old Masters. Often, her photos present images of women who have dedicated themselves to the clichés of the fashion world and advertising. She arrange traumatic images of catastrophe, in which her own body appears as a burier fragment, or signals the final end of Romanticism in a horrific vision of sexuality being practiced by medical prostheses and anatomical space parts. Cindy Sherman takes literally all of our fantasies and nightmares, our secret desires and hidden fears, and transform them into suggestive images.

…It is a name associated with an unconventional and at the same time spectacular artistic procedure, with a form of role reversal that makes it possible – primarily from a feminine perspective – to convey a disturbing psychological image of humanity.

…The American artist uses photography exclusively, and has consistently probed and investigates its various means of depicting realities and illusions through images. But by using the illusionism of this medium, she also sheds light on the stereotypes, particularly of women, found in the mass media today, and simultaneously draws attention to the function and deeper significance of her work derives from the fact that she has put her finger on the pulse of today’s collective and individual ideas, wishes, desires and fears. She unveils wish projections and phantasms, but also models, whose subliminal power influences the behavior of individuals or particular social groups. And this is precisely where her criticism begins. She refuses to recognize clichés, or even to confirm them. Her work individualizes existential experience and – in a both sensitive and radical manner – brings a feminist point of view to bear on it.

The latent Horror of Cindy Sherman's Images
Perhaps the most notable aspect of Cindy Sherman's photographs is the peculiar power of attraction they exert on the observer. When you look at the American artist's untitled images, you experience - as when watching Hitchcock films - an intense mixture of feelings and sensations oscillating between fascination and professional execution of the photos can hardly avoid a certain sense of confusion.
...The fact that Cindy Sherman has so far succeeded in avoiding the danger of clearly defined themes shows the ability of her work to call up a variety of cultural context, and to transcend the causality of time and space.
...Jan Avgikos recently stated, with some justification, that "From series to series, from year to year, Sherman's work has met with astonishingly varied reactions"...Avgikos even suggests that the function of Sherman's work is to “reflect the observer's reaction - together with the relativizing contexts in which her art stands."
...Cindy Sherman's work is not a commentary on the world. Rather, it evokes a wide range of potential comments and offers a variety of reflections, whose disturbing presence finds expression in these photographic visions.
The outer inner world by Martin Schwander
...The photographs appear to be from real life - and at the same time, they recall films of the 1950s and early 1960s. This confusing interference between various levels of time and reality is central to understanding why Sherman's photographs lack "essential" core for the observer.
...Cindy Sherman has never thought it necessary to provide any theoretical foundation for the sophisticated game she plays with remembered and invented elements, with things dreamt and experienced, with high culture and popular culture, and with appearance and reality.
...The artist "silence" is submerged in a discourse that seems to be in danger of cancelling itself out, in a kind of racing standstill. Sherman's sober - and at the same time sobering - comment on this state of affair was, "I like to read these kind of analysis because they have nothing at all to do with anything that made me produce the works concerned. Still, the fact that they exist is very interesting. They are kind of side effect."
The question of Sherman’s distaste for theory leads to the center of her artistic self-image: the observer should not need to depend either on a theoretical "framework" or on explanations to understand artistic products. Sherman’s declared aim is to create a post - Warhol art, a form of art to which as man people as possible can have access: "When I was at school, I got more and more annoyed by this attitude that art has to be terribly religious or sacred, and I wanted to create something that people could relate to without having to read a book about it beforehand. Something that would appeal to anybody at all; even if he didn't understand it completely, he would still be able to get something out of it. That was how I came up with culture, I wanted to imitate it and make fun of it, and that's what I actually did."
...From 1975 to 1995, Cindy Sherman produced more than ten cycles of works: the "Untitled Film Stills" (1977-80) and the "Sex Pictures" (1992) mark the two extremes of a creative development that has undergone dramatic changes since the mid-1980s. The "sex Pictures" are meant to confront the observer in a "shocking" fashion with images of widely varying forms of sexuality. The grotesqueness and artificiality of this dramatic production, however, are also capable of triggering laughter.
Our awareness of these more recent works alters our perception of the earlier ones - particularly of the "Untitled Film Stills”. Underneath the neat surface, signs of fear and alarm, of loneliness and alienation, become noticeable in Sherman's early heroines. These sings are camouflaged by the conditioned body language of socially prescribed roles, such as housewife, student, lover or film star. Their often charming appearance contributes to the distraction of the (male) observer. This illusion, nourished by social and cultural conventions, gradually vanishes in the images Sherman has created since the beginning of the 1980s. Thus Sheman's entire oeuvre can be seen as an a exploration of the myths of femininity from various perspectives - a process of exploration that begins with the body's outward, physical manifestations and moves on to penetrate into this interior. Ultimately, the journey leads to a world of female phantasmagoria, in which the female subject - robbed of her identity - dissolves and simultaneously eludes the attack of the (male) gaze.
It is to Cindy Sherman's credit that she has developed a pictorial language that can manage without expressionist pathos or existentialist self - pity. Her images do not conjure up a new "essentialism" that raises any claim to truth. The artificiality and over staged quality of many of her more recent pictures prevents the observer from seeing an imitative representation, and thus attributing any “truth content”, to her artefacts.

The other self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman’s Hysterical Performance

“I don’t do self-portraits”, Cindy Sherman explained to Andreas Kallfelz in an interview for the journal Wolkenkratzer, “I always try to get as far away from myself as possible in the photographs. It could be, though, that it’s precisely by doing so that I create a self-portrait, doing these totally crazy things with these characters” (1984)

…For Sherman has also explained that she uses her photographs to reveal the latent psychological material that one does not normally see on the surface, in subject’s face or gestures, namely the material that contains the subject’s imagination.

…Cindy Sherman describes how she first felt alienated within her won family, how she later felt totally threatened existentially by the urban violence of New York City, and how, to reduce this threat, she learned to transform herself into other people, initially in her room, then later in her studio.
She started to study her own face continually from different angles until it began to look like a stranger’s face. She began to disguise herself by dressing up in different costumes, until she could no longer recognize the figure in the mirror.
As such, these portraits always also articulate her sense of dissatisfaction with the expectations prevailing culture has of femininity.
Imbued with exactly the same gesture, her photographs are brilliant and at the same time painful parodies of the dictate impose by media images on every American girl…
She stages herself in scenarios by virtue of distorting her appearance, putting on costumes, perfuming a masquerade. But in so doing she also points to the fact that, as a woman who grew up in a specific cultural context, she has also been performatively constructed by the discourse specific to her environment.

…she insists that the act of self-representation, as a means of expression, simultaneously always also performs the act it designates. Her explanation, “I don’t do self-portraits”, can thus also be understood as referring to the notion that the portraits she makes of herself function as an aesthetic “performance” of the following utterance. The subject of the portrait has been created performatively, in the fact it can only be articulated as a performance.

…“I see myself as a composite of all the things I’ve done”, she explains (quoted in Kellein, 1991)
Sherman’s self-presentations can thus be seen, on the one hand, as the serial fashionings of a plethora of potential identities. On the other hand, they raise the question whether this highly intricate role playing stages the represented subject as a false self, a mimicry; whether the illusion of authenticity is preserved even though such a gesture is intended to deceive; or whether beneath the surface, beneath the media composite, an autonomous self nevertheless does exist.
“People are going to look under the make-up and wigs for that common denominator, the recognizable. I’m trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me” (cited in Schulz-Hoffmann 1991)

…By calling upon us to exercise our own memory and imagination, but doing so precisely by staging stereotypic figures – from the image repertoire of femininity, of fairy tales, or of horror films – Sherman succinctly raises the question whether the fantasies thus aroused are really authentic, or perhaps nothing more that clichés.
Craig Owens argues, “Sherman’s photographs themselves function as mirror-masks that reflect back at he viewer his own desire (and the spectator posited by his work is invariably male) – specifically, the masculine desire to fix the woman in a stable and stabilizing identity...but while Sherman may pose as a pin up, she still cannot be pinned down” (1992)
“and that’s the other aspect. It could be that I really do let out some crazy person inside me in this way.” Sherman said.

…The performance of her masked, disfigured or displaced body is meant to serve as an apotropaic gesture against, and as a reference to the body’s vulnerability, to the fallibility of identity, and to anxieties about destruction and death, regardless of the whether these fears have their origin in an actual experience of the threatening events, or merely in childhood nightmares.

…on the other hand, to demythologize traditional stereotypes, especially regarding femininity, and to deconstruct the primary of the idealized body, she seeks, on the other hand, to evoke those images of horror that are that are usually repressed – anxieties about fragmentation, dissolution, or the substitution of the human body with artificial body parts and prostheses.
Her photographic performance exposes what lies beneath the cosmetic surface (“Disaster Pictures, “Fairy Tales”), or reduces everything to a simulacrum (“Film Stills”, “Centerfolds”, “Fashion”), to anatomical body parts and prostheses (“Specimens”, “Sex Pictures”).
In lieu of self-portraits Sherman offers the knotting together of a given cultural image repertoire, with memory traces, creations of fantasy and figures of the traumatic.
In contrast to her earlier work, Cindy Sherman no longer appears as the model in her photographic transformations of the Grimm fairy tale “Fitcher’s Bird” her body is replaced by dolls and artificial body parts.
Here, too, she draws on a familiar archive of culture, the image repertoire of fairy tales, and picks out from it the story of a clever and a sly girl who, after initial passivity, begins to revolt against the dictate of female obedience.

…hysteria performatively stages precisely the same problematic that characterize Cindy Sherman’s displaced self-representations. The hysteric uses her body to repeat by representation an earlier trauma, and, in the course of this mimetic self-representation, she oscillates between memory and figuration, between masculine and feminine self-definition, between resuscitating what is dead, inanimate, artificial and killing off what is animated and material.

…To read Cindy Sherman’s photographic work as a post-modern performance of hysteria involves, on the one hand an interpretation of the content of her images, given that the themes of her portraits of women are often the somatization of a wandering desire, a bodily imitation of culture and an expression of discontent with it, a malady caused by fantasy, representation and reminiscences. Repeatedly her portraits represent the vagabonding, the boredom, the day dreaming of the female subject. On the other hand, the undecideable question posed by art criticism – “Are Sherman’s portraits of woman only meant as surface phenomenon, a free play of signifiers without an specific non-semiotic point of reference, or can a feminine essence, an authentic woman be discerned beneath the surface of the image?”

…In her first photographs, the “Untitled Film Stills”, she presents reconstructions of film scenes of the 19505 and 1960s – film noir, melo, nouvelle vague – in which she consciously poses as the stereotypical heroine of post-war Hollywood films, indeed turns her body literally into a representation , into the prototypical signifier Woman. If we, furthermore, take into account that she was born in 1954, then we realize that the media images she cites include these representations of femininity her mother tried to identify with as she was conceiving and giving birth to her daughter.

…With every image she suggests that something is about to happen, but leaves open which event it is that is about to occur. These women, self-preoccupied, pausing in mid-sentence, hesitating in mid-action, recall the hysteric whose unsatisfied desire produces a permanent state of feverish expectations and fragile anxieties.

…By virtue of this hysterical gesture, Sherman self-consciously demonstrates to what extent the reality of femininity is produced by the representational medium, how the represented subject exists as a knotting of signifiers of femininity, as the integration of arbitrarily assembled details from our cultural image repertoire without any material non-semiotic referent.

…“The level of energy brought to the otherwise faked emotions, as well as the staging of my photographs, leaves me drained”, she explains “the only way I can keep objective towards the characters I’m portraying is to physically distance myself from the activity…I don’t see that I’m ever completely myself except when I’m alone. I see my life as a training ground because I’m acting all the time; acting certain ways to certain people, to get things done, what I want, to have people act towards me the way I want them to” (1982, cited in Stockebrand 1985).

…Wile Laura Mulvey argues that in the “Film Stills” “each of the women is Sherman herself, simultaneously artist and model, transformed chameleon-like into a glossary of pose, gesture, and facial expressions”, Judith Williamson opposes such an essentialist interpretation. She suggests instead that because Sherman offers a lexicon of represented feminine identities, each image calls upon the viewer to construct the inextricability of femininity and the image, the enmeshment of femininity as a phantasy projection onto a single image and the depiction of a woman concretely given figure to by any single image.

…As Williamson puts it, Sherman’s photographs are to be understood as a “surface which suggests nothing but itself, and yet in so far as it suggests there is something behind it, prevents us from considering it as a surface”(1983, 102).

…Arthur Danto, who reads the “film Stills” as a representation of the essential Woman, eternally the same in the midst of all her guises: “The Girl is an allegory for something deeper and darker; in the mythic unconscious of everyone, regardless of sex. For The Girl is the contemporary realization of the Fair Princess in the Far Tower; the red clad child in the wolf haunted woods, the witch sought Innocent lost in the trackless forest, Dorothy and Snow-White and The Littlest Revel in a universe of scary things. Each of the stills is about the Girl in Trouble, but in the aggregate they touch the myth we each carry out of childhood, of danger, love, and security that defines the human condition where the wild things are” (1990, 14).

…Norman Bryson has poignantly described the transition with Cindy Sherman’s work as that from the conventional post-modern notion that “all is representational” to a reformulation that privileges “the body as horror”; from a notion that the simulacrum is the only reality we have to the breakdown of the simulacrum into a body of disaster.

…In her early series, the heroine composed of citations from invented film stills, advertising and pornographic images, functions as a serial display of stereotypes of femininity perpetrated by the image repertoire of Western culture.

…In her later work Sherman turns surface beauty inside out to reveal human mutability, the decomposed, vulnerable body and the monstrosity that is inherent to any aesthetically coherent image, its ground and vanishing point, meant to remain occluded by the perfection of sublimation. Now, her performance aims precisely at making manifest what is excluded from and foreclosed by the representation, the alterity that crosses cultural constructions of femininity with the real.

…In the television interview with Mark Stones, Cindy Sherman describes how she at first dismissed the suggestion, made to her by a doctoral student, that her entire work was one long confrontation with death, but upon reflection recognized that her interest in horror films, in artificial body parts, as well as in fairy tales, could indeed be understood in this way, since these representations allow her to prepare herself for the potential incursion of violence and death.

…“I don’t know why, I think of death perhaps every day, but maybe it’s living in Manhattan, and reading the paper, and thinking how it can happen at any moment…there are so many variables” she explains. “I think what’s fascinating is that you are never prepared for it. And I’m not exactly afraid to die, once you’re dead, what is there to be afraid of? It’s just the unknown, and I think that is what’s triggered in the films that I like, and somehow, I guess, I try to come to terms with it in my work, somehow”. All of Sherman’s work, one could say, revolves around staging this hesitation, this “somehow”. It performatively transforms her sense of being haunted by nightmares, memory traces and inherited representation into renditions of a coherent photographic subject. Yet at every turn she makes sure that one never loses sight of the underlying trauma.


Cindy Sherman 1975-1993
text by Rosalind Krauss, with an essay by Norman Bryson
Rizzoli publications

In 1981, when Sherman had her first one person exhibition, there was a small group of critics who were prepared to receive work that focused on the media production of reality and the disappearance of the artist’s “persona” behind the mask of the stereotype. For this reason, these critics welcomed the vehicle Sherman was using because photography was it self the very medium of the image world’s production of the stereotype, and so photography, shorn of its associations to the “fine print” and dragging its relations to mass-culture behind it, breached the walls of the art world in a revolution that belonged to Sherman’s artistic generation. Barthes’s own vaunted notion of “the death of the author” had informed the universe of this critical dialogue, and Sherman, an artist who had come to N.Y. in 1977 directly from majoring in art at SUNY, Buffalo, could be seen to address the very issues Barthes raised in his “mythology”.

