Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman

(b. 1954)

In Cindy Sherman’s trademark style, she places herself in front of the camera lens and photographs herself playing the roles of various women in society. The image begs the question, who are these women and are they real? In fact, in a country mesmerized by Hollywood, Disneyland, and mass media, these women are more than real. Where Kay Sage or Salvador Dali showed us the surreal, Sherman engages us in the hyperreal.

Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, the youngest of five children. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Sherman was tuned into the glamour of Hollywood film stars like Marilyn Monroe who unwittingly served as celluloid role models for young girls and American housewives alike. Throughout her career Sherman has returned to this early interest in pop culture and Hollywood. The artist first used Hollywood as source material while she was a student at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1975. After receiving a B.A. in 1976, Sherman moved to New York City and became involved in collage work and photography.

The 1970s and early 1980s were a dynamic period for artists. Energized by feminist and postmodern theory, artists were feverishly pushing the boundaries of the two-dimensional picture plane and the definition of visual art in pursuit of new, inclusive forms of visual representation. No longer compelled to adhere to traditional art forms, artists began to blend painting, performance, photography, and sculpture. Women artists in particular explored the uses of nontraditional materials and subjects. Exciting new work by Judy Chicago, Jennifer Bartlett, Miriam Shapiro, and Judy Pfaff was given serious critical attention, and women artists finally found themselves in the mainstream. It was in this climate that Sherman came of age and explored the use of wigs, make-up, and clothing to construct and alter images of women.

While working as a receptionist in Manhattan and making art for a close circle of friends, Sherman created the body of work that launched her career. She had her first solo exhibition in 1981 at The Kitchen, a noncommercial gallery in New York.

The “Untitled Film Stills” from (1979-81) are regarded as Sherman’s seminal works. They consist of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs resembling “grade-B” film stills. In each of the sixty-nine untitled works, the artist employs wigs, makeup, and clothing to play the role of a fictitious film star. The images illustrate the limitless possibilities for self-invention while simultaneously questioning the varying roles that women willingly assume in society.

During the 1980s Sherman departed from the black-and-white film stills to explore large-format color photography and more extreme confrontational representations of the body. These concerns reappear in her work from the late 1990s including the New Britain photograph. Working in color and using herself as the model, Sherman staged interpretations of paintings by the Old Masters, such as Caravaggio’s Bacchus, 1597, in the collection of the Uffizi, Florence. Following this series of images appropriated from art history, Sherman removed herself from the picture and her works took a grotesque turn. Perhaps in response to the emerging AIDS epidemic, Sherman began to employ outrageous props, such as fake vomit and sliced Barbie dolls, to create elaborate tableaux exploring representations of death and the body.

In 1995 Sherman received a Macarthur Genius award. A year later, the Museum of Modern Art purchased all of the “Untitled Film Stills” for approximately one million dollars, and pop music superstar Madonna sponsored a retrospective of the series at MoMA two years later. While Sherman has achieved superstar status, she has rarely spoken in public or granted interviews about her work, which only adds to the overall ambiguity of her images. A constant theme throughout all of Sherman’s work is a persistent exploration of shifting identity. This exploration boldly surfaces in the New Britain photograph.

Untitled, 2000

“Untitled” is one of twenty-two images created in 2000, eleven of which were first shown at the Gagosian gallery in Los Angeles. The group presents invented photographs of recognizable social types, perhaps from Los Angeles and Manhattan. In this body of work, Sherman continues her exploration of the connection between costume and identity, returning to her early interest in Hollywood first evidenced in the Untitled Film Stills.

In this photograph, an ambiguous larger-than-life female figure fills an otherwise empty picture plane. Her slightly lowered left shoulder tips uncomfortably into the viewer’s space, simultaneously beckoning and repelling the viewer. Her shiny cobalt-blue ruffled blouse is contrasted against a barren green-gray backdrop. Cold frontal lighting serves to highlight her indulgent yet unskilled application of makeup—her overdrawn eyebrows and lips and her cotton-candy blush. This painterly application of makeup delivers an expressionistic portrait of a woman engrossed in a daily ritual of attempted self-invention. Over-processed stiff hair hints at a wig. The woman’s gaze is transparent, empty. Attention is directed to the teddy bear cradled in her hands. A press-on thumbnail coated in bubble-gum pink lacquers subtly echoes the pastel tones of the facial make-up. Just like the “grade B” actresses in the Untitled Film Stills, this woman is a bit player relentlessly attempting self-discovery through cosmetic modification. The resulting mask calls to mind Japanese Kabuki actors, drag queens, and ladies who cling to dreams of a bygone era.

Is this woman a media construct derived from a popular sitcom? Perhaps she is a studio executive’s wife or a social outcast. Or is she one of the young women in the Untitled Film Stills, only matured beyond our interest? Still, she may be every American woman; an amalgamation of excessive cosmetic surgery, makeup, and consumer spending. She is a simulation of the media images bombarding our daily lives. This woman is at once our ideal and our nightmare, embodying our relentless need for self-improvement in a society that values the newest of the new.

MO’S

References

Untitled

Janet Wolf, Feminine Sentences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Arthur Coleman Danto, Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994); Peter Galassi, “The Complete Untitled Film Stills: Cindy Sherman,” Museum of Modern Art Annual Report (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995 – 96); Vince Aletti, “The Lady Vanishes,” Village Voice, November 21, 2000, p. 85; Michael Kimmelman, “Cindy Sherman,” The New York Times, November 24, 2000, p. E:36; Linda Yablonsky, “Vanity Fare,” Time Out New York (November 30-December 7, 2000): p. 91.

Untitled, 2000

Color photograph, Edition 1/6

32 ½ x 22 in. (82.6 x 55.9 cm)

Members Purchase Fund (2000.88)