What Is Cindy Shermans Preferred Motif in Her Art
©2011 CINDY SHERMAN/MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, ACQUIRED THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF AN ANONYMOUS DONOR, MICHAEL LYNNE, CHARLES HEILBRONN, AND THE CAROL AND DAVID APPEL FAMILY FUND
Starting with the game-changing black-and-white "Untitled Film Stills" she created in the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman has shown herself to be the ultimate chief of self-morphing, utilizing everything from old-fashioned makeup and prosthetics to digital applied science, inventing and portraying boggling alter egos and multiple identities that brilliantly reflect our epitome-saturated culture—and in the process inventing her ain genre.
Call it the Cindy Sherman outcome. Whether information technology's those iconic stills of faux movie house moments or her more contempo scary-funny clown serial, the tragicomic coven of aging lodge women or the larger-than-life photographic murals that popped up at the 2011 Venice Biennale (much to the please of visitors who posed with them), Sherman's brilliant manipulations of her own epitome have mirrored—and in some cases anticipated—the zeitgeist. Now, with the major career retrospective that opens at New York's Museum of Modern Art on February 26 (up through June eleven), the full extent of Sherman's imagination and prescient vision will be on display.
"Her piece of work has in some ways presaged the media historic period that we live in now and besides absolutely responds to it," says MoMA photography curator Eva Respini, who co-organized the retrospective, which includes 175 images. "A number of younger artists are very much indebted to Sherman in their exploration of not only identity simply besides the nature of representation. Now we all accept it for granted that a photograph can be Photoshopped. Nosotros live in the era of YouTube fame and reality-Television receiver shows and makeovers, where y'all tin can be anything y'all want to be any minute of the twenty-four hours, and artists are responding to that. Cindy was one of the first to explore the idea of the malleability or fluidity of identity."
Sherman'due south coup was to bandage herself as subject matter, making each of her staged characters the star of an implicit narrative, from the lush color centerfolds that followed the "Picture show Stills," in 1982, to the strangely sexualized "Cleaved Dolls" of the '90s. No wonder the work of so many artists parallels Sherman'due south, or at least mines similar conceptual veins: function-playing and the nature of identity; sexual and cultural stereotypes; the pressure level to suit to the images of perfection promulgated through television, motion picture, and advert.
Call back of Lisa Yuskavage'southward send-ups of idealized female anatomy, George Condo'southward bizarre bandage of invented characters, or the work of such chameleon-like performers equally Tracey Ullman, Anna Deavere Smith, and Tamy Ben Tor. And then in that location is a whole new crop of artists whose sensibility has been shaped by the Cyberspace and social media, major influences that didn't fifty-fifty exist when Sherman outset began her photographic odyssey.
Sherman's paradigm shift was one stride ahead of technology. Her kaleidoscopic investigation of the essence of her own—and, by extension, society'south—identity circuitous has relied on ingenuity, not gigabytes. Thanks to today's digital hegemony, the notion of fluidity—for Sherman an intellectual and artistic ploy—is at present not just de rigueur but de facto. Polymorphously perverse has become pervasive. The implicit has become increasingly explicit. Artistic personae can non only exist instantly created but also instantly blithe and disseminated. Fine art via avatar.
Take Ryan Trecartin, who was all-powerful an fine art star in 2009, when his work was seen in the New Museum's "Younger Than Jesus" evidence. Now 30, he began taking pictures of himself and his friends part playing and cross-dressing while still in inferior high schoolhouse, when he was besides introduced to Sherman's piece of work. Trecartin's trippy videos feature himself and others in wild makeup, wigs, and costumes à la Sherman—if Sherman were on acid. His psychedelically hued, reality TV–infused shape-shifting is Proteus in a Cuisinart—perfect for the attention-deficit disorder of today'south app-fond world. Says Respini, "He's sort of the 21st-century inheritor of Cindy'due south legacy."
The work of 27-year-one-time Jillian Mayer is somewhat similar to Trecartin's and shares with information technology a Shermanesque sense of masquerade. In the hilarious video I Am Your Grandma (2011), Mayer plays both the future grandmother of a furious infant and the tearful babe. But this is grandma as gremlin. Wearing various Mardi Gras getups—makeup, headgear, and masks that are alternately insectlike, coneheaded, witchy, and shamanesque—she chants, "I wish I could have met you lot. I would have hugged yous then. But y'all are in the future, you go loved by video." In the disturbing H.I.L.Grand.D.A. (2011), Mayer, like Sherman in her "History Portraits" (1988–90), appropriates a famous artwork. Her impersonation of Venus de Milo takes a fierce plough when she amputates her own arms.