…Most of these later critics who have written about the Untitle Film Stills acknowledge that Sherman is manipulating stereotypes and that though these are being relayed through a generalized matrix of filmic portrayals and projections, there is of course no real film, no “original”, to which any one of them is actually referring…One form of this that can be found in the mountainous literature on Sherman’s work is to assume that each of these signifieds is being offered as an instance vehicle through which the fullness of humanity might be both projected and embraced in all its Sherma’s “fantasy of herself in a certain role, redolent usually of some movie memory”… She has mined this sediment for ideas, creating an array of new, transpersonal images that speak across the gap between self and culture.

…Another, more subtle form of myth-consumption, continuing to buy into the “characters”, is to see the multiplicity of these roles as various forms of what Arthur Danto seems to like to call “The Girl”…But this point is that “the Girl is an allegory for something deeper and darker, in the mythic unconscious of everyone, regardless of sex…Each of the stills is about The Girl in Trouble, but in the aggregate they touch the myth we each carry out of childhood, of danger, love and security that defines the human condition.

…that Laura Mulvey herself looks at the Film Stills, understanding them to be rehearsing this structure of the mal gaze, of the voyeurist constructing the woman in endless repetitions of her vulnerability and his control:
“The camera looks; it ‘captures’ the female character in a parody of different voyeurism. It intrudes into moments in which she is unguarded, sometimes undressed, absorbed into her own world in the privacy of her own environment. Or it witnesses a moment in which her guard drops as she is suddenly startled by a presence, unseen and off-screen, watching her.

…It was Mulvey’s own 1975 text, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, that most formatively set out that latter argument, in which woman is constructed as spectacle and symptom, becoming the passive object of a male gaze. Which is to say that in her essay a relation is set up among three terms: (1) the observation that there are gender distinctions between the roles that men and woman play in films – males being the agents of the narrative’s action; females being the passive objects or targets of that narrative, often interrupting the (masculine) action by the stasis of a moment of formal (feminine) opulence; (2) the conception that there is a gender assignment for the viewers of films, one that is unrelentingly male since the very situation of filmic viewing is structured as voyeuristic and fetishist, its source of pleasure being essentially an eroticization of fetishism – “ the determining male gaze projects the fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly”, she writes; (3) that these assignments of role are a function of the psychic underpinnings of all men and women, since they reflect the truths about the unconscious construction of gendered identity that psychoanalysis has brought to light: “Woman…stands patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command, by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”

Centerfolds

…The Untitle Film Stills had been a laboratory for exploring the range of signifiers that go together to produce the look of a given filmic genre or director and thereby to construct a ‘character’, sealing as the ‘real’ of denotation, which in Barthes’s terms, as we’ve seen, is only the last of the cinematic, connotational codes to be slipped into place. It was from this varied testing ground that Sherman then began to select out a single signifier, so as to concentrate on it.

…First, in 1980, this signifier was special effect of backscreen-projection with its resultant fissure in the image-field: the split it sets up in the experience of density and substance between the three-dimensional character and her flattened, factitious-looking scenic surrounds. Colour, which entered Sherman’s work at this moment, heightened this distinction.

…Then, in 1981, a different signifier, put in place in a series triggered by a commission for a centrefold for Artforum magazine, emerge as the central concern. That signifier is point of view. And in this group of images that viewpoint, consistent through most of the series and stridently adopted by the camera, is from above, looking down. It is though the extreme horizontality of the image’s format had suggested a corresponding horizontality in the image field. From being a projection of the viewer looking outward towards a visual field imagined as parallel to the vertical of the upright body of the beholder and his or her plane of vision, the view now slides floorward to declare the field of vision itself as horizontal.

…Yet we all have to do is to focus on the insistence verticalization inscribed by all the metaphors that circulate through Lacanian universe of the subject – the vertical of the mirror, the vertical of the veil, the vertical of the phallus as instance of wholeness, the vertical of the field of the fetish, the vertical of the plane of beauty – to sense why the horizontal is forced to recede from view when one’s eyes are fixed on this theory.

…It was not just modernist painting, which formed part of Sherman’s heritage as an artist that insisted on this verticality – and its effect of sublimation; it was also the media universe of movies and television and advertising that declared it. And these two fields, so seemingly inimical to one another, had a bizarrely complementary relation to this effect of sublimation if the media’s fetish occupied the axis of the vertical, that very axis had itself become the fetish of high art.

…During the 1960s and 1970s, however, a series of blows had been struck against this fetish.

…This was true of Andy Warhol’s Oxidation paintings, through which Warhol read Pollock’s dripped pictures as the work of a urinary trace (as through made by a man standing over a supine field and peeing), thus insisting on the way Pollock’s canvases are permanently marked by horizontality of their marking. It was also true for Robert Morris’s felts and scatter pieces, through which Morris reinterpreted Pollok’s enterprise as “anti-form”, by which he meant its condition of having yielded to gravity in assuming the axis of the horizontal. It can also be said that it was true of Ed Ruscha’s Liquid Word pictures, with their reading of the significance of the drip technique as opening onto the dimensions of entropy and “base materialism”.

…If this sequence is invoked here it is to give one a sense of the connotations of the /horizontal/ within the field of the avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s as certain artists opposed the /vertical/, within which is inscribed all forms of sublimation, whether that be of the beautiful or of the fetish. It is to see the work already in place on the pictorial signifier once it operates in terms failure to resist the pull of gravity, of the pivoting out of the axis of form.

…In the “horizontals” Sherman’s work is joined to this tradition. That de-sublimation is part of what she is encoding by means of the /horizontal/ will become unmistakably clear by the end of the 1980s with what are sometimes politely referred to as the “bulimia” pictures, images in which the horizontal plane occupied by the point of view is forcibly associated with vomit, mold, and all forms of excremental –“base materialism”. Indeed. But in this works of 1981 it is already clear that the view downward is desublimatory.

Gleams and reflections

…In the view of its theorists, the Male Gaze can do its work of continually putting the fetish/form in place even in the absence of any identifiable image. Victor Burgin, for example, argues that the effect of the gestalt’s delineation and boundary can be generated by the very surface of media artifacts, such as the glossiness of the photographic print, with its high resolution and its glazed finish.

…And Mulvey follows Burgin in this argument. For even while she reads the “horizontals” in terms of “the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ of femininity”, she also admits that there is a contradiction between the limpness she sees in Sherman’s poses – “polar opposites of a popular idea of fetishized femininity (high-heeled and corseted erect, flamboyant and exhibitionist) – as well as the limpness of the image – “Sherman’s use of colour and of light and shade merges the female figure and her surroundings into a continuum, without hard edges” – and the sharp definition characteristic of the fetish. But fetishism, she argues, “returns in the formal qualities of the photography. The sense of surface now resides, not in the female figure’s attempt to save her face in a masquerade of femininity, but in model’s subordination to, and imbrication with, the texture of the photographic medium itself.”

…This texture, “in keeping”, as Mulvey writes, “with the codes and conventions of commercial photography”, is glossiness, the product of a kind of reflective veneer. It is this shiny shiny surface that Burgin had related to the fetishized glanz, or gleam, that Freud had described in his essay outlining the conscious mechanics of the construction of the fetish.
Now while it is true that shininess functions as a certain kind of support for media images – and not just those of photography but even more insistently of backlit advertising panels and film and television screens – it is also true that Sherman performs specific work on this phenomenon. Just as she had taken a horizontal format – borrowed both from centrefold photographs and from cinemascope screens – and worked on it to produce a signifier that (in opposition to the meaning of the /vertical/) would cut out a specific signified – the /horizontal-as-lowness-as-baseness/ - so, here as well, the gleam is submitted to her sustained investigation.

…Lacan says “Mimicry reveals something insofar as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind,” which is to say, distinct from a subjective ground of the subject. Rather, we pass into the “picture” as mere “stain”, which is to say as physical matter, as body. And here Lacan also refers to Merleau-Ponty’s position in The Phenomenology of Perception that our relation to space, insofar as it makes us the target of a gaze constituted by the free-floating luminosity that surrounds us- a light that caches us in the beam from behind our backs as well as from in front of our faces – founds our perception not in the transparency of a conceptual grasp of space (as in the “geometral”) but in the thickness and density of the body that simply intercepts the light.

…In this sense that to be “in the picture” is not to fell interpolated by society’s meaning – “It’s me!” – is not to fell, that is, whole; it is to feel dispersed, subject to a picture organized not by form but by formlessness.

…Nowhere is the notion of having become “the picture” more searingly evoked that in Sherman’s Untitled, ♯167, where the camouflage-effect is in full flower.

History Portraits

In 1989 and 1990 Sherman turned her own attention to Art, which is to say, firmly and steadily towards the most overt and pronounced version of the sense of sublimation. (The very term high that explicity or implicity modifies art, announces this sublimatory effect as having had its origin in a gesture of raising one’s eye to the plane of the vertical and of the thereby acceding to the field of the gestalt.) Sherman’s History Portraits revel in forming again and again the signifiers of the form that high art celebrates, signifiers of verticality meshing with signifiers of the wholeness of the gestalt.

…Further, another rather disturbing signifier enters this theatre of the /vertical/ to point to still one more meaning of high in the conception of high art. This signifier, a function of the way these History Portrait sitters are constructed by Sherman thanks to fake body parts that are strapped onto her torso or applied to her head, marks the surface of the image as a mask or veil, one that can supposedly be removed, pushed aside, seen behind. In their very detachability, these elements point thus to the hermeneutic dimension of the work of art: the idea that it possesses an inner truth or meaning to which the interpreter might penetrate. In being a hermeneutic object the work of art thus occupies the “high” position, not as vertical to horizontal but as ideal to material, or as mind to body.

…And yet it is also because of the obviousness of the condition of these body parts as prostheses that they work against the conception of the veil with its hidden Truth at the very same time that they borrow into the /vertical/ to oppose and topple it. Conniving against the sublimatory energy of Art, the body parts constitute signifiers that mark a yield to gravity, both because of the weight of the physical elements they model and the sense they promote of these pendulous forms already sliding down the surface of the body. In this capacity they elaborate the field of a desublimatory, horizontal axis that erodes the façade of the vertical, bearing witness to the fact that behind that façade there lies not the transparency of Truth, of meaning, but the opacity of the body’s matter, which is to say, the formless.

…It is as though Sherman’s own earlier work with the /horizontal/ has now led her back to the vertical, sublimated images, but only to disbelieve it. Greeting the vertical axis with total scepticism, the History Portraits work to dis-corroborate it, to deflate it, to stand in the way of its interpellant effect.

Disgust

However, even this bedrock – the vomit and the blood for instance – returns to cultural significance: that is, to the difficulty of the body, and above all the female body, while it is subjected to the icons and narratives of fetishism.
Laura Mulvey

…Nothing, it would seem, could be less alike than Sherman’s impersonation of various Raphaels and Davids and Ingres and the series she worked on over roughly the same time period (1987 – 1991), to which various descriptive rubrics have been given, among them “bulimia” and vomit”, although since to these materials one would have to add mold, rot, blood, and other unnameable substances, perhaps one should stick to “disgust”. And yet the notion of the veil can operate for both series: either in the manner of the hermeneutics of the work of art, as described above; or, for the bulimia pictures, in the manner that Mulvey has called the “phantasmagoria of the female body.”

…If the woman-as-fetish/image is the cosmetic facade erected against this wound, the imagined penetration of the façade produces a revulsion against the “bodily fluids and wastes that become condensed with the wounded body in the iconography of misogyny”. And the woman themselves, Mulvey points out, participate in this notion of exterior/interior, of veiled and unveiled. Speaking of how women identify with misogynistic revulsion, not only in adopting the cosmetics of the masquerade but in pathologically attempting to expunge the physical marks of the feminine, she says: “The images of decaying food and vomit raise the spectre of the anorexic girl, who tragically acts out the fashion fetish of the female as an eviscerated, cosmetic and artificial construction designed to ward off the ‘otherness’ hidden in the ‘interior’.

…Now the contrast between interior and exterior, which Mulvey had consumed as the mythic content of Sherman’s “horizontals”, continues to be the thematics she reads into Sherman’s work throughout its progression. Moving from the “horizontals” to the parodistically violent fashion images Sherman made in 1983, Mulvey sees these as a protest against the smooth, glossy body of the fashion model, a protest registered by surface that seems to drop away “to reveal a monstrous otherness behind the cosmetic façade”. Or, in the subsequent series inspired by fairy tales she sees the revelation of the very stuff of the unconscious that lines the interior: “While the earlier interiority suggested soft, erotic, reverie, these are materializations of anxiety and dread”. Finally in the body’s disappearance into the spread of waste and detritus from the late 1980s, “the topography of the exterior/interior is exhausted,” since “these traces represent the end of the road, the secret stuff of bodily fluids that the cosmetic is designed to conceal.” With the removal of this final veil and the confrontation of the wound – “the disgust of sexual detritus, decaying food, vomit, slime, menstrual blood, hair” – the fetish fails and with it the very possibility of meaning: “Cindy Sherman traces the abyss or morass that overwhelms the defetishized body, deprived of the fetish’s semiotic, reduced to being ‘unspeakable’ and devoid of significance.

…Mulvey writes: “The argument that abjection is central to the recurring image of the “monstrous feminine” in horror movies is also applicable to the monstrous in Sherman. Although her figures materialize the stuff of irrational terror, they also have pathos and could easily be understood in terms of “the monster as victim.”…The 1987 series suggest that, although both sexes are subject to abjection, it is women who can explore and analyze the phenomenon with greater equanimity, as it is the female body that has come, not exclusive but predominantly, to represent the shudder aroused by liquidity and decay.

Sex Pictures

“When I did those Horizontal pictures of me lying down, I got a lot of criticism for being ‘Anti-Feminist’ and ‘Turning the clock back’ by showing these ‘victims’ and these new pictures (the 1985 fairy-tale characters) show me just how wrong I think those people really were.”
Cindy Sherman

…There are many reasons why, in the series she made in 1993, Sherman turned away from her own body as support for the image and began to use dolls instead, or more specifically, plastic mannequins acquired from a medical-supplies house. She has spoken in interviews of trying to imagine breaking away from her own constant presence in front of the camera and possibly using models, although she would always end up by saying why it didn’t seem feasible. Perhaps she finally found a way to make it feasible; perhaps the decision to stage the display of the genitals and the performance of “sexual acts” was in fact a way to forcing her own body out of the image, giving her an excuse to engage a substitute.

…But there are many perhapses. Another has to do with how artists locate themselves in a universe of discourse. Some of the criticism of Sherman that has come from feminists who, unlike Mulvey or Solomon-Godeau, see her not as deconstructing the eroticized fetish but as merely reinstalling it- “Her image are successful partly because they do not threaten phallocracy, they reiterate and confirm it”- has focused on Sherman’s silence. By calling every one of her works “untitled”, they argue, Sherman has taken refuge in a solid muteness, refusing to speak out on the subject of her art’s relation to the issues of domination and submission that are central to feminism. Avoiding interviews as well, it is maintained, Sherman further refuses to take responsibility for the interpretation of her work.

…It is far more usual for artists to construct the interpretive frames within which they are producing and understanding their work by situating themselves in relation to what the critic Mikhail Bakhtin called a discursive horizon. Which is to say that the work an artist makes inevitably enters a field that is structured by other works and their interpretation: the artist can reinforce the dominant interpretation – as when, say, Morris Louis acknowledged the general understanding of Pollock’s drip paintings as “optical mirages” by paintings his own series of “Veils”; or the artist can resist, and by implication, critique that interpretation – which was the case of Warhol and Morris when they transgressed the optical, modernist reading and produced their own in the form of the horizontalized, urinary trace on the one hand and “anti-from” on the other.

