Untitled #105

Seminal to the Pictures Generation as well as contemporary photography and performance art, Cindy Sherman is a powerhouse art practitioner. Wily and beguiling, Sherman’s signature mode of art making involves transforming herself into a litany of characters, historical and fictional, that cross the lines of gender and culture. She startled contemporary art when, in 1977, she published Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media (especially arthouse films and popular B-movies).

Through mise-en-scène​ and movie-like make-up and costume, Sherman treats each photograph as a portrait, though never one of herself. She embodies her characters even if only for the image itself. Presenting subversion through mimicry, against tableaus of mass media and image-based messages of pop culture, Sherman takes on both art history and the art world. Eva Respini (Associate Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York) writes (in ‘Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?’, article in Eva Respini, Cindy Sherman, exhibition catalogue, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012):

Sherman’s sustained, eloquent, and provocative investigation into the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation is drawn from the unlimited supply of images provided by movies, television, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Her invented characters speak to our current culture of YouTube fame, celebrity makeovers, reality shows, and the narcissism of social media. More than ever, identity is malleable and fluid, and Sherman’s work confirms this, revealing and critiquing the artifice of identity and how photography is complicit in its making. Through a variety of characters and scenarios, she addresses the anxieties of the status of the self with pictures that are frighteningly on point and direct in their appraisal of the current culture of the cultivated self.

Cindy Sherman’s photographs explore the potential of the image to create myths, and how identity is constructed. Her photos seem to be immediately accessible, and they quickly appealed to both critics and a broad public, but they are nevertheless underpinned by paradoxes. The artist is both model and photographer, but the pictures are not portraits. The works borrow from an image repertoire that is familiar to us from movies, art and media, but nevertheless remain enigmatic. They suggest stories without revealing anything about themselves, not even a title.

If enigmatic and suggestive, Sherman’s body of work, however, clearly addresses questions about gender, the construction of female identity and last, but not least, the traditional male gaze. Respini, again, writes:

The vast majority of the figures in Sherman’s photographs are women, so inevitably the discourse on her works must acknowledge gender as an important element in their meaning and reception. The construction of female identity, established through visual codes like dress, hair and makeup, had been rejected by feminist artists in the 1970s. Sherman’s reappraisal of these roles was both an embrace and a rejection, establishing a complex relationship to feminism. Furthermore, her role as both subject (and object) and producer of images of women put her in the unique position of enacting the traditionally male viewpoint of photographer while also undermining it.

Untitled #105, like most of Sherman’s other pictures, remind us about our own complicated relationship to identity and representation, and how the archive of images that we carry in our collective imagination informs our vision of the world and, ultimately, our view of ourselves. Or, as Respini puts it: “Sherman’s photographs speak not only to our desire to transform and be transformed, but also to our desire for art to transform us”.

Provenance
Metro Pictures, New York.
Private collection, Sweden.
CFHILL, Stockholm.
Firestorm (acquired from the above).

Exhibitions
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Cindy Sherman, July – October 1987 (another example exhibited).

Literature
Peter Schjeldahl & I. Michael Danoff, Cindy Sherman, 1984, pl. 66.
Amanda Cruz, Elizabeth A.T. Smith & Amelia Jones, Cindy Sherman. Retrospective, 2000, p. 112.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation