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| Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, #54, 1980 |
As an art
history student in the early1990s, I thought Cindy
Sherman’s Film Stills were brilliant
in their conceit and their critique of the movie star images of women that we
were still unconsciously devouring. Their unsettling confrontation of our gaze,
the framing and composition that makes everything not quite right, and the
ambiguous narratives they incite in our minds, underly endlessly fascinating photographs.
And no one else was doing quite the same thing in the 1970s and 1980s. Wandering through
the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I couldn’t
help thinking that the Untitled Film
Stills were still, all these years later, among Sherman’s most astute and
provocative images.
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| Cindy Sherman, Untitled #479, 1975 |
It’s a lot
to ask an artist who had so much success early in her career to keep producing
work at the cutting edge of her chosen medium. Sherman has done this to varying
degrees of success. Of course, all her work has been celebrated, but I am not
convinced that it all warrants the same levels of applause. What makes the
early film stills so brilliant is their multiple meanings and multiple suggestions.
It’s not simply that the figure becomes androgynous, or the woman looks back,
or the body has been cut off by the side of the frame. For us as viewers, their
challenge is often that they are playful and funny and critical and
compassionate all at the same time. The end result is that we don’t quite know
how we are being asked to respond, and indeed, if our instinctive response is
appropriate. This level of density is difficult to sustain,
and as I say, she doesn’t always achieve it.
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| Cindy Sherman, Untitled, #122, 1983 |
That said, in
a disturbing series where she does succeed, Sherman was commissioned to produce
centerfolds for fashion magazines. Her way of critiquing the glamour and false
notions of beauty propagated by the industry—and happily consumed by us—was to masquerade
as angry, down and out, face-lifted and depressed women. Thus,
the very companies that commissioned her work come under fire for their absurdist notions of beauty, elegance and the desirability of women. We see figures displaying unseemly emotions in oversized, confrontational images, leaving us no choice
but to question our own desire to look. Ironically, we admire the clothes of
these same figures who are dressed in a fine Comme des Garçons suit, or an
exquisite Balenciaga dress. Unnervingly, with their slick photographic surfaces,
rich colors, and desirable clothes, the images are sumptuous
and it's difficult not to keep looking. Until, of course, we recognize that we
are also the very problem Sherman is critiquing in the negative performance of
the fashion industry.
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| Cindy Sherman, Untitled #250, 1992 |
In some of
the most powerful works on display, Sherman makes a series of macabre sex scenes
that verge into pornography. In a clear reference to the surrealist works of
Hans Bellmer, Sherman uses dolls, masks and medical prostheses to create disturbing,
impossible figures in poses that make us recoil. Even though they
are dolls, I found myself responding to the figures as though they were people.
They had the same effect as cartoons – we give them emotions, and human
qualities, even when they comprise horrific details such as sausages coming
out of a man’s vagina. It’s this ability to shift her viewer between laughter
and horror, squeamishness and intellectual curiosity that makes Sherman’s work powerful.
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| Cindy Sherman, Untitled #92, 1981 |
If the
genre of portraiture has conventionally been used to
represent identity, to flaunt the wealth and social status of the sitter, to
record and pay homage to the powerful—I think here of Popes and Kings—Sherman turns
the genre inside out. Like mirrors to our own desire for identity, or admiration of power and
status, Sherman exploits the portrait to expose our subconscious role in posing
and looking at portraits. We see women in distress, anxiety ridden heroines, performing
for their audience, but yet, deeply uncomfortable at being looked at. Effectively,
Sherman uses her own face and body in photographs to show women in all
different states of social grooming, to represent a portrait of the way that we
see and represent women. Thus, her work is not just about the world we live in,
but the way we imagine that world to be, as it is envisioned through the
material and mental images of women.
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| Cindy Sherman, Untitled, #574, 2016 |
Lastly, seeing
the work in this retrospective format gives insight into how Sherman continues
to re-invent her work. So much of her ability to do this grows from her full
embrace of the technology of photography. In the early works, the medium and
her process is often present in the image – in the student works we see the
lead presumably from the camera to her foot where she must have stood on a
switch to trigger the shutter. In her most recent works, the overt
foregrounding of the use of digital manipulation through separation of back
projection and figure—to the point where in images such as Untitled, #574, the figure could be a cardboard cut out. This exploitation
of the technology of photography to produce multiple Cindy Sherman’s in a
single shot, of for example, to create self-conscious illusion, both critiques
the medium that is her vehicle and successfully pushes her work into new and
ever more provocative areas.
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