…Now the same horizon that is encircling Sherman’s work, demanding that either acknowledge or disconfirm its commitments to feminism, has also held up for criticism, much of it virulent, the work of another artist whose work major support is the photographic image. This artist is Hans Bellmer, who spent the years 1943 to 1949, that is, from the rise of the Nazi party through World War II, in Germany making work to which he gave the series title La Poupee. Using photographs of dolls that he assembled out of dismountable parts, placing the newly configured body frames in various situations, mainly domestic, in an early version of installation art, and then disassembling them to start a new, Bellmer has been accused of endlessly staging scenes of rape and of violence on the bodies of women.

…Laura Mulvey comments on this effect of Sherman’s retrojective meaning: “ The visitor (of a Sherman retrospective exhibition) who reaches the final images and then turns, reversing the order, finds that with the hindsight of what was to come, the early images are transformed.”

“he flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety.”
Lacan

…In the Sex pictures series, Sherman manages to play with exactly this gap between the body as the ecstasy-of-discourse and that body’s inadequate stand-ins on the representation stage. Hence their comedy of the macabre, their gallows humor: the medical-student mannequins and body parts and Halloween masks and prostheses cannot live up to, cannot match, the affect they induce. But in a sense the horror object need not even aim to be adequate, since it is only a decoy, not the real thing, only a herald of the real, a warning that horror is in the air.

…Perhaps this is what subtends the strain of Gothic Revival in the post modern, whose key practitioners are (for me at least) Sherman, David Lynch and Joel-Peter Witkin. The structure on which each thinks about the image and the body is less the sing than the symptom. The symptom is what stands permanently on the threshold of symbolisation but cannot cross over; it is a cyphered message, on the verge of passing into signification and culture yet permanently held back, as a bodily cryptogram. What makes it recognizable (insofar as this is possible) is its affect of dread, as the whole edifice of personal and cultural intelligibility is shaken by what has excluded – the object-cause of the subject’s fear and desire.

…In both Lynch’s and Sherman’s work that intensifies the symptom’s dread is that nothing from the available “reality” seems strong enough to ward off or drive back the fearful incursion from the real. In a classical order of representation (like that of the Musse Grevin), based on the two terms original – copy, the representation of horror – however ghastly – was never any more that a phantom or a temporary nightmare, since no matter how bad the dream one could always wake up and shift away from the unsettling zone of representation back to the safe haven of real world and a waking state. But in the postmodern visual regime, built around the idea of the breakdown of the classical opposition between real and copy and on the absorption of reality within representation, there is no space outside of the theatre of representation into which the subject might run.
…In the Untitle Film Stills all that remains of a reality largely swallowed up inside representation is narrative and visual shards from old cinema genres (film noir, Hitchcock, New Wave, Neo- Realism, etc). None of these flimsy screens has the force to keep at bay the advance of the real towards the subject (the same can be said of Lynch: the quotations from the older cinema – from musicals, road-movies, comedies, science fiction- serve only to weaken still further the narrative space, leaving it powerless before the real’s encroachment).


F R O M _D R E A M _G I R L _T O _N I G H T M A R E _A L L E Y
BY GLEN HELFAND
www.salon.com/media/1997

Cindy Sherman has the most recognizable face of any living American artist, if only because she uses it so relentlessly in her photographs. The retrospective of 20 years of her work that recently opened at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art is filled with the artist's famous images of herself, costumed and posed to evoke a panoply of media-induced female stereotypes, from her career-launching Untitled Film Stills series of the late 1970s to her later impersonations of subjects of Old Master paintings, as well as numerous new -- and surprisingly large -- color prints of nightmarish arrangements of faux blood and dismembered plastic body parts. Since Sherman is also now making her directing debut with an endearingly goofy, if not completely successful, feature film gore fest called "Office Killer" (starring Carol Kane and Molly Ringwald), it seemed piquantly appropriate that the press preview for her retrospective be held on Halloween.

From the beginning, Sherman has explored the intimate connection between costume and identity, using wigs, makeup and an uncanny ability to inhabit a character. In her film stills, she quickly and seamlessly channeled the spirit of a young blond starlet playing a kitchen-bound housewife in a mythical Godard-like foreign flick or a fair-haired innocent staring wistfully out at an open highway, her suitcase at her feet. Sherman could just as easily become a martini-swilling moll on the lam at a beach hideaway -- and dozens of other mythic feminine images. As a member of a generation raised on broadcast media, Sherman, 43, seems to have instinctively tapped into and reflected the archetypal undertones of the TV and movie legends she consumed. As her artmaking continued, Sherman found herself digging deeper into the myths behind these single-frame "stories." Her intuition, it seems, led directly to the darker subjects of her extreme later works, disturbing visions that draw on our universal fear of nightmares and physical decay.

Instinct, Sherman has suggested, is her artistic MO, and it also serves as the best way to approach her work. There is something irresistible about her images, and their magnetism holds firm whether you analyze them or not. Her recent photographs combine elements from fairy tales and horror films, surrealist non sequiturs, cheesy fake butts and breasts, haute couture, gruesome but gleeful gore and an incredibly lush sense of color. And frightening as they may be, like passing a bloody five-car pileup on the freeway, it's hard not to look.

Although Sherman's well-known enough to have been mocked in the November issue of Vanity Fair with a cartoon parody called "Untitled TV Stills" (depicting cleaning housewives and Coneheads), her actual presence has always seemed elusive. She's given only a handful of interviews since her first exhibitions, so it came as no surprise that Sherman didn't attend the press event for her own show. She was actually across town, on the idyllic patio at the Chateau Marmont, consenting to speak with reporters about "Office Killer," which opens this month.

"I've done four interviews for the show already, and somehow I feel like I'm able to be fussier about granting interviews about my art than about the film," the soft-spoken artist said over coffee at a shaded garden table. "The film has to be more commercial and talking to press is part of that, so reluctantly ..."

Though the extensive exhibition includes images of Sherman as, among other things, a noirish femme fatale, a pig-snouted freak and a clown-faced lunatic, she's hardly frightening in person. Wearing a well-worn gray T-shirt, green pajamalike pants, Fila sandals and expensive, nerd-style glasses, she seems like a nice, nondescript neighbor -- friendly and retiring at the same time. She appeared proud of the retrospective, resigned about the film's bad buzz ("I'm just waiting for all the bad stuff to come," she sighs), but generally unaffected, almost as if she's surprised that anyone would want to discuss her art with her.

"I'm not really an eloquent person," Sherman admits. "I don't think artists should be the ones that have to explain their work. That's why there are critics and journalists. I figure, let the work speak for itself and let other people figure it out."

The strategy of not saying too much lends Sherman's art a mystery and an extended life span. All of her work, from the 8-by-10 series of Untitled Film Stills to her recent, imposingly large pictures of masks, is free of appellations. Though the artist may have her own personal titles for her pictures, she's well aware that wall labels would quickly siphon off their ambiguity.

This open-endedness in playing with fictional and media-generated archetypes has also provided loads of fodder for Sherman scholars, of which there are many. The selected bibliography in the retrospective's catalog, which clocks in at an impressive nine pages, proves the point. Amelia Jones' dense art-historical essay in the same volume begins by looking at Sherman's position as a cultural lightning rod: "Art historians and critics have claimed her as an artist/genius who excavates the human consciousness or as a producer of work exemplifying a postmodern culture of simulation, a feminist negotiation of the male gaze, or the condition of the abject in artistic practice."

Sherman doesn't seem to mind the attention, but she's hardly a theory-head -- and shyly admits that she's only halfway through reading Jones' essay. "When I'm making the work, I'm never thinking of any of the things people find in it," she says. "Sometimes I wonder if maybe it's all a lot of crap. Maybe the work doesn't mean anything. When they're writing about it, they're just finding whatever to attach their theories to. I just happen to illustrate some theories."

The most unexpected and illuminating elements in the catalog are the reproductions of pages from Sherman's artmaking notebooks, complete with scribbled memos to herself. "What could I possibly do when I want to stop using myself and don't want 'other people' in the photos?" she ponders in one of them. The answer is the powerful sex pictures that followed in 1992, perversely pornographic tableaux of anatomically-correct medical mannequins. "The difficulty," she writes on the next page, "is making poignant yet explicit imagery." Somehow she managed to do just that.

And just what does Sherman think is so alluring about the grisly Gothic overtones that now dominate her photographs? "This is my theory," she says tentatively, "it prepares you psychically for the potential for violence in your own life. Or your own death. I think it's also a way to be removed enough from it to even laugh at it. It just further prepares you for something that you don't look forward to having to experience."
SALON Dec. 8, 1997


CINDY SHERMAN: MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
By John Judge, Chicago, Illinois, 1998

Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art promoted this show on the radio as "required viewing." Banners featuring images of Sherman's work hung from streetlights around downtown. And in the wall text that greeted viewers at the entrance to the exhibition, the museum called Sherman one of the most important artists of the late twentieth century. I must confess, however, that I do not understand what all the fuss is about.

The exhibition, like Sherman's career, begins well. Near the front hangs "Untitled A-E," a set of five black-and-white photographs executed by the artist while still a student in ë75. They are self-portraits in which small changes in facial expressions, clothing, or makeup allow Sherman to assume different personas like an adolescent boy, a clown, and a young girl. These casual photos call to mind a young person playing dress-up and making faces in the mirror. Their simple, straight-on, head-and-shoulders composition underscores the innocence of that activity.

Sherman retains the black-and-white format for the "Untitled Film Stills", a series of sixty-nine photos that resemble the publicity stills created to market movies. In these photographs, which are more complex than "Untitled A-E", Sherman wears a vast wardrobeóincluding office attire, robes, kerchiefs, wigs, underwear, aprons, and much moreóto create a large cast of female characters.

The viewers' challenge is to decipher who these women are and what is happening in each scene. There are no titles to guide us, so we have to identify these women based solely upon what they look like. Doing so is not difficult, because many of the characters resemble specific female types portrayed in the movies. For example, because the woman in untitled film still #7 wears only a slip and stockings, carries a martini glass, and appears to stumble through a doorway, we assume, like Amada Cruz in her catalog essay, that this is "a floozy." We suspect she is drunk and screaming at her lover from the door of their motel room. But, of course, we could be wrong, and there could be a much less sordid explanation.

Viewers' experience with the "Untitled Film Stills" simulates the everyday judgments that are made of women based solely on their looks. And because these photographs refer to the marketing of the film industry, they raise issues about mass media's sale of identities to women. If a woman buys the black negligee that some beautiful actress wears in a film or a model wears in a Victoria's Secret catalog, she too can be a sultry seductress (like the character in untitled film still #14). But if she wears frumpy clothes and no makeup, and if her hair isn't perfect, no man will want her, just as the unseen lover of untitled film still #7 no longer wants the floozy.

It is remarkable that Sherman was able to create such an effective series of photos on what appears to be a relatively low budget. Indeed, the restrictions imposed by the low budget contribute to the effectiveness of the "Untitled Film Stills". The prints' small scale (about 8" x 10") and lack of color require viewers to look at the photos up close in order to have any sense of what is going on in the pictures, and as we examine them closely, we are inclined to project onto the photos our notions about different types of female images.

Unlike many of the characters in the "Untitled Film Stills", the characters Sherman portrays in her "Centerfolds" series cannot be easily categorized by sight. But once we know the title of the series, it is easy to understand what they are: the antitheses of porno magazine models. The women are not particularly attractive, and all wear unerotic clothing that covers their genitals and breasts. In fact, none of them shows much skin. And rather than appearing to enjoy the photo sessions, these women are aloof to, frightened by, or worn out by the camera that looks down at them.

The "Centerfolds" thus directly criticize one mass-media genre by subverting its conventions, and thereby manipulate viewers. The obvious point of these photos is to make us angry about the way pornographic magazines exploit women. In contrast, because the "Untitled Film Stills" merely imitate the conventions of a media genre, they do not attempt to direct our responses to them. How viewers react to the stills depends on personal experience with the genreómoviesóand on how they personally feel about the female types presented in films and in Sherman's imitations of this genre.

In addition, because the photos of the "Centerfolds" series are so large (the women are almost life size) and in color, the dynamics of viewing them are different from looking at the "Untitled Film Stills". We do not need to look up close at the "Centerfolds" to understand what is going on. These photos exert themselves on us, and, as a result, they, along with the titles, thwart any inclination to project our own ideas onto the pictures.

The shift in format and approach that differentiates the "Centerfolds" from the "Untitled Film Stills" is unfortunately, continued in later series. The "Fashion" series, like the "Centerfolds", was inspired by a magazine commission. Again, Sherman presents in these photos the antithesis of a mass-media genre. This time the genre is a fashion spread. Like the Centerfolds, these are large color photos. And just like the "Centerfolds", the Fashion photos present us with plain rather than beautiful women. In spite of the expensive clothes they wear, these women are not glamorous. Instead, they look silly (untitled #119), deranged (untitled #122), homicidal (untitled #138), or wrinkled (untitled #132). As Amada Cruz notes, the purpose of this series is to "undermine the desirability of [typical fashion] images by emphasizing their contrived nature." However, these photos are like one-line jokes: They are funny for a moment or two, but the effect is short-lived.

The one-line jokes continue in Sherman's "History Portraits," a series of photos in which she masquerades as both men and women in mock portraits. With Sherman wearing wigs, fake eyebrows, clumsily attached nose prosthetics, and obviously fake breasts (in one instance projecting some liquid), the characters of the "History Portraits" look ridiculous. The obvious point of these photos is to mock the conventions of this genre from art history in which the subjects often appear wealthy, serious, and elegant.
The "History Portraits" and most of Sherman's other work directly link her to her childhood. In a BBC program shown at the exhibition, she mentions that, as a girl, she liked to play dress-up. One way of viewing Sherman's career, then, could be to consider it as a series of attempts to recreate the fascination that self-transformation provided her when she was young. Sometimes these efforts, such as the "Untitled Film Stills", are absorbing for viewers. Often, however, they aren't, and instead seem like exercises in self-indulgence.

The photos that seem the most self-indulgent of the entire exhibition are from Sherman's "Sex Pictures" and "Disasters" series. In these pictures, Sherman seems to revel in vulgarity. Wart-covered buttocks, a drooling and deformed face, vomit, mutant clowns, a flaccid pink penis, a torso with male and female genitalia, and other grotesqueries are on huge, full-color display. In her notebook, Sherman writes that she does not want the "Sex Pictures" to "be merely about sex per se as shock element." But the shock-value of the "Sex Pictures" and some of the "Disasters" series overwhelms any other intentions Sherman might have for these photos.

Nonetheless, these pictures are saved from a purely adolescent sensibility by the technical skill with which Sherman has executed them. In terms of color, composition, and lighting, the "Sex Pictures" and "Disasters" series are some of the most accomplished photos in the exhibition. And in some cases, Sherman's intentions and skill work together to produce truly poignant images. For example, in untitled #168 from the "Disasters" series, a woman's business suit lies on sand surrounded by computer components and bathed in a blue light from the monitors. The machinery stands vigil around this clothing that is now as obsolete as the suit's former owner whom the computer has replaced.

If many more of Sherman's photos were as effective as untitled #168 or the "Untitled Film Stills", I might agree with the accolades expressed in the MCA's marketing of this exhibition. In a print ad the museum says, "First, she transformed herself. Ultimately, she changed the art world." Certainly, Cindy Sherman has greatly influenced both artists and critics. But how much for the better?