Says Mayer, "Cindy Sherman opened a lot of the doors. She was the trendsetter in terms of distorted characters within self-portraiture. Originally painters painted self-portraits, and and so she kind of blew information technology open with photographic portraiture, and now there are all these avenues younger artists are taking, which would not have been so easy without her piece of work."
As Whitney Museum curator Donna De Salvo observes, "Cindy is an incredibly influential figure. She fundamentally nailed it in terms of understanding the style images are constructed. Portraiture was never considered something conceptual in quite the manner that she took it on."
By deconstructing and reinventing portraiture, which in itself was something of a expressionless genre when she arrived on the scene, Sherman influenced not only photographers simply besides painters and performance and video artists. And past limiting her subject matter strictly to herself, while at the same time excavating countless permutations, she inspired a generation of younger artists to explore their ain identities across a range of mediums. "What she does is inside a very narrow set up of parameters that she'due south been able to mine brilliantly for the last 35 years," says Respini.
Photographer Abe Frajndlich'due south recent book Penelope's Hungry Optics, published by Schirmer/Mosel, a collection of his portraits of famous photographers, features a stunning picture of Sherman on its cover. Eyes closed, bare of any bamboozlement but the slightest hint of makeup, Sherman is shown totally unmasked.
Says Frajndlich, "What Cindy did, starting with the 'Film Stills,' is she realized the caste to which the stills used to promote cinema influenced the way people portrayed themselves, and she saw information technology as pure theater. That'south what I see equally 1 of her dandy strengths—the theatrics of camera vision. And she played it out incredibly, and so she just used that as the stepping-stone to have information technology further and farther and further out. Then much of her work is performance, so much is improvisation, so much is theater. I am sure there are all kinds of people who look at Cindy every bit their god."
Other Sherman progeny include Nikki Due south. Lee, who impersonates a fellow member of a cultural group (yuppies, senior citizens), interacts with each group, and and then documents it in a snapshot; and Yasumasa Morimura, who photographs himself as various cinematic femmes fatales, from Audrey Hepburn to Elizabeth Taylor. Then there is Laurel Nakadate, who doesn't then much transform herself every bit insinuate herself into a narrative past picking up unmarried men on the street and and then videotaping them as they engage with her in an bearding fantasy.
Sherman's dazzling skill every bit a perpetual shape-shifter is peradventure her major contribution to contemporary art. A less conspicuous but equally important legacy involves the way her work has permanently blurred the line between art and photography. Sherman's oeuvre, from her offset solo show, in 1981, helped bring most a seismic shift in the curatorial and art-historical debate near photography as high art. Although there are many famously innovative photographers who came before her, from Man Ray to Diane Arbus, all of them were considered first and foremost photographers. Thanks in function to Sherman, since the early on '80s photography has been considered on a par with painting.
"I think I was part of a movement, a generation, and perchance the most popular one of that movement at the time, just it probably would have happened without me," says Sherman. "The art globe was ready for something new, something beyond painting. A group of mostly women happened to be the ones to sort of take that on, partly because they felt excluded from the rest of the [male] art world, and thought, 'Nobody is playing with photography. Permit's take that as our tool.'"
Observes Dennis Scholl, who was an early collector of the work of Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Catherine Opie, and Katy Grannan, "I really think almost all the women who went to Yale to study photography who would have never had an clue of pursuing this kind of fine art if it weren't for Cindy. She fabricated information technology seem possible, and she also took photography and helped make it not the redheaded stepchild. She played a panthera leo'south share in the crossover of photography equally fine art."
Not surprisingly, a second wave of innovative female photographers has followed in Sherman's wake. Catherine Opie's work focuses on gender identity. In the 1990s, she began taking pictures of herself and her lesbian friends in Los Angeles sporting obviously fake mustaches. In a later series, the transgender element became more nuanced. "Afterwards the portraits became very well known, [people] would point to a portrait and say, 'Is information technology a male child or a girl?' And I would say it's a adult female, just that's not the point of the body of piece of work. The point is that we are very fluid with gender," Opie explains in a video interview on YouTube.
Katy Grannan has taken a unlike tack in her hit explorations of mutable identity. For her series "The Westerns," she placed ads in local newspapers inviting people to pose as they wished for photographs. Cultural stereotypes have clearly permeated the collective unconscious; women (and men dressing as women) splay themselves, nude and clothed, in bedrooms and on beaches, in poses that await cinematic even if they are not. Shot in color, many of the images are vaguely reminiscent of Sherman'due south "Untitled Pic Stills."
