Cindy Sherman
(1954 - ) |
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Conceptual Portraits Art Work
| Name: |
Cindy Sherman |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Glen Ridge, New Jersey, USA |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Birth: |
1954 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
http://www.cindysherman.com/ |
| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Conceptual Portraits |
| Medium: |
Photography |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Photography
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Biography
Cindy Sherman creates masterly mises en seine in her photographs. Her still lifes, for instance, can be so nauseating that the sight of them can cause viewers to feel sick. Yet her images of sweets and moldy leftovers possess colors so beautiful that they almost befit Old Masters paintings. She has produced grotesque and macabre photographs using prosthetic body parts and dolls and, in 1997, made Office Killer, her first movie.
Cindy Sherman achieved fame with a series of photographs in which she was her own subject. Since the 1970s, she has posed in front of the camera countless times, but not one of her photographs is a self-portrait in the conventional sense. She uses different backdrops and props, dons costumes and masks, trowels on layers of make-up, slips on wigs, false noses and breasts. The real Sherman always remains hidden. She once commented that her images were personified feelings with their very own natures, ones that represented themselves and not her.
Even as a little girl, Sherman loved to dress up at home, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where she was born in 1954. Because of her obvious gift for drawing, she studied art at State University College in Buffalo and, together with fellow students Robert Longo and Nancy Dwyer, opened the Hallwalls Gallery She moved to New York in 1978 and soon met her husband-to-be there, the French video artist Michel Auder.
Produced between 1977 and 1980, her Unfitted Film Stills is an extensive series of black and- white photographs, each measuring roughly 20 x 25 cm. Sherman is the sole protagonist in every photograph, whether she is seen in the kitchen, at night by the roadside or in a rumpled bed. At times we see her in a neat suit and a blonde wig, at others wearing an apron or in a petticoat. Thematic and formal associations between the individual photographs are suggested, but remain vague: these are stills from movies that were never made. In Film Still # 4, a woman, her eyes closed, is shown leaning against a door in a bare and dimly lit corridor, the image reminiscent of 1950s and 1960s movies, In its emotional content, the scene appears neutral and ambiguous; every attempt to develop a storyline fails for lack of any discernible anecdotal or narrative clues. The only thing that is apparent is the picture's artificial nature. Sherman's Film Stills demonstrate the absurdity of the long-held belief that photographs reproduce reality; rather than reality, they reflect common cliches and stereotypes.
In the 1980s, Sherman concentrated on fashion and fashion photography, whose standards of beauty she exposed to ridicule in her constructed scenarios. This was the era of her famous History Portraits, in which she recreated famous paintings from the Renaissance to Picasso as photographs. In her masquerades, Sherman also questions our ideas concerning the artists authentic self, and the individual, unmistakable personality as a social construct.
Her concern with idealized images of femininity and beauty has earned Sherman the reputation of being a feminist artist, a label from which she has increasingly distanced herself with her 1990s scenarios on themes of horror and detritus.
As a girl, Cindy Sherman dressed up as an old woman and walked around her suburban American neighborhood. Later, when she was first making her way as an artist in New York, she would change her appearance before she went out, dressing in androgynous clothes so that she could travel unhindered. Now Sherman is known for photographs in which she transforms herself. She enacts and records what the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere described in 1929 as the 'masquerade' of womanliness. Riviere theorized that there was a. gap, a critical distance, between a woman and the image of femininity she projected. Sherman works in this space, creating from her box of tricks, her store of costumes, make-up and props, a never-ending parade of different' people.
Sherman's career began during the second wave of feminism. Some critics of the period were building on earlier feminist writing, and on psychoanalytic theory, to unpick the formation of masculinity and femininity. They argued that it was society and nurture, not nature, that created sexual identity. In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) the film critic Laura Mulvey argued that Hollywood films were one of the mediums responsible for ideas of gender difference. By offering up the woman on screen as a passive spectacle for the male gaze, films inculcated the female viewer with the same subject position, 'to-be-looked-at-ness'. Sherman's early black-and-white photographs, Untitled Film Stills, can be interpreted in the light of Mulvey's writing. Each is inhabited by a single female figure who looks as if she is a character in a film. She can be blonde or brunette, surrounded by a forest of skyscrapers, or lolling like a starlet on a bed. The stories we imagine for these women reveal how much we read into appearance. And the fact that one artist can embody a whole cast of film stars' foregrounds a woman's skill at manipulating her image. Sherman's pictures of her 'selves' were interpreted in the light of the work of an earlier generation of women artists, including Claude Cahun, Frida Kahlo and Dorothea Tanning, in the exhibition Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation that toured from the MIT List Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1998-9.
Art history has also been a rich source for Sherman's identity games. In a series of works made during 1989-90 she masqueraded as famous figures from paintings, from Caravaggio's Bacchus with wreath and grapes, to a female sitter in an Ingres portrait, reclining in the comer of a salon in silk and jewels. These pictures draw attention to their constructed-ness. Make-up is crude and heavy, and the sets are clumsily put together. Sherman makes us acknowledge how art is a fiction, by revealing the rough edges that are usually edited out. There is also the additional feminist twist that, in reconstructing these images, Sherman steps into the shoes of the masters.
Sherman's imagery became darkly disturbing in photographs from the mid-1980s and early 1990s about dirt, death, decomposition, sex and obscenity. Untitled 250 (1992) is a disjointed, legless figure that appears to be the sister of one of Hans Bellmer's dolls. She displays her smooth-skinned breasts, swollen belly and genitals to the viewer. But her head is a wrinkled fright mask with wispy white hair. Untitled 263 (1992) is a crude take on Courbet's notorious painting of female genitalia The Origin of the World (1866, Musee d'Orsay). Sherman's work pictures a mode, of a female torso, from the waist down to the top of the thighs. The lower limbs, which in Courbet's work are 'naturally' cut off by the edge of the canvas, are brutally lopped off in Sherman's piece, leaving splayed stumps that rest on a swirl of fabric. And, weirdly, a model of the corresponding section of the male body is tied to the female section with a large bow.
These elaborately repulsive images can be read in the light of the theory of the grotesque developed by the critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin interpreted the celebrations of the medieval poor, often involving displays of crudity centered on the body, as a subversive transgression of the social order. The grotesque was particularly associated with the female body, and so for some women critics and artists taking up the 'grotesque' has offered a powerful critique of idealized femininity. Sherman has complained about surrealist images of the female body; 'Whenever there is a female figure, she's still always beautiful.'** By exploring just how repellent she can make her pictures, she seems to have followed to the letter what Bakhtin considered to be one of the ultimate manifestations of the grotesque. Her Untitled 2$o (1992) could be Bakhtin's 'senile pregnant hag' materialized.
In 2000 Sherman made a series of images of women that draw upon the conventions of the formal portrait photograph. They represent types seen by the artist on the West Coast of America - a biker chick with shades and tattoo, a superannuated glamour-puss with dyed-blonde hair - who appear ludicrous as they pose and smirk. By taking photographs that could represent real people (as opposed to film stars, figures from paintings and porn dollies), Sherman seems to be pointing to the possibility that in the privileged West the dividing line between grotesque excess and everyday 'normality' is being squeezed tight. |
Samples of Work
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