Tamed Girls Running Wild. Figurations of Unruliness in Contemporary Video Art.
By Yvonne Volkart
Published in: In: Stella Rollig - Video as a female terrain. Catalogue Styrian Automn, Graz 2000.
www.obn.org/reading_room

In the film "The Office Killer" from 1996 US-artist Cindy Sherman shows a woman whose job is transformed to part-time work from home. She's on call as a result of the deregulation, feminization and flexibilization of work. Left alone with a computer and a modem, she first responds by falling into a state of deep depression before she takes revenge and kills her boss. In a further act of self-empowerment, she radically appropriates the widely propagated potentials of digital technology, which in reality served as a means to oppress her: via e-mail she camouflages the murder as suicide and takes off in a smashing convertible. The last frame shows the previously ugly duckling is now a self-asserted blonde sporting sexy sunglasses who heads towards a bright and well-prepared future in superior style.

The film shows a tamed girl running wild. First, she tries to settle into her new miserable situation as best as she can but it makes her all the more desperate. Then she gets her act together, secretly arranging things in such a way that she can live well and happily again — all by herself and in privacy. The protagonist does not instigate a political revolt of the workforce, it is highly probable that she does not even think about her position in society. All she does is fight for her own survival, and she does it in a radical and unadjusted way. Unruliness is an act of self-empowerment, the "female", subordinate kind of resistance against discriminating conditions. It is not a way of working through existing circumstances or politically articulate action: it is individual riot, a radical gesture of survival by a minority, by the female class — a class that is discriminated against, that feels deep down inside that they cannot change unfavorable conditions but have to find ways to live with them and in them without succumbing to them. It is pure flexibility and has nothing to do with opportunism or fatalism. Contrary to (open) resistance, unruliness is pure nihilism coupled with the will to survive, and hence libidinous and destructive.

"Unruly is what does not obey, what cannot be straightened out. A silly strand of hair or an undesired fold that can only be subdued by special means, technical expenditure or disinterest. Or it takes a sense of humor. Something is unruly. Unruliness has a physical, an erotic dimension. Whether this is desired or not, the term echoes something that for centuries was supposed to mark a feminine quality: lack of knowledge, unawareness — and obstinacy. A childish, almost touching disobedience to what asserts itself as unchangeable and rigid. However, it is also disobedience without a target, thoughtless, unplanned, anarchic, something that cannot be tolerated for long by that which exists. All measures taken against unruliness derive their legitimacy from this. Unruliness is threatened with being broken by violence or disinterest. Even laughter can kill it if it fails to recognize its serious motivation." This is what the art historian Ute Vorkoeper wrote about the exhibition "Widerspenstige Praktiken im Zeitalter von Bio- und Informationstechnologien" which I curated in the spring and summer of 2000.

These comments about the erotic-feminine-physical dimension of unruliness describe precisely what prompted me to use the word once again in the context of : it is associated with "femininity" in all its manifestations, and it strikes a balance between (patriarchal) ascription and feminist self-articulation. My title was inspired by the German version of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew", in which I played the lead 20 years ago; like so many other feminists, I have not been able to ever forget the other, suppressed message of the play. Another reference is Donna Haraway's cyborg figure/figuration which I always pictured as an ageless naughty girl. Her Cyborg Manifesto (1984), which she considered to be an "ironic myth" as she propagated the cyborg figure and trope as a feminist fantasy of transgression, is one of the most important junctures in (post-)feminist theory. Committed to a policy of self-empowerment and articulation, these theories again and again called for the figuration of female "subjects" beyond simple policies of identity. Haraway as well as Rosi Braidotti and others have pleaded in favor of enjoying the blurring of boundaries and the state of hybridity, to take the new conditions and their "informatics of dominance" (Haraway) as an opportunity to shape subjects and identities in a new way, to form alliances — which is what the protagonist of "The Office Killer" does in an exemplary fashion. To my mind, the important point in these ideas is that the elements of pleasure and enjoyment come to the fore very clearly — in a process that could have a lot to do with loss, dissolution and a well-founded fear of new forms of oppression. I think that this productive re-interpretation of conditions that are bad on one level but are turned into a chance on a different level is a decisive aspect in (post-) feminist approaches which also conforms with my idea of unruliness.

"The Office Killer", Cindy Sherman's first feature film - the flagship of a feminist reading of art, as it were — also shows something else: female contemporary (video) artists can be in sync with the mainstream. The movie addresses a mass audience, and, judging by the simple structure of the plot, the female figure to identify with and the idea of "female power", it could well be a Hollywood production. Unruly women are popular — just think of the successful movie "Thelma and Louise", to which "The Office Killer" bears a certain likeness while it is much more critical of capitalism and more feminist. The latter is particularly true because the revolting protagonist does not drive off to meet death but possible freedom. In other words: there is great need for unruly girls — a potential of wishes which Hollywood, television, independent films and video art evoke and satisfy to the same extent, albeit with different aesthetics and degrees of complexity. Even though Hollywood movies and soap operas tend to prefer simpler structures, we must not jump to the conclusion that female artists would in general create more complex, off-beat or critical products or unrulier wild girls.


Three (or More) Women John Haber in New York City
Summer 2004: Lynda Benglis, Cindy Sherman,
and Lee Bontecou
www.haberarts.com

Feminism means living with contradictions. It comes with the burden of living with the past. Maybe that is why, after so many years of culture wars, it remains so critical.

The issues are almost too familiar by now to repeat. Feminists must give due recognition to women whose achievement have been overlooked, but they must also point out the obstacles to achievement. They must refuse to be seen solely as women, while insisting on perspectives that differences may bring. They must probe whether the differences come defined for them by men or by nature, while showing how every definition is an act of description and creation. They must refuse to be defined solely by men, while acknowledging how self-definitions, too, can perpetuate old roles and old biases.

Does it make any difference that a man just wrote all that? Does it make any sense that I took my title here from a film directed by a man?

Any minority will recognize the conundrums, except that women outnumber men. Since the conundrums involve the connection between power and self-representation, no wonder artists have the ability to explore it. Perhaps this Web site has driven all those issues to death by now, but I had to remember them again this spring and summer. I thought in particular of high-profile exhibitions by Lynda Benglis, Cindy Sherman, and Lee Bontecou. Each has put art by women in focus while competing on allegedly male territory—themselves.

Cockiness erupting
In a spring when past generations of sculpture—David Smith, Donald Judd, and Carl Andre, to name just three—held court in Chelsea, Lynda Benglis extended the saga one more decade. A supposed gallery retrospective looked curiously small and overly familiar. Yet it helped make sense of two almost shockingly different views of the artist.

How dreadful to be so creative that, in retrospect, one becomes simply part of one's time. And she was, but oddly one remembers two very disparate images. One was so singular that who could care outside Soho? When she took an ad in an arts magazine, picturing herself fondling a dildo, she caused an outrage that I have trouble understanding this long after. Imagine how some shock art today may look in, oh, six more months.

Conversely, one remembers her sculpture as the opposite side of the 1980s, not as the politics of art-world celebrity, but the end of dogma in art. She and others cast Minimalism aside for "expression" and even "decoration." They broke down the formal boundary between painting on the wall and sculpture, and they looked formal, iconic, and even pretty all the same. She fits so nicely in one's historical memory with Joel Shapiro, Elizabeth Murray, or Frank Stella, just for starters. The new had become neo, without even the artists themselves noticing.

Unlike traditional sculpture, Benglis's works hang on the wall. Their bows, knots, and delicate folds, painted in gaudy, metallic shades, flaunt associations with such "feminine" media as fabric. Betty Woodman sometimes does the same with ceramics that invoke classical friezes. Like Woodman, in fact, she demands the solidity of sculpture.

They may also seem to have little to do with her ad, as if her press agent had handled that for her. Yet for me her exhibition proved a revelation. It emphasized a side of her as comfortable with postmodern installations as with sculpture—but also as assertively and confusingly sexual as her ad. How could I ever have taken her for granted?

The ad's feminism points both ways. It shows a woman, but a woman in your face. And, sure enough, her layered floor pieces, like molten lava frozen into place, do the same. They, too, suggest the paradox, an artist ready to accept liquid, flowing compositions but also grunge, as if the lava still represent an eruption—or perhaps the product of what that dildo represents. They cast a fresh light on the wall pieces that share the room. Her career's solidity and classicism looks as assertive now as its feminine imagery.

The baggy pants in this family
One could call Cindy Sherman a photographer, but she appears on both sides of the camera. One could call her a visual artist, but she spends less time snapping pictures or manipulating images than reinventing each staged setting—and herself. One could call her an actor, but no one will never view the movies imagined in her Untitled Film Stills. One could call her a performance artist, but no performance tries to hard to keep the artist from the public eye.

So why not a clown? Judging by her latest show, she agrees. A clown, like a women in Sherman's typically scathing analysis of gender roles, can move from laughter to tears behind heavy makeup. As ever, though, she does her best to subvert one's ideas of art and entertainment. The circus is in town, but think less of Cole Porter's advice to "Be a Clown" than of "Desolation Row."

Each clown here exaggerates a part on the stage of life, including ones that no children's performer would dare to face. Costumes simultaneously cover and exaggerate breasts. Makeup truly lays it on thick while emphasizing the wrinkles.

That said, I found the show monotonous. Sherman, as a leader in the wave that brought photography into the mainstream of pomo galleries, has always stood for the conundrums with which I began. No one so belabors images of women, but no so puts gender in quotes. No one hides herself so well, but no one so lacks for self-exposure. With her star status, one sees her now everywhere and nowhere, embracing and crossing gender boundaries. This time, she takes on roles a little too easily.

In her scariest works, Sherman provokes me most when she settles for less of a close-up. When she curated Robert Mapplethorpe, she brought out the personality of the sitters and their roles in the art world as much as perhaps the severest disguise of all, of nudity and transgression. Here, she definitely wears the pants in art's dysfunctional family.

In Sherman's fashion work, she sits on the ground, with fewer smiles, frowns, or gestures. She makes a clown costume into a fragile burst of color. One could almost believe with Porter and fashion magazines that "dress in huge baggy pants / and you'll ride the road to romance." Here she reverses the procedure, tempting one with the romance only to end up in baggy clothing. In her different roles and the increasing familiarity she brings to them, she keeps recalling a harsher paradox of the 1980s: the very critique of originality gave birth to a disturbing explosion of art markets, passing fame, and serious fortune.

Nature, culture, and then some
If one takes Benglis for granted, one sees Sherman everywhere. Lee Bontecou, in contrast, has made a point of vanishing. If they taunt those who would categorize them as women artists, she simply dismisses the question. And why not, since she's literally holding a blowtorch while she works. Yet she typifies the enigma of gender roles just as much—or more. She offers one last pressing reason to visit Long Island City, before MOMA reopens in Manhattan and MOMA QNS fades into memory.

Fittingly, in concluding its escape from midtown Manhattan, the Modern hopes to rescue the memory of an artist who showed with the mainstream but kept her distance from it. Bontecou, once the sole woman on Leo Castelli's roster, stopped displaying but continued her teaching and her art. A Soho loft dweller before that meant anything, she departed for a farm. A pioneer along with Eva Hesse of materials at once loose, tactile, fragile, and menacing, she offered a model for feminist art while refusing to let the images be written off as a woman's work.

Bontecou began with drawings in black and black that may recall the delicacy and rigor of Agnes Martin. However, her signature pieces, like Benglis's both extend and undermine the wall as much as hang on it. They thrust forward several feet. They also surround central cavities that seem to borrow deep into the space of the gallery, not to mention the unconscious. They look at once industrial and organic, until one recognizes the seams as common wire, the terra cotta hues as torn canvas, and the black space behind as velvet. If that suggests the goth fad, they stay way too grown-up for Metallica fans, but they also trade more on metaphor and shock than the use of canvas and wire by Richard Tuttle.

After a few shaped rather like broken TV sets—and with about the same functionality—she found her trademark construction of concentric arcs. Some whirl outward. One has black, steel teeth deep inside. She shied away, however, from the association with a vagina, dentata or otherwise. She knew that she worked with the same hybrids of machine parts and art supplies as any number of artists after David Smith.

Her later work has the same confusion of nature and culture. Translucent fish and flowers revel in the tackiness of salmon-colored plastic. Still later, more chaotic works, suspended from the ceiling, look vaguely like a cross between galaxies and something in need of vacuuming up. They leave the wall for good, but they never gain the mass or envelop the space of the cavities.

I fear that both series approach tchotchkes. I can see the fish in the window of a craft store, shopping-mall variety. They help make the retrospective a little disappointing, after the expectations one has from the emblematic cavities and for a forgotten woman artist. Still, they help place in a larger arc Bontecou's explorations. They show her always pursuing the mass produced and the handmade, the appropriated and the constructed, the human and the industrial, the late modern and the directions that art is again beginning to follow.

Soot and gunpowder
I came to Queens with great expectations. I had been anticipating her work for months, as the pattern of an insufficiently appreciated woman's art—perhaps the real global feminism in the city's most multicultural borough. Strangely enough, however, I encountered connections to a male artist of her time, working a continent away. It had to do with those first, dark gray drawings.

Also this summer, a show of Ed Ruscha changed my view of an artist by focusing on drawings in a medium that I had never seen before. I had never responded to Ruscha's early paintings, although I had admired his interest in an artist's book and his insights into a bleak, changing America. His words on canvas seemed too visually boring to relate to painters of his time like Sol LeWitt, too much like bad jokes about Los Angeles to pass for more conceptual paintings like Lawrence Weiner's or Om Karawa's. I get a smile at reading "Honey, I weaved through more damn traffic today," but how much more? Judging by the drawings, it should be a lot more.

In his drawings, Ruscha he turns into an illusionist. Letters leap into three dimensions, against a background of light and shadow executed with consummate precision. One sees the same patience with the medium as he shows for subject matter in his encyclopedia photographs—also at the Whitney—of Southern California emptiness. Only one thing: the gray may look like pencil, but Ruscha somehow draws with gunpowder. It makes his painting of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on fire sound dangerous.

Bontecou's abstract drawings also look like pencil but burn like fire. She applied soot—at times with that blowtorch. Soft textures and holistic imagery may suggest a gently feminine take on Mark Rothko's sublime, but the artist cannot afford to transcend time. She has taking command of the first industrial revolution and is working on the second. The drawings help situate her sculptural cavities and meandering career that much better.

Her own statements notwithstanding, I prefer to think of her as denying the purity of the female body and its identification with nature rather than neglecting it altogether. A more subtle twist on sexuality and sensation makes a perfect antidote, in fact, to a show of model skyscrapers just next door at MOMA QNS. Harping on male and female private parts makes for bad jokes and lousy art criticism. Still, as a friend put it, sculpture is always one or the other, and one might as well deconstruct the story rather than ignore it. At her best, Bontecou does, with the same laughter that Maddy Rosenberg brings to The Secret of the Sex.

I wanted to find an artist at the center of my art history, but I have to settle for one who has dark issues about centers. Like Hesse and, nearby at P.S. 1, Lee Lozano, she makes one rethink the "minimal" in Minimalism. Dia:Beacon could swallow even Louise Bourgeois, but I wonder if it could stomach these.


Untitled 2004
Gallery Going, by DAVID COHEN
New York Sun, June 10, 2004
www.artcritical.com

Now that the doyen of feminist performance photography has taken to masquerading as tacky, pathetic circus performers it seems a good time to come clean with a double confession: I have never found clowns or Cindy Sherman remotely entertaining.

Make no mistake about the gravity of these failings: Within polite art-world company not to "get" Ms. Sherman is tantamount to not having a brain, rather as despising the grinning goons who interrupt the jugglers and the lion tamers is to admit to not having a soul.