Lorna Simpson recently took a page straight from the "Stills" when she used a found archive of 1950s black-and-white photographs of an African American woman to create 3 different series, including one in which she replaced the adult female with images of herself and another in which she added her gender-bending interpretations.
Alex Prager, who photographs her Los Angeles–based coterie to create tableaux of archetypes fully attired in makeup, wigs, and retro fashions, is a direct descendant of Sherman. Prager too draws on films for inspiration. But her pictures are, she says, "exaggerated moments I decided to create that may have happened in existent life." Says Prager of Sherman's influence, "She'southward a woman commenting on women and so am I. I'1000 also attracted to the weird and bizarre, and she's a chief at that. I relate to her use of color, lighting, and the way her 'scenes' are mocked up in a mode that is never too clean."
Sherman'due south staged scenes were in themselves something of an innovation. Respini says, "She emerged simply before the nail of staged photography in the '90s, with people like Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall. And I think it's no coincidence that her extremely fictional photographs came before what is now the de facto mode of photography—staged and fictional cinematic tableaux. A lot of younger artists are interested in using a photographic space that is a fictional infinite, whether it'southward created in the studio or appropriating pictures from the Internet."
In subtle and not-so-subtle means, Sherman's accomplish also extends to painters. Says Julie Heffernan, "I remember how heady it was to see Cindy Sherman'southward piece of work for the first time, to walk into a gallery and see, suddenly, a room total of women's faces. Disguised or not, it was thrilling. Hither nosotros were, women coming out of the woodwork. She mirrored my state of heed at the time, a adult female artist who was tired of all the bravado of the male-dominated art globe."
Heffernan, whose paintings sometimes include her own image and tend toward the baroque, likewise credits Sherman with "giving me permission to dig deeper and trust what I would find at that place. It was similar she was telling us secrets at a slumber party and we all got more than wild and indiscreet along with her."
Adds Marilyn Minter, who uses photographs as the ground of her paintings and is renowned for her lush, visceral images of mud-splashed Sex and the City–style shoes, models gagging on pearls, and tongues lapping oozing liquids, "Cindy inverse all women's lives—she put names to the stereotypes associated with women past making pictures of them. When y'all tin name something, you tin laugh at it."
Claudia Doring-Baez has gone all out in her appreciation of Sherman's work, appropriating the "Movie Stills" in a serial of oil paintings for her graduate thesis project at the Studio School in New York, including such classics as Untitled Picture show Still #7, in which a sideslip-clad Sherman is framed in a window, holding a martini glass. Below her looms a mysterious effigy in a straw lid. "I was born in 1960, so when Cindy's work came out in the '80s information technology was revolutionary, it was amazing," Doring-Baez says. "She was the first adult female who empowered women at the time. Beingness a woman is an identity trouble. We are all every single 1 of those women that Cindy created."
Of course, it is not only female artists who respond strongly to Sherman's work. John Currin says he has been fascinated by Untitled Pic Still #7 for years. "I recall Sherman has obviously influenced me, or I've just ripped things off from her. I thought the straw chapeau in that image was an amazing sinister presence. Information technology stuck with me, and I used it in The Dogwood Thieves, which is a painting of 2 women clutching a hat. Cindy is someone who can create a new kind of scary clown that is non a cliche. Her work is very straightforwardly put together, simply it is incredibly mysterious and magical."
Peradventure the earth's most self-effacing artist (literally and figuratively), Sherman refuses to accept whatsoever credit for her innovations. What has she herself discovered through her work? "I remember information technology has made me realize that nosotros've all chosen who we are in terms of how nosotros want the world to come across us," she says.
True to form, Sherman's approach remains modestly depression tech. Although her nigh recent work relies on Photoshop to subtly alter her face, provide intricate backgrounds, or even clone like personae within a unmarried piece, "I nevertheless similar the idea of challenging myself through the more easily-on methods, only because I think it'south more challenging when you are limited," Sherman says.
"With Photoshop anything goes, and I don't want to brand easy crazy characters just because I tin. I recollect at that place are some artists who are fine without whatsoever boundaries. It somehow frees them. Simply I really demand certain limitations to know how far I can go and work inside that." Few current artists have gone as far.
Phoebe Hoban is a New York–based author who covers art and culture for a variety of publications. Her biography Alice Neel: The Art of Non Sitting Pretty was published by St. Martin's Press in 2010.
Source: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/the-cindy-sherman-effect-505/
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