Clowns are a natural synthesis of Ms. Sherman's familiar preoccuptions. Her meteoric ascent in the early 1980s came with fictional "film stills" in which she posed in artfully contrived stereotypical scenarios as the ubiquitous dumb blonds of B-movies. Rather ingeniously, this established intentional vacuity as her emotional affect of choice, a less is more aesthetic that allowed nonchalence to be classed as "subtle" and clichéd gestures as "subversive."

In the 1990s, Ms. Sherman absented herself from the picture to pursue still-lifes that tested the taste endurance of viewers with lurid assemblages of detritus and vomit. Sex toys and sexually-posed prosthetic limbs became a favored motif to complement her pukey palette, and then gender warfare broke out between battered and besmirched Ken and Barbie dolls.

More recently, the performance artist returned lense-side to star in a series of stereotype-castings, as assorted middle-aged losers, personifying Hollywood wannabees and sexually past-it housewives. In her latest, clown incarnation, sick color, sad gesture, slick technique, nonchalance, and nihilism are brought together in a pantheon of the pathetic. Her large format tableaux fill two floors at Metro Pictures, where the artist has shown from the outset of her career: elaborately costumed, affectless behind grimly determined smiley masks, with artful, computer-manipulated backdrops, she is truly the sagging bore she seems to want to be.

The impression I had, trying my utmost to be moved or intrigued by these images, is of meeting the wealthy aunt of Ronald McDonald. Each is as corporate and ubiquitous as the other, and the product they push about as nourishing.


Sherman's Mediation of Subjectivity
by Claire Todd- Miller, 30 October, 2006
blogs.usyd.edu.au/postmodernismnow/2006

Looking at Cindy Sherman’s photographs depicting depthless female stereotypes, the hybridity of the transgendered, and the grotesque images of organic cyborgs, we can see that Sherman’s work reveals how the subject can be mediated in this capitalist, consumer culture and postmodern world. The question of the identity of the subject has been a modernist question, with the split between the subject- object and the private- public spheres creating a sense of the subjective individual and sense of self. However in Sherman’s images there are characteristics that subvert these modern notions of the subject creating a postmodern subject or as Baudrillard argues an absence of the subject. I will argue that Sherman’s work can generally tell us two main things about the mediation of subjectivity in postmodern culture. Firstly that the subject has become simply an image or simulacrum that lacks any depth, and yet can mediate between interior and exterior spaces breaking down the subject- object boundary. Secondly the subject is fragmented and has become hybrid in its gender and material makeup, being in transition between man and woman and between ‘fake’ plastic mannequins, ‘real’ bodies and mutated cyborg flesh.

In the postmodern society in which we live, termed “the cultural logic of late capitalism” by postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson, the negotiation of subjectivity has changed in the ways in which I have outlined above and will explore through various postmodern concepts and texts. Theorists that will be used to look at subjectivity include Baudrillard, Jameson, Adorno and Haraway. These theorists will be used to explore postmodern subjectivity in Sherman’s works and other texts including films [safe] (1995), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) and Videodrome (1983). Although I will argue the ways in which subjectivity is mediated, postmodern theorist Baudrillard takes this concept further claiming the ‘death of the subject.’ This concept is helpful in explaining why in many of Sherman’s photographs in which Sherman places herself, her omnipresent face fails to add up to a subject. Baudrillard argues that social relations have been replaced by a simulational order that have eliminated any sense of identity and subjectivity as the boundary between subject, object and other and ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ has disappeared. (Dunn, 1998, 103- 4, 66) Baudrillard views this elimination of subjectivity as caused by identity being completely “disintegrated in processes of signification…[and] absorbed into the signification of technology.” (Dunn, 1998, 66, 104)

Sherman’s photographs explore female identity, representation and transformation yet if we ask the question “Who is Sherman?” her photographs reveal nothing of her subjectivity. (Knafo, 1996, 139- 40) This is because her photographs are about no one in particular but about the constructed nature of identity and images of ‘the real’ and popular culture. (Knafo, 1996, 139- 140) “The fact that Sherman’s photographs are assigned serial numbers rather than titles emphasises that there is no true identity but that they are interchangeable, allowing the viewers own meaning to be projected onto them. (Knafo, 1996, 147) In this postmodern culture of television, advertising and media manipulation, Sherman is exploring how “reality itself has become a manufactured image” and how the self has thus lost depth, being simply a “shallow artefact of cultural production,” with self- discovery and self emancipation becoming only a delusion. (Farrell, 1994, 245)

This lack of depth in the postmodern subject is reflected in Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills in which the Sherman places herself as nothing more than an image or what Baudrillard calls a ‘simulacrum.’ Sherman uses wigs, makeup, props and clothing to ‘play’ and reconstruct feminine stereotypes such as the film- starlight (Untitled Film Still #7) the worn out housewife (Untitled Film Still #3), the librarian (Untitled Film Still #13) and other identities that appear as if stills from a B grade movie. These photographs are simply spectacles, and Sherman’s gaze remains empty suggesting a vacuous interior. (Knafo, 1996, 145, 146- 7)

Postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson describes a ‘wanning of effect’ which signifies a draining of emotional depth, “the face becoming an impenetrable façade revealing nothing of the self and the skin becomes a plastic wrapping.” (Murphet, 2006, L2) The 'wanning of effect' can be seen in Sherman's Untitled Film Still's and her photographs that use mannequins instead of real people. Also Baudrillard’s hyperreal concept is visualised through Sherman’s photographs, being pure floating images, behind which there is nothing. (Morley, 1996, 59) Baudrillard sees these simulations as the “generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”(Baudrillard, 1988,166) Baudrillard outlines the successive phases of the image which leads to this lack of depth that one can see in the subjects of Sherman’s work: An image "1) is the reflection of a basic reality. 2) It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3) masks the absence of a basic reality. 4) It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum." (Baudrillard, 1988, 170)

Not only have subjects become shallow images that are copies of copies, but we have also become subjects of consumerism, no longer individuals but targets for consumption. (Dunn, 1998, 66) Theodore Adorno sees this leading to the subject’s loss of autonomy. "Advertising becomes information when there is no longer anything to choose from, when the recognition of brand names has taken the place of choice." (Adorno, 1991, 73)

Along with the loss of autonomy another change in subjectivity that Sherman’s photographs reveal is the breaking down of the boundaries between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spaces of the subject. Sherman plays with the relationship between a woman’s external appearance and her internal world with backlighting and empty facial features in her 1980- 1985 colour photographs including the groups of photographs ‘Rear- Screen Projections,’ ‘Centrefolds’ and ‘Pink Robes.’ (Knafo, 2006, 147- 8) Also Sherman’s 1985- 1989 ‘Fairy Tale’ and ‘Disaster’ groups of photographs explore how external appearance can be a means of expressing the contents of her inner world. Sherman does this by “using material from fairy tale, dreams, mythology and fantasy, all which represent a more marked transition from external to internal world.” (Knafo, 2006, 148-9)

Boundaries of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds of the self are explored and crossed throughout the film [safe] (1995) directed by Todd Haynes, with the lack of depth of the ‘interior’ world of Carol White soon revealed. Carol remains internally impenetrable. For example, in a scene where Carol goes outside into the darkness alone and stands by the pool, “the camera frames her in a long shot with her back to us.”(Potter, 2004,138) The camera tracks in yet Carol never turns. The viewer expects a moment of reflection when Carol is alone, being accustomed to these facial close- ups, yet this is denied. Even when the camera is close- up, her face is ambiguous and has no signs of inner thought or emotion. (Potter, 2004, 138) Although Carol is insulated from the outer world, cocooning herself in private spheres such as her car to move through city roads and interconnected freeways, it is these technological advances created to make consumers lives easier, such as cars and consumer products that are making Carol sick. Also it is this disease that is creating Carol’s identity, internalizing the external. The relationship between inner and outer spaces is explored at Wrenwood retreat centre where Carol is trying to cure her allergic reaction to the Twentieth Century. Peter, the leader of the centre, believes that negative internal thoughts and beliefs manifest themselves in external symptoms and disease. He promotes personal growth and self realization with chants such as “We are one with the power that created us, we are safe, and all is well in our world,” showing the connection between external outer spaces and inner spaces. (Potter, 2004, 144) However this search for self is shown to be futile as Carol continues to have "a lack represented interiority." (Potter, 2004, 129) The ending of the film leaves no hope for Carol as she has come to no self- realisation or knowledge. Instead her condition is deteriorating, locked up a igloo- like room to escape the outside world, she said “I love you” into the mirror” but she is only saying what she was told to say and is simply a subject defined by her disease and toxic substances. (Potter, 2004, 129)

Other ways in which in Sherman’s photographs illustrate how the subject is mediated in a postmodern world, can be seen in some of Sherman’s work where the unified conception of identity is eliminated and subjects are fragmented and hybrid transgender and cyborg identities. Some of Sherman’s photographs portray androgynous identities Untitled #353 (scroll down to view) and Untitled # 112. In Untitled # 112 gender ambiguity is emphasized by the black background.

These malleable identities are similar to the constructed and multiple identities of the character Hedwig in the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) directed by John Cameron Mitchell. Hedwig played by John Cameron Mitchell is a transgendered rock star who grew up as a boy, Hansel, in East Berlin which was seperated from the world by the Berlin Wall. Hedwig transgresses sexual, gender and physical boundaries by having a sex change and fleeing to the West to become a U.S rock star. Hedwig adopts multiple guises and identities when she is performing onstage. Thus Hedwig’s identity is fragmented. She said “My sex change operation got botched; my guardian angel fell asleep on the watch; now all I got is a Barbie doll crotch; I've got an angry inch!” She is neither male or female, “but in-between.” Thus Hedwig is a fragmented self which Jameson describes as ‘schizophrenic’ where there is the liberation of multiple identities within former selves and where "larger forms of identity are shattered." (Murphet, 2006, L2 & Jameson, 1991, 33-4) For example, Hedwig’s 'schizophrenic' identity is revealed when Hedwig’s enormous wig collection is shown, with all these different wigs showing the multiple identities that Hedwig has created for herself. When Hedwig is performing near the end of the film, she rips off her plastic dress, or 'simulacrum' as Baurdrillard would term it, and layers of her identity to reveal a naked, exposed self. Also in the film Hedwig is trying to find her other half through love. Hedwig said: “The origin of love. It is clear that I must find my other half.” This is a deliberate cliché, which Mitchell shows is futile as Hedwig learns she is really searching for herself and he does finally love herself, celebrating her fragmented wholeness.

The change in Sherman’s photography from having human subjects, with Sherman herself being the subject of her photos, to their replacement with unreal plastic dolls, dummies, mannequins, mutations, distorted human beings and cyborgs shows a change in the mediation of subjectivity in postmodernism. These images lack human emotion, yet shock the viewer as they are spectacles of the grotesque. Her subjects have transformed into blow- up dolls and mannequins Untitled # 188, Untitled # 255 and to mutated organic cyborgs: Untitled # 315, Untitled # 324, Untitled # 190. (See Art Links to view: The Lilith Gallery of Toronto)

“An organic cyborg can be defined as a monster of multiple species, [such as the ones Sherman's photographs depict] whereas a mechanical cyborg can be considered a techno- human amalgamation." (Gonzalez, 2000, 59) Cyborgs are hybrid identities that are present in the film Videodrome (1983) Directed by David Cronenberg. In the film the fusion of technology and the subject is shown through the character, Brian O’Blivion, who is kept alive through the media, existing only on pre- recorded tapes in an archive. This subjectivity shows how public life on TV is more real than in the flesh (Murphet, 2006, LV) Brian O’Blivion said:

The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television…. After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there?

Another cyborg identity is the main character Max Renn (James Wood) who becomes a machine as his body starts to fuse with media and machines e.g. hand gun/ hand grenade (literalizing a pun). (Murphet, 2006, LV) There is the blending of the technical (machine) and organic human. Therefore Max Renn, with this cyborg identity transcends notions of hierarchies and boundaries. This identity is also a fusion of the masculine and feminine, with Max having both female/ male reproductive organs, his stomache opening up like a female sexual organ to be penetrated by technical apparatus such as CD’s and cassettes that modify his flesh. Man becomes the medium as Max is used as hardware, where software operates. For example he is inserted with cassettes that program his memory and control his actions. (Murphet, 2006, VL) Max Renn is starting to become the new flesh, where machines become alive; breathing, squirming, bleeding. Max Renn said at they end of the film “Death to Videodrome! Long live The New flesh!” Max Renn's words can be seen as a utopic vision much like Donna Haraway's who argues against identity politics based on some naturalised or essentialized subject and sees the image of the cyborg as the new political identity, defying categorization and taking pleasure in the fusion of boundaries (human- animal, human- machine, nature- culture). (Sawicki, 1996, 168)

Sherman’s photographs and other texts including Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Videodrome and [safe] were examined in terms of what they reveal about the mediation of the subject in this postmodern world. It was found that subjects were lacking depth, that there was a breaking of boundaries between the inner and outer spaces of the self and that identities were hybrid and fragmented. These findings were supported by postmodern concepts including: Jameson’s ‘wanning of effect’ and notion of the ‘schitzophrenic;’ Adorno’s notion of the loss of autonomy, Baudrillard’s ‘death of the subject’ and notion of 'simulacrum' and Haraway’s utopian views of cyborgs able to break down of the boundaries of the subject.

References

Adorno, Theodore. ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’ in his The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, London, Routledge, 1991.
Baudrillard, Jean. ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ in (Ed.) Mark Poster, Selected Writings, Polity, Blackwell.1998
Dunn, Robert G. Idenity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity, University of Minnesota Press, London, 1998
Farrell, Frank B. “Subjectivity, Realism, And Postmodernism- The Recovery of the World,” Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.
Gonzalez, Jennifer in (Ed.) Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kath Woodward, Fiona Hovenden, The gendered cyborg: A reader, Routledge, London, 2000
'Hedwig and the Angry Inch', Dirc. John Cameron Mitchell. Video. RoadShow. 2001
Jameson, Fredric, ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ Duke UP, 1991.
Knafo, Danielle ‘Dressing Up and Other Games of Make- believe: The Function of Play in the Art of Cindy Sherman’ American Imago 53.2 (1996) 139-164. Accessed 18 October 2006.
http://muse.uq.edu.au.ezproxy.library.usyd.edu.au/journals/american_imago/v053/53.2knafo.html [Project Muse]
Morley, David. ‘Postmodernism: The Rough Guide’ in (Ed) James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine, Cultural Studies and Communications, Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group, New York, 1996.
Murphet, Julian, ‘Lecture Videodrome Presentation,’ Sydney, University of Sydney, 2006
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/english/undergrad/uos/units/engl2617.shtml
Murphet, Julian, ‘Lecture 2,’ Sydney, University of Sydney (2006). Accessed 16 October 2006 http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/english/undergrad/uos/pdfs/engl2617_2006/ENGL2617LectureTwo.pdf
Potter, Susan, ‘Dangerous Spaces: Safe,’ Camera Obscura 19:3 (2004): 124- 154.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/camera_obscura/v019/19.3.potter.html
'[safe].' Dirc. Todd Haynes. Video. AV Channel, 1995
Sawicki, Jana, 'Feminism, Foucault, and "Subjects" of Power and Freedom,' in (Ed) Susan J. Hekman, Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault, The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania, 1996.
'Videodrome.' Direc. David Cronenberg. Video. Universal Pictures. 1983.


Cindy Sherman: Metro Pictures
ArtForum, Sept, 2004 by Jan Avgikos
www.findarticles.com

Cindy Sherman has gone digital! It's still her masquerading for the camera as she brings to life a series of clowns (twelve of which were included in this exhibition), who are easily among the most flamboyant characters she has ever created, But in several of these new photographs (all works 2004), Sherman employs digital technology to multiply her image within a single frame. Dressed in clown outfits, clusters of her surrogates share space for the first time. They rub shoulders, snatch furtive glimpses, taunt one another, and leer at us from the other side of the looking glass--introducing in the process new potential for social narrative. Sherman has also activated the background space of her photographs, and the results are positively psychedelic. Pulsing, fruit-colored patterns, spinning whirlpools, and other wild special effects telegraph highly charged psychological states and suggest a carnivalesque virtual environment.

Do we identify with these clowns? Certainly not in the way we have with most of Sherman's characters. Looking at the "Untitled Film Stills," don't we see ourselves in relation to the ingenue? Ditto Sherman's impersonations and parodies of fashion victims, matrons, and other idiosyncratic types. Her ever-growing social registry of American culture, particularly the female half, relies on keen observation--hers and our own.

Human nature is luridly on display in this particular troupe. In their eye-popping domain, everything is patently artificial. Even though the clowns display moods and behaviors--cocky, clever, raucous, inquisitive, innocent, withdrawn, or indifferent--that can be endearingly familiar, their difference from us, despite the human posturing and pantomime, is pronounced. Echoing the monsters, ghouls, and aliens that have appeared in Sherman's work before, the clowns exceed the limits of the everyday and in their "post-human" vigor hint at some ultimate form of "letting go."

Traditionally, clowns are anonymous. The identity of the person behind the mask is inconsequential. Clowns are all surface and no depth, yet they are as old as culture itself. Where we've been, they've always been, which makes clowns an intriguing symbol. Given the importance of identities that are mass-produced and passed around in Sherman's work, her impersonations of (usually) feminine stereotypes have always been remarkably clownlike. With her makeup, masks, costumes, and disguises, it's as if Sherman had been "clowning" from the get-go. Even though her ingenues and circus clowns share a thing about getting dressed up and posing for the camera, the latter are immeasurably more resistant to blending in with the crowd. They don't seem to live in our world--but that's not to say that the world we live in hasn't become alarmingly like their own. A raucous extravaganza of fools, buffoons, and lunatics, with nary an "ordinary" person in sight? Is it a circus, the nightly news, or a subject listing for new figuration?

The mushrooming of clowns in contemporary art points in the direction of a zany zeitgeist that substitutes silliness for substance but incorporates a healthy dose of irony. Given the enmeshing of images from the front lines, entertainment media, special-effects cinema, and the Internet added to the pervasive tension of a post-9/11 world, perhaps we should view the arrival of the clowns as a sign. They appear to be quite happy in a society that verges on total insanity.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group


Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures
Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Jean Dykstra
www.findarticles.com

It's a little surprising that Cindy Sherman hasn't explored clowns before. She has engaged for so long with things clownlike--exaggeration and masquerade; the notion of a shifting, unstable identity; and the boorish, pathetic and grotesque aspects of our personalities. To represent clowns directly, as she has in her latest series, seems almost redundant. In a 2000-01 series, a withering study of middle-aged women holding on stubbornly to a youthful self-image, Sherman drew attention to the cracks in the veneer: the once-fashionable clothes, the outmoded hairstyles. Clowns are explicitly about such imperfections, revealing the pathos behind the flamboyantly slipshod costume, or the menace underlying the glee.

Sherman is an unparalleled performer and a sharp observer of human folly and weakness. She has said that she didn't like clowns as a child (who does, really?) and only began visiting the circus in her 30s. Clearly, she found some fertile ground. In a particularly effective work, a pensive male clown tenderly holds a pink balloon-dog on one side of a diptych, while, on the other, his female counterpart, wearing a Carmen Miranda hat of balloon-fruit, has folded her arms and closed her eyes, looking resigned and world-weary. In a creepier photograph, a yellow-suited slickster manages to look altogether threatening while playing a small accordion. The most girlish-looking clown in the series--with pink ponytails and a stuffed animal--is also the most sexual, with fabric breasts and a triangular patch of felt pubic hair that recall earlier Sherman series in which she incorporated prosthetic body parts.

The strongest pieces are those that focus in on the details of Sherman's carefully calibrated performances and her nuanced use of color and costume. Slightly weaker are the ones that digitally montage more than a single figure, providing too much information and narrative direction. In one of the photographs with several figures, three images of the same blue-haired clown, with different expressions and in different sizes, are seen against a zigzagging, psychedelically colored background. The digital backgrounds are new to Sherman's work, and the more trippy and hallucinogenic they are, the more they draw attention away from the characterizations. In the most compelling photographs, the clown is an isolated Everyman, and we are given the freedom to peruse his psychological depth. While the subjects of her Film Stills or History Portraits were distant as cultural icons, the clowns can be read as embodiments of us all.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group


Cindy Sherman
www.encyclopedia.com

Sherman, Cindy (Cynthia Morris Sherman), 1954-, American photographer, b. Glen Ridge, N.J. In images in which makeup, costumes, wigs, and the like allow her to take on a variety of guises and roles, Sherman transforms still photography into performance art to explore traditional and pop-cultural myths of femininity. Her work implicitly examines issues of identity and stereotype, representation and reality, the function of mass media, and the nature of portraiture. Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) is a widely acclaimed series of 69 black-and-white works in which she assumed the identities of stock characters from Hollywood B films. A set was acquired (1996) by New York's Museum of Modern Art, which published them in 2003. Turning to color in the 1980s, Sherman continued to use herself as subject matter, sometimes also photographing mannequins or dolls. Her more recent themes have included erotica, mutilation, and decay; her personae, overblown movie divas and characters from grotesque fairy tales and ersatz Old Master paintings. Sherman also has directed a feature film, the black comedy Office Killer (1997).


Shows

Cindy Sherman
Exhibition
Venue: Martin-Gropius-Bau
15 June to 17 September 2007
www.berliner-festspiele.de

Organizer
Berliner Festspiele
An exhibition arranged by the Jeu de Paume, Paris in cooperation with Kunsthaus Bregenz, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
Curators Régis Durand and Véronique Dabin
Media partners RBB Inforadio, RBB Kulturradio

In the summer of 2007 the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin will be presenting the major Cindy Sherman retrospective arranged by the Jeu de Paume in Paris. The exhibition comprises works produced by the artist between 1975 and 2005.

Even in her earliest works Cindy Sherman almost always featured herself as the model and subject of her productions. She puts together her fictitious personae with the help of various accessories, such as make-up, costumes or artificial limbs, and photographs them in the studio. The figures represent social and cultural stereotypes. They are constructed in a partly parodistic, partly caustic and occasionally brutal manner, carefully examined and then portrayed in imitation of the various vehicles for presentation: the centre pages of a magazine, advertising, cinematic art and classical painting. The outcome is a subtle analysis of human identity, especially female identity, as well as of the fantasies that it engenders and the powers to which it is exposed. This immersion in vague, conflict-ridden spheres, in which the identity of the individual grapples with the collective unconscious, with stereotypes and symbolic power, is playful now and then, but occasionally also sombre, for instance when horror and revulsion are evoked or when disfigured, mutilated bodies are depicted.

Régis Durand on Cindy Sherman’s work 1975–2006
“With a few exceptions, Cindy Sherman’s works are presented both in books and in exhibitions in the form of extensive series – mostly in chronological order and documenting the way in which they belong to each other. Although there is always the possibility of overlapping and of general thematic strands (some of which are referred to below) and sometimes no clear line can be drawn between the respective series, both the chronology and the series can be seen as crucial to the work of this artist. This constellation makes it possible to grasp both the strong inner coherence and the continuous development of the work.

Cindy Sherman’s artistic development is marked by rigour, innovation and ever greater depth. It exhibits astonishing humour and extravagance, although these also have a dark side reflecting both with the incomprehensibility of the EGO and the omnipresence of illusion and death. The work, which seems to operate on a superficial level and plays with hallucinations, withstands the critical gaze of the observer and preserves its secret. However, this secret is not suitable for those who think they can arrive at an explanation by means of a better level of information or more systematic access. It has to do, rather, with the identity of human beings, with their capacity to recognise and misjudge themselves, to portray themselves and invent parallel lives – a capacity that no other living being has.

The texts between the individual parts are intended to disclose the structure of the sequence and emphasise the great diversity. The figure which appears as an individual protagonist is often also described as the subject. The use of this term indicates that the figure is not really the artist herself (that would mean reducing her work to straightforward psychological or strictly autobiographical aspects) or any of the individual figures she presents and furnishes with a social or psychological identity, to which we are certainly to attribute credibility, however deep that may go.”


"Take 2" in January
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
www.stephaniesyjuco.com/antifactory/blog

Huzzah! I'm busy prepping for another show that opens in January, "Take 2", and features Cindy Sherman, Janine Antoni, and Kara Walker, among others. Nice lineup :) I'll have quite a bit of work in it, and am recreating a work from 2003, Wertschafts-Werte (Economic Values), so there's been a lot to do. Curated by Janet Bishop from SFMOMA. Will post again as it draws nearer.


Take 2: Women Revisiting Art History
Organized by Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture, SFMOMA
January 17–March 15, 2007
Mills College Art Museum
Oakland, CA

Oakland, CA - The Mills College Art Museum will feature a provocative major exhibition, featuring nine internationally recognized contemporary women artists, from January 17–March 15, 2007. Entitled Take 2: Women Revisiting Art History, the show will be organized by Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Presented in conjunction with a search for a new director and plans for a significant expansion of the Mills College Art Museum, the exhibition will focus on artists forging compelling new territory by working with existing conventions and “repurposing” them to new ends. A public reception for Take 2 will be held on January 17 in the Museum from 5:30 pm–7pm.

According to Bishop, “Take 2 presents the work of prominent women artists whose artistic strategies include reinventing established art historical conventions. The exhibition examines the conceptual, political, and often very personal motivations for the use of visual tropes ranging from scientific drawings, silhouettes, and South Asian miniatures to traditions and icons within western art history.”

The artists featured in Take 2 are:

Janine Antoni (b. 1974, the Bahamas; lives and works in New York; photography and sculpture)

Beate Gutschow (b. 1970 Mainz, Germany; lives and works in Berlin; photography)

Sherrie Levine (b. 1947 Hazleton, Pennsylvania; lives and works in New York; sculpture, photographs, and works on paper)

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954 Glen Ridge, New Jersey; lives and works in New York; photographs)

Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969 Lahore, Pakistan; lives and works in New York; works on paper)

Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974 Manila, Philippines; lives and works in San Francisco; sculpture and works on paper)

Sam Taylor-Wood (b. 1967 London; lives and works in London; films)

Catherine Wagner (b. 1953 San Francisco; lives and works in San Francisco; photographs)

Kara Walker (b. 1969 Stockton; lives and works in New York; works on paper)

Bishop points out several exhibition highlights: “Through sculptural pieces based on a billiard table in a Man Ray painting or Duchamp’s famous Large Glass, Sherrie Levine complicates issues of gender and authorship via direct riffs on the work of canonized male artists. Stephanie Syjuco points to the strange and unfamiliar nature of contemporary technological hardware through prints that treat their parts like botanical specimens. Catherine Wagner presents photographs from her project titled Re-Classifying History, in which chairs from the de Young Museum’s decorative arts collection serve as surrogates to explore human relationships.

“In addition, Walker makes provocative cut paper pieces inspired by Victorian silhouettes to focus on issues of race, violence, and slavery in the antebellum South, and Shahzia Sikander fuses elements from the ancient practice of miniature painting and contemporary western culture in small-format works that function metaphorically in a permeable global society. The exhibition will also include photographs by Beate Gutschow, Cindy Sherman, and Janine Antoni, as well as film by Sam Taylor-Wood, all of which explore classic subjects within European painting such as landscape, still life, portraiture, biblical characters, and genre painting.”

A 64-page catalogue written by Janet Bishop will accompany the exhibit.

Janet Bishop’s recent projects have included the nationally touring exhibition Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective (2005-6). She was part of the curatorial teams for 010101—Art in Technological Times (2001) and Present Tense: Nine Artists in the Nineties (1997). She is currently working on a major retrospective of the work of David Park, an exhibition celebrating SFMOMA’s 75th anniversary, and an exhibition reuniting the modernist collections of Gertrude Stein and her siblings.


First Thursday Picks for December
Posted by Jessica Bromer on December 06, 2006
www.portlandart.net/archives/2006

NKOTB Quality Pictures inaugurates their Hoyt St. space with work by Cindy Sherman, Jenny Saville, Nikki S. Lee, Sue de Beer, Larry Sultan, Kara Walker, Glen Brown and Katy Grannan, among others, promising to keep the opening going until 11pm and evidently ordering enough food to warrant mentioning the opening's caterers (Planet B's Modern Tastes) in the press release. Sounds almost too good to be true...will they ask for our immortal souls at the door?

Ascendant local Holly Andres will join the formidable ladies and gentlemen listed above in POW! Pictures of Women, an exhibition of works that investigate female aesthetic power beyond the bland confines of traditional standards of beauty. Running simultaneously, Chris Verene's Self Esteem "will feature photographs by Mr. Verene that examine the role of photographed image and its effect on an individual's self esteem. Works in this exhibit will be primarily drawn from Verene's 'Self Esteem Salons' and from early work. Verene's 'Salons' are a performance artwork wherein he builds a temporary sanctuary to be used in helping strangers-'clients'-to make a sincere and lasting change in their lives."
Opening Reception • Dec. 7, 6-11pm • POW! Pictures of Women: Dec. 7-30 • Self Esteem: Dec. 7 - Jan. 27

Take 2: Women Revisiting Art History is free and open to the public at the Mills College Art Museum, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland, CA 94613. Museum hours: Tuesdays, and Thursday through Saturday 11–4 pm; Wednesday 11–7:30 pm, Sunday 12–4 pm.


Cindy Sherman
A Play of Selves
11 November - 16 December 2006
www.metropicturesgallery.com

Created in 1975, A Play of Selves is a visual tale of a young woman overwhelmed by various alter-egos working at odds within her and her final conquering of self-doubt. Acted out with 16 separate characters, the 71 photgraphic assemblages mark Sherman's earliest explorations of her ground-breaking use of herself as the subject in staged photographs.

Sherman originally shot hundreds of photographs of herself costumed as the various characters in dozens of poses. After cutting out the individual images from black and white prints, she used an elaborately organized, hand-written script to organize the images into the 4 act "play". The piece was first shown at the artist-run, alternative space, Hallwalls, in Buffalo, NY in 1975 where Sherman was a founding member as a student at Buffalo State College.



BURCHFIELD-PENNEY ART CENTER
The Unseen Cindy Sherman: Early Transformations (1975-76)
A touring exhibition of the Montclair Art Museum & Cindy Sherman: Western New York Collections
OCTOBER 23, 2004 - JANUARY 9, 2005

The Unseen Cindy Sherman: Early Transformations (1975–76) brings together previously unknown early works by the artist. Culled mostly from family collections, these works comprise early photographs and montages created during the mid 1970s while Sherman was an undergraduate at Buff State, a resident of 30 Essex Street, and a co-founder there (with Charles Clough, Robert Longo, and others) of Hallwalls. These photographs are truly a revelation, providing the foundation for Sherman’s emergence as indisputably one of the most important artists of her generation and of the late 20th century.

“Virtually unknown are a group of early photographic works of 1975–1976, completed when Sherman was a student and soon thereafter [at Hallwalls], with which the artist had already begun to confront the variety of ways in which women and even men are depicted in America’s mass-media, image-saturated society,” writes Gail Stavitsky, chief curator at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, organizer of The Unseen Cindy Sherman: Early Transformations (1975-76), in her essay which accompanies the exhibition. “These prophetic works parody the styles and conventions of such sources of idealized femininity as women’s magazines, old movies, and television. Already, they are not conventional self-portraits, but inventions of different characters through varieties of costume, makeup, setting, facial expression and pose, which draw, nonetheless, upon the artist’s own experiences and preoccupations. Sherman is her own actress, scenarist, cinematographer, lighting designer, makeup artist, and costumer. Exhibited together as a group for the first time, they provide an opportunity to look anew at Sherman’s work in the full context of her formative life experiences and artistic influences.”

These “formative artistic influences” include both the friends and peers who co-founded Hallwalls, and other artists who visited Hallwalls as invited guests in Hallwalls’ first few years. As Cindy herself said when presenting Hallwalls with its 1999 Governor’s Arts Award at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, “Whenever someone asks where I studied art, I always say it was at Hallwalls.”

Complementing The Unseen Cindy Sherman will be Cindy Sherman: Western New York Collections, bringing together works from both private and public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Burchfield-Penney Art Center, and Castellani Art Museum.
The Unseen Cindy Sherman: Early Transformations (1975-1976) was made possible with support from the Collectors Forum of the Montclair Art Museum. Additional support for the exhibition catalogue—a co-publication with Smart Art Press, Santa Monica, CA—was provided by Judith Targan, gifts to the Ann & Mel Schaffer Tribute Fund, and Beth & George Meredith. Montclair Art Museum programs are made possible in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts; Judy & Josh Weston; the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation; and Museum members.


CINDY SHERMAN
Clowns,
November 26, 2004 - January 15, 2005
www.spruethmagerslee.com

Sprüth Magers Lee proudly presents Cindy Sherman’s latest body of work in her first solo UK commercial show.

Sherman’s career spans a thirty-year period; within which she has addressed ideas of the abject, female stereotyping and the mediated image. Throughout this time she has maintained a truly seminal position within contemporary art. This rise and continued success began in the late seventies, with the critically celebrated series Untitled Film Stills. It was within this series that Sherman would use her own body to play the role of the object. Placing herself within the frame, Sherman acts not as the subject, in the traditional genre of portraiture but as an object that inverts the act of looking. Sherman’s own physicality is integral to the resultant image whilst her personality disappears from view and her true identity becomes irrelevant.

In the clown series, Sherman takes the notion of the mask and the masquerade in a new direction. Initially conceived after being approached by British Vogue magazine to guest edit their fashion section in June 2003, Sherman’s clown portraits would become a way of exploring the boundaries between clothing and costumery. Intrigued by the apparent dichotomy of the clowns’ persona and any sense of the interior, or real self, Sherman explores the society of difference in this subtly disparate group of facades.

Despite Sherman’s frequent references to the mediated image within her previous works, the clown portraits are the first to extensively use computer manipulation. In this respect the clown series becomes a punctuation mark in Sherman’s work a shift that can also be seen in her use of mannequins and dolls in the mid eighties. The most marked evolution in this departure is the use of multiple characters within the same image. Each clown in the series plays a distinct figure in Sherman’s macabre album of characters, who together tie this exhibition into an incredibly strong landmark in the career of an artist continuing to make work that is both relevant and affecting.

This series has also been exhibited at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, Germany and follows the artist’s recent retrospectives at the Serpentine Gallery London and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

Sherman’s work is also extensively placed within many important collections around the world including the Tate Modern, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and also in the Museum of Modern Art, New York who have recently acquired the entire collection of Untitled Film Stills.


The Unseen Cindy Sherman: Early Transformations (1975-1976)
Montclair Art Museum , March 21 - August 1, 2004
www.tfaoi.com

The Unseen Cindy Sherman, curated by MAM's Chief Curator Gail Stavitsky, offers a little-known selection of works by this leading contemporary artist. Primarily culled from family collections, the exhibition comprises early photographs and photographic assemblages created by Sherman as a college student, when she had begun to use herself as the subject of staged photographs. These early works vividly illustrate Sherman's early explorations of the myriad constructions of self and female identities as a young woman, and her interest in challenging conventions of beauty and behavior. (right: Untitled, 1975 (Untitled), 13 black and white photographs, 9? x 45 inches, Lent by Elizabeth and Frank Leite)

Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and moved to Huntington Beach in suburban Long Island, New York when she was three. There, Sherman's interests in art, movies, television, makeup and clothing began their lifelong evolution into artmaking. Her three siblings had 'artistic leanings' according to Sherman, and she would play with paint tubes they left behind. As a child, she also frequently posed for her father who was a dedicated amateur photographer, and was given her own Brownie camera at an early age. Beyond this, Sherman had little exposure to art, nor did she venture into nearby New York City as her parents considered the city too dangerous. Sherman says when she was young, her "idea of being an artistwas a courtroom artist or one of those boardwalk artists who do caricatures." Still, Sherman took high school art courses, and in 1972, enrolled in Buffalo State College, initially studying painting. She also drew self-portraits as a way of studying 'how a face is put together,' and during this period experimented with making mock covers of magazines like Vogue and Family Circle, her face superimposed on the covers.

Sherman began dating fellow art student Robert Longo, who was instrumental in introducing her to contemporary art, which resulted in her diminished interest in painting and an increasing focus on photography. Though she had failed a required photography class as a freshman, she took the course again with Barbara Jo Revelle, who she credits with introducing her to conceptual art and other contemporary trends, all of which had a liberating effect on Sherman. (left: The Fairies, 1976, black and white cut-out photographs mounted on paper, 10 x 23 inches, Lent by Elizabeth and Frank Leite)

As she began pursuing her own direction in photography, eschewing becoming literate in the academics of classic photography, Sherman found a vital support system through the artist-run, alternative space, Hallwalls, in Buffalo. At Hallwalls, with its communal atmosphere, Sherman became immersed in the work of a number of visiting artists like Suzy Lake, Katherina Sieverding, Hannah Wilke, and Lynda Benglis, and consequently began to identify her own direction of exploring cultural stereotypes of women through her art, performance and body art and dramatic characterizations.

Among the works in the exhibition is Sherman's early representation of herself in both male and female stereotypical roles in The Play of Selves, a drama which Sherman authored -- The sub characters (Vanity, Desire, Madness, and Agony) begin to close in on the male friend, features the artist in the roles of various invented personae. Also on view will be two rare surviving works from Sherman's The Murder Mystery series, a relatively unknown aspect of her work that contrasts to the entirely female roles of her first well-known series, the Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980). Sherman also explored male roles in her Bus Rider works of 1976. An example from this series will be included in the Montclair Art Museum's exhibition. The Unseen Cindy Sherman will also include Untitled, 1975, which Sherman considers her first important work. Consisting of 23 hand-colored photographs of herself progressing from drab to glamorous, this little-known work was exhibited in a group show of western New York artists at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 1975 with the title Laminated Transmutation. (right: The sub characters (Vanity, Desire, Madness, and Agony) begin to close in on The male friend, Act 3, Scene 7 from The Play of Selves, 1976, black and white cut out photographs mounted on paper, 15 ? x 11 inches, Lent by Elizabeth and Frank Leite)

The idea for the current exhibition came to the Montclair Art Museum through Sherman's niece, Ms. Dorothy Waldt, a resident of Glen Ridge, New Jersey. "Cindy gave the work I have to my dad, Bob Sherman and he gave it to meWe are so used to this stuff as our private treasures. The Montclair Art Museum is a little jewel and a serious museum so I thought it seemed perfect for MAM to be the vehicle to show these important works and to share them with everyone," said Ms. Waldt.

The Unseen Cindy Sherman is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published with Smart Art Press, Santa Monica, California, and authored by exhibition curator Gail Stavitsky.


Cindy Sherman
Metro Pictures, 8 May – 26 June, 2004
www.artnet.com

Cindy Sherman’s most recent series of clown images feature riotous makeup, flamboyant costumes and digitally produced backgrounds of synthetic colors and patterns. Behind the sheer visual lushness and latent humor/horror of the portraits, lies Sherman’s interest in revealing the underlying pathos of the hysterically happy or intensely nasty clown image; the sadness of the character behind the greasepaint.

Sherman has been working on the clowns for the last eighteen months. The first five images were shown in her survey exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, last summer. In the most recent pictures, Sherman combines several clown characters in single photographs, digitally manipulating the scale of the figures and the spatial background.

One of the most admired and influential artists of her generation, Sherman’s work has been collected and exhibited by major museums throughout the world since 1980. Numeros monographs have been published on her work including the most recent by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, “The Complete Untitled Film Stills.” Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York City.


Center for Art and Visual Culture presents White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art
www.umbc.edu/news/2003, July 14, 2003

UMBC's Center for Art and Visual Culture presents White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, organized by curator Maurice Berger, from October 9, 2003 through January 10, 2004. The exhibition features works by Max Becher & Andrea Robbins, Nayland Blake, Nancy Burson, Wendy Ewald, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Barbara Kruger, Nikki S. Lee, Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman and Gary Simmons. An opening reception will be held on October 9th from 5 to 7 pm.

White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art is the first exhibition of art that explores race and racism from the perspective of white people. Over the past twenty years, the cultural and scholarly discourse around race has expanded to include the study of whiteness and white privilege. This inquiry represents a radical shift in the way we think and talk about race in the United States. Since the advent of the modern civil rights movement, people of color have usually been responsible for leading the debate and discussion about race and racism?a discourse that has traditionally centered on the issue of African-American, Latino, Asian-American, and American-Indian victimization. While people of color are forced to evaluate the status of their race in relation to the prejudice they experience every day, most white people, even the most liberal, are usually oblivious to the psychological and political weight of their own color. It is precisely this unwillingness to mark whiteness, to assign it meaning, that has freed most white people from the responsibility of understanding their complicity in the social and cultural economy of racism. The study of whiteness asks all Americans?and especially white people?to take stock of the political, psychological, economic, and cultural implications of white skin, white entitlement, and white privilege.

A number of visual artists?some white, some of color?have taken their lead from progressive writers and scholars who have used the concept of ?whiteness? to denote the racial counterpart of ?blackness.? To these artists, whiteness is something that must be marked, represented, and explored. To them, whiteness is not just a color. It is also a ubiquitous and unexamined state of mind and body?a powerful norm that had been so constant and persistent in society that white people have never needed to acknowledge or name it.


White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art gives voice to twelve contemporary artists who explicitly address the issue of whiteness: Max Becher and Andrea Robbin's German Indian series (1997-98)?photographs of German men, women, and children who regularly attend carnivals dressed up as Native Americans?examines white people's fascination with and appropriation of racial otherness. Nayland Blake's Invisible Man (1994) challenges the socially and culturally prescribed boundaries of race, questioning both the purity and meaning of whiteness itself. Nancy Burson's Untitled (Guys Who Look Like Jesus) (2000-01), the culmination of a national search for people who believe they look like Christ, depicts eight men of varying ages and races. The series challenges one of Christianity's (and whiteness') most generative and foundational myths: that of Aryan purity as a metaphor of godliness and the triumph over evil. Wendy Ewald's White Girl's Alphabet?Andover, Massachusetts (2002), a project created in collaboration with teenage subjects, represents a poignant, humanistic exploration of the vulnerabilities and ambivalence that underwrite both whiteness and femininity. William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection Series: Johannesburg?2nd Greatest City after Paris; Monument; Mine; Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old (1981?91) are a series of short films based on charcoal drawings that play on the medium's innate black-and-white aesthetic to explore the complex, and often fragile realities of white power and black subservience in apartheid-era South Africa. Barbara Kruger, in a work specifically commissioned for the exhibition, will create a billboard series in a number of neighborhoods in Baltimore City. In Nikki S. Lee's The Yuppie Series (1998), the Korean-born artist infiltrates and documents the world of mostly white, economically privileged Wall Street professionals, meticulously adopting her colleagues' code of dress, behavior, and living habits. The series represents both a meticulous documentation of white privilege, clannishness, and exclusivity as well as Lee's own alienation in the face of white racism and indifference. Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley's Heidi (1992), an hour-long video, represents a disquieting journey into the dysfunctional behavior and emotional brutality that they myth of the pristine and wholesome white middle-class family attempts to conceal. Cindy Sherman, in a series of early photographs, each depicting the artist masquerading as a bus passenger, depicts a range of racial and class types that include some of the earliest attempts by a visual artist to see whiteness as both a racial category and a stereotype (Bus Riders, 1976-2000). In another series, Untitled (2000), Sherman fixes her lens on white women, cycling through a range of characterological (and often stereotypical) types, from the erstwhile female executive to the WASP matron. Gary Simmons' Big Still (2001), a monumental, white-washed moonshine still, is a monument to the world of white poverty?the hillbillies and ?white trash? of depression-era America? that has been erased from a mainstream history defined by white patriarchy and white power.


Serpentine Gallery
Teachers’ Notes
3 June – 25 August 2003
CINDY SHERMAN: AN INTRODUCTION

THE ARTIST & EXHIBITION

Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. She is one of the most influential artists of the Twentieth Century with work included in major private and public collection throughout the world. Since the beginning of her career in the mid-1970s, Cindy Sherman has been taking photographs of herself and is renowned for her ability to transform herself into a wide array of characters. Her variety of personas and disguises explore and expose well-defined mages and stereotypes of women in Western society throughout the ages. She has combined the roles of director and leading actress or photographer and model to create over 400 photographic works of art, most of which feature a single, posed figure.

Sherman insists that these images are not described as self-portraits, as she does not identify herself with any of them - her characters are different from one another and different from her. Whilst they are technically photographs in which she appears, they do not convey her likeness, as a self-portrait would. Neither can they be seen as portraits in the most traditional sense as they do not represent actual people in real places, at specific times. Her work has sometimes been described as performance, but again this definition is not an accurate one, as Sherman never appears in these guises publicly - she becomes these characters in the privacy of her own studio.

This survey exhibition, her first in the UK for almost ten years, brings together over 50 works that span the artist’s career including new photographs shown for the first time. Examples of key bodies of work have been brought together to create a selection of images from her ‘Murder Mystery’ series of the 1970s to her newest work based on the representation of clowns. From the Serpentine Gallery, the exhibition will travel to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (6 December 2003 – 7 march 2004). To coincide with the Serpentine Gallery exhibition, Sherman has made 10 large-scale photographs for display on platform 4 at London’s Gloucester Road Underground Station in a commission for the Serpentine Gallery and London Underground.

Sherman’s career can be broken into a number of bodies of work, mot of which are on display here. For the purposes of these notes, these bodies have been named and will be discussed in turn as follows (although it is important to recognise that all of Sherman’s work is ‘untitled’):

Untitled A, B, C and D (1975)
Student work in which Sherman presents herself as different characters – three female, one male.

Murder Mystery People (1975)
17 small black-and-white photographs of characters from a murder mystery film or theatre production.

Film Stills (1970s)
Black-and-white photographs of characters and settings from imaginary 1950s and 60s Hollywood B-movies.

The Centrefolds (1981)
Colour horizontal photographs commissioned by Artforum magazine, based on the poses and look of the centre spreads of pornographic magazines.

Fashion Photography (1980s)
A series of colour photographs inspired by fashion houses and magazines.

History Portraits (1989 - 90)
Large-scale, framed photographs loosely based on old master paintings.

Portraits (2000 - 1)
Large-scale colour photographs specifically referencing the genre of commercial photography.

Clowns (2003)
A new body of work featuring clowns set against digitally produced psychedelic backgrounds.

Untitled A, B, C and D (1975)

“These images were from a series of head shots that I made to show the process of turning one character into another. At that time I was merely interested in the use of make-up on a face as paint used on a blank canvas.” Cindy Sherman, 1998

Sherman was 21 years of age and still at college (the State University College of Buffalo) when she made this body of work, consisting of a series of black and white head shots of women of three different ages and a man. Untitled A, B, C and D demonstrates the way Sherman first began to transform herself, relying only on simple make-up, facial expressions, hairstyles and a minimum of props to take on different roles. In Untitled A, a cheerful young woman grins out from under a knitted hat. In Untitled B, a young man with tanned skin and heavy eyebrows wears a goofy smile under a striped hat. In Untitled C, a shy teenage girl wears a ballet outfit. In Untitled D, a young girl smiles shyly, her hair tied back with tiny bow hair clips. These images do not depict specific individuals, but ‘types’.

Murder Mystery People (1975)

“I absorbed my ideas for the women in these photos from every cultural source that I’ve ever had access to, including film, TV, advertisements, magazines, as well as any adult role models from my youth.”
(Cindy Sherman, 1998)

The Murder Mystery People consisted of seventeen small-scale black-and-white photographs, features individual characters from a fictional murder-mystery film or theatre production. Sherman has photographed herself against a white wall in her studio in Buffalo, New York, in a seemingly impromptu manner, with self-timer and cord visible between the artist and camera. When Sherman first showed this series, she cut out the figures and assembled them into scenes, taping them to the wall and then later, on to boards, to create composite images, not unlike a storyboard for film or theatre. Sherman has based this work on the generic suspense narrative – each character assumes the role of a member of cast – from the butler to the detective. The title of one image identifies the actress ‘at the murder scene’, whilst another names the son and daughter ‘at funeral’.

Film Stills (1970s)

“Some people have told me they remember the movie that one of my images I derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all.”
(Cindy Sherman 1983)

Sherman first became known in the late 1970s for her series of Untitled Film Stills, black-and-white photos in which she mimicked the characters and settings of imaginary 1950s and 60s Hollywood B-movies. The series consists of 69 photos created between 1977 and 1980, after moving from Buffalo to Manhattan. These constructed scenes are reminiscent of film stills or celebrity publicity photos of the 1950s and 60s. Sherman has not specifically referenced any real films in this work, instead she has drawn on her knowledge and experience of the film images of that era – a knowledge and experience that circulates within a collective consciousness. She invites the viewer to create their own narrative around the scenarios she sets up: “Obviously I am trying to force the viewer into coming up with their own interpretation by the fact that I leave everything untitled. Ideally, I want people to question whatever preconceived notions they may have about a particular ‘scenario’ about a character.” (Cindy Sherman, 1998).

The Centrefolds (1981)

Commissioned by Artforum magazine, these horizontal images are based on the poses and look of the centre spreads of pornographic magazines. Some of her earliest works in colour, The Centrefolds depict women draped in temporary clothing (a bathrobe, a sheet) as if between moments of undress, caught in the middle of a disturbed state. Large enough to be life-size, these images portray young women looking off to the side, away form the camera, with a vacant or pensive look. Background details, make-up and props are kept to a minimum, with concentration placed on the use of light and colour instead. On first release, these images created quite a stir. Although Sherman wanted to subvert the tradition of the nude centrefold, she was criticized for reaffirming sexist stereotypes, with some critics even reading one of the works as a scene after a rape. Artforum decided to reject the images and did not publish them as two-page layouts. Collectors, however, had a very different reaction once they were exhibited in the large proportions we see here.

Fashion Photography (1980s)

Inspired by fashion photography, Sherman began to create colour images responding to the construction and circulation of different images of femininity in the 1980s. A natural extension of film and television, fashion provided another means of ‘masquerade’ for Sherman. A number of series have been made in response to commissions from designers and publications, such as Jean-Paul Gaultier and Vogue, allowing for Sherman to respond directly to the influence of female identities and stereotypes. The clothes provided for her shoots, became her costumes – something she would pick up again in the 1990s and beyond. A particularly well known image from the Fashion series, Untitled #123 (1983) shows a woman wearing a black suit with large shoulder pads, mimicking the fashion of the time, with a long platinum blond wig hanging across her face - a complete disguise for Sherman.

History Portraits (1989 - 1990)

There are thirty-five works in this series, where Sherman has created her own unique renditions of historical portraits, loosely based on old master paintings. Sherman makes reference to the representation of women and men within Western European history of art and responds to the genre of portraiture in its most traditional sense. She uses the ‘codes’ of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portrait painters, such as dress, props and poses, to depict characters of a particular time, role and status in society. Of course the difference here is that Sherman is neither representing a particular person, nor is she representing them at an actual time or in a specific place. She has, by default, recreated specific works of art, such as Raphael’s La Fornarina (Untitled #205 [1989]) and Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus (Untitled # 224 [1990]). According to the artist, she did not set out to refer explicitly to these works, but in some cases her props called to mind actual paintings. Sherman’s means of ‘disguise’ becomes more obvious in these works – she is purposefully leaving evident the means by which the characters have been constructed. Make-up is applied thickly, in a mask-like manner and prosthetics are incorporated. In Untitled # 205, fake breasts and an artificial stomach are strapped on, with no attempt to disguise the joins between ‘real’ and ‘fake’.

Portraits (2000 - 1)

This body of work, focussing on the traditional head and shoulders view of a single ‘sitter’ suggests the work of a commercial photographer – the kind of photo that would be taken in a professional photographer’s studio to be framed and placed on the side-boards of friends and family. The monochromatic backgrounds and expressions of the ‘sitter’ smiling directly at the camera, particularly suggest that these represent the type of photo taken professionally. Sherman was interested in creating images of older women who might actually exist – types of ordinary people recognisable to us all. She describes these characters as, “very ordinary, older women – the type you’d spot in a supermarket’. The each seem to have a story to tell, dressed up in their fineries or favourite items of clothing, with ‘looks’ that appear out of date.

Clowns (2003)

“I’m more intrigued by things that are hard to look at. Some people are really terrified of clowns. I find them sort of sad, pathetic, but also terrifying, hysterical.”
(Cindy Sherman 2003)

Her most recent body of work, shown at the Serpentine Gallery for the first time, is based on clowns. Initially inspired by a single article of clothing – pyjamas with fur-like buttons, Sherman came up with the idea of working with clown imagery. Invited by Vogue to be guest fashion editor for the May edition, Sherman took up the opportunity to develop a new series of images, using clothes that had appeared on the autumn/winter catwalks. She plays on the reactions of adults and children to clowns, often involving fear or a sense of unease at what lies beneath the cheerful exterior or the masquerade that is clowning. Sherman is fascinated in the person behind the greasepaint and is interested in revealing a little of the personality behind the clown in some works. What becomes apparent are split personalities – the sad clown behind the happy face, the hint of the evil behind a calm exterior. The formal poses of the clowns, presented on brightly coloured, patterned backdrops, could be seen to resemble a set of promotional posters for the circus.


Cindy Sherman Retrospective
An artist to be taken seriously
By Richard Phillips
18 August 1999
www.wsws.org/articles/1999

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney is hosting a major retrospective by American artist/photographer Cindy Sherman. The exhibition, which includes photographs from the mid-1970s through to 1996, is jointly organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Los Angeles and will be shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto after the Sydney season concludes on August 30.

Sherman first won artistic recognition for her Untitled Film Stills (1977-80)—a series of 69 enigmatic black-and-white self-portraits emulating movie publicity shots from the 1940s and 50s. Over the last 30 years she has risen to become the most widely known and financially successful art photographer in the United States. Her latest photographs are large colour prints of masks and dolls, as well as detailed arrangements of dummies, body parts and other inanimate objects.

Sherman's prints generally sell for between $20,000 and $50,000. A 20 x 25 centimetre print from the Untitled Film Stills series was recently auctioned by Christie's for a record $190,000—an unprecedented figure for a living artist/photographer. In 1996, New York's Museum of Modern Art paid $US1 million for the complete Untitled Film Stills series.

Much praise and numerous critiques have been published about Sherman. She has been elevated to virtual heroine status by a number of post-modernist ideologues. "Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman", an essay by Amelia Jones in the current exhibition's catalogue provides an example of the overblown verbiage used by some critics. [1] Those able to decipher this impenetrable essay will discover little substance, let alone any explanation of the evolution of Sherman's work over the last two decades, its strengths and, most importantly, some of its underlying weaknesses.

Born in New Jersey in 1954, Sherman grew up in suburban Long Island and attended the State University College in Buffalo, New York where she studied painting and photography. After initial difficulties with the technical aspects of photographic printmaking, Sherman was introduced to conceptual art and began using the camera to produce self-portraits. The first of these are included in the retrospective.

After graduation Sherman moved to New York with artist Robert Longo, and at the end of 1977 began to produce the first of her Untitled Film Stills. Using her apartment and a range of locations in and around New York City, Sherman's strangely nostalgic and lonely self-portraits record her masquerading as a range of characters: a blonde actress, a secretary, housewife, schoolgirl, a Latin film star and a young girl running away from home.

None of Sherman's photographs are titled, her aim being to force the viewer to draw their own conclusions from the works. "These are pictures of emotions personified, entirely of themselves with their own presence—not of me," Sherman commented in an earlier exhibition catalogue.

"The issue of the identity of the model is no more interesting than the possible symbolism of any other detail. When I prepare each character I have to consider what I'm working against; that people are going to look under the make-up and wigs for that common denominator, the recognisable. I'm trying to make other people recognise something of themselves rather than me."

In 1980-81, Sherman began using colour film and placed her invented characters in front of scenes projected onto backdrops. Known as the Rear Screen Projections, these photographs were inspired by television images and other contemporary visuals. These were followed by Centrefolds, photographs commissioned for the Artforum magazine. The larger-than-life images parodied semi-pornographic magazine photographs. Artforum rejected the pictures with some feminist critics claiming that Sherman was "reinforcing sexist stereotypes". The Pink Robe series followed in 1982 together with commission work for some prestigious fashion houses.

One of the most striking images from this period is her 1983 Untitled #122, a stark self-portrait in which Sherman wears a platinum blonde wig and shoulder-padded overcoat. The long blonde hair covers Sherman's face, one blood-shot eye is partially visible, her arms are by her side, and fists are tightly clenched. The character, who is charged with unreleased tension and anger, is ready to fly into a rage. What individuals or event, what sort of society, has produced this almost apoplectic state? The untitled photograph provides no real clues and therefore forces the viewers to find their own answers.

Fairy Tales (1985) marked another departure. Sherman began using a range of theatrical props and other accoutrements to create disturbing and partly comic images influenced by horror movies. This was followed by the History Portraits (1989-90), in which the artist, using plastic body parts and other bits and pieces, photographed herself as characters drawn from old master paintings, in particular Caravaggio's Sick Bacchus, Jean Fouquet's Madonna of Melun and Raphael's La Fornarina.

Sex Pictures (1992), Sherman's next major series, was produced in response to attacks on freedom of expression by the Christian Fundamentalists and extreme rightwing elements in the United States. It followed government amendments prohibiting the National Endowment for the Arts from providing grants for art work considered obscene and the attempted prosecution of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati over an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs. Sherman's sexually explicit and partly abstract photographs mock conventional conceptions of obscenity and defied those demanding increased censorship. The photographs are a surreal combination of artificial body parts, fake genitalia and dismembered medical dummies in lewd poses.

The most recent photographs included in the current retrospective—the Horror and Surrealist Pictures (1994-96)—are without doubt Sherman's most demanding images. Many have been favourably compared to paintings and prints by Hieronymous Bosch, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Francisco Goya; in particular Goya's Los Caprichos and his famous The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

These images fall into two categories: the mask portraits; and photographed arrangements of mannequins, toys, rotten garbage, broken domestic goods and unidentifiable waste products. More abstract in form, these works are intensely claustrophobic works, saturated with sadness and disillusionment. Many of these pictures are grotesque, challenge conventional conceptions of beauty, and demand that the viewer explore the darker depths of their subconscious and imagination—sensations and thoughts that generally only come to the surface during dreams or nightmares.

In a 1997 interview, Sherman explained that she started creating these images in an effort to more deeply examine and then transcend ordinary conceptions of beauty. "I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realise what you are looking at is something totally opposite. It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest or the most obvious way to see the world. It's more challenging to look at the other side," she said.

Not all of this is successful. Some photographs are simply too clever or self-conscious. The History Portraits (1989-90) in my opinion represent an artistic and creative low. The images are little more than smug parodies of classical art portraiture and make no emotional connection, or provoke any inner exploration by the viewer. They contain none of the intense irreverence of the best Dadaist work or the mysterious radicalism of the Surrealists. The political message, drawn from the post-modernist schema, is obvious: civilisation and history is entirely subjective—something invented, to be chopped up and reconstituted according to one's own whim. History has no value, other than what it can provide for the immediate needs of those studying it.

It would be a mistake, though, to write off Sherman or conclude that this posturing—and there is an echo of this in the Sex Pictures —is a permanent feature of her work. The artist/photographer's less successful work, moreover, has to be understood within the social and intellectual conditions in which it was produced.

Sherman emerged in the rarified New York art scene during the 1980s. As art critic Robert Hughes explained in his essay, "The Decline of the City of Mahagonny":

"At the end of the eighties there may have been five hundred people in the world who could pay more than $25 million for a work of art, and tens of thousands who could pay a million: a situation with no historical precedents at all. Never before have the impulses of art appreciation and collecting been so nakedly harnessed to gratuitous, philistine social display as in the late 1980s, and nowhere more so than in the United States".

And New York, Hughes declared, had become an "immense bourse in which every kind of art is traded for ever-escalating prices". A place of "premature canonizations and record bids, and the conversion of much of its museum system into a promotional machine".

The latest generation of American artists, according to Hughes, operate on the basis that "nature is dead, culture is all" and everything is "mediated to the point where nothing can be seen in its true quality". The inflated prices, art dealer speculation and vast amounts of media hype and premature careerism had so distorted the American art world "that a serious artist in New York must face the same unreality and weightlessness as a serious actor in Los Angeles."

So while the art market was booming, the artistic and intellectual life was being hollowed out with a predominance of overrated and mainly unemotional work. Typical, and especially from those influenced by the Andy Warhol school, was a tendency to blandly reproduce images from the popular media—film, television and advertising—in the belief that such presentations rebelled against traditional artistic values or represented some new initiative.

Sherman worked in, and was no doubt influenced by, these intellectually unfavourable conditions. But while popular cultural icons and conceptions were her starting point, Sherman's photographs rose above the trite and largely forgettable work then on display. Instead of passively recreating the images around her—frequently an indication that the artist has little to say—Sherman often made a real emotional connection and compelled her viewers to think.

Sherman is a serious artist who is attempting to explore, and perhaps understand more profoundly, some aspects of the disturbing social and psychic reality of society at the end of the 20th century. Her staged photographs and unsettling "still-life" arrangements are the means through she is conducting this exploration. Those approaching the retrospective with fixed ideas about what a photographer should or should not do will gain little from a visit to the exhibition. Those able to immerse themselves in her work will be rewarded.

Footnote

1. A typical paragraph:
"...Sherman's practice participates in what I have argued to be the opening of the subject to otherness (the baring of the circuits of desire connecting self and other in a dynamic of intersubjectivity) that gives what we might call postermodernism its most remarkable and particular antimodernist thrust. In feminist and phenomenological terms, the body, which instantiates the self, is a 'modality of reflexivity,' posing the subject in relation to the other in a reciprocal relationship; through gendered/sexual performances of the body, the subject is situated and situates herself through the other. The subject, then, is never complete within itself but is always contingent on others, and the glue of this intersubjectivity is the desire binding us together (the projective gaze is one mode of intersubjectivity but functions specifically to veil this contingency by projecting lack onto the other rather than admitting its own). It is the intersubjective dimension of Sherman's work that has largely been ignored (not surprisingly since it exposed the investedness and contingency of every reading of her pictures)."

["Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman", by Amelia Jones, Cindy Sherman: Retrospective; Thames and Hudson, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; 1997, page 33]