Cindy Sherman
Abstract
This paper gives details about the famous photographer, Cindy Sherman’s background and her best-known projects. Sherman’s works are focused on creating new personas. The mentioned projects are in chronological order; Untitled A-E (1975), Untitled Film Stills (1995), Rear Screen Projections (1980), Centerfolds (1981), Pink Robes (1982), Fairy Tales (1985), Disasters (1986-1989), The History Portraits (1989), Sex Pictures (1994-1996) including the woman artist’s she was inspired by. In the conclusion section, Sherman’s determination to try new things is mentioned.
Keywords: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Series, Untitled Film Stills, Woman Photographer
Cindy Sherman grew up in a Long Island suburb after being born in New Jersey in 1954. She attended State University College in Buffalo, New York, to study painting. Her primary painting subjects were realistic recreations of pictures and magazine images as well as self-portraits. Because of the technological aspects of printing, she failed her introductory photography course. While taking the course for the second time her new photography teacher introduced her to conceptual art, which had a big impact on her.
In 1975 Sherman produced a five-photograph series while still at college, Untitled A-E, she started altering her face with makeup and clothing she found on her trips to thrift stores. Collecting accessories and clothing from thrift stores started suggesting particular characters to her, like a clown in Untitled A and a little girl in Untitled D.
Untitled A
Untitled B
Untitled C
Untitled D
Untitled E
Cindy Sherman and her contemporary artist classmate Robert Longo relocated to New York following her 1977 graduation. She kept experimenting with role-playing and started taking pictures of the outcomes in their flat. While some of the images were taken by her friends and family, she took most of them herself. Her Untitled Film Still series began with this. Which in 1995, the complete series was first exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.
Since Sherman herself doesn’t describe her art, the audience is free to create their own stories for Sherman's figures in the Untitled Film Stills. Her encouragement to participate makes her the object of the viewer’s gaze. The famous article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" by Laura Mulvey from 1975 portrays the woman on screen as the target of the domineering male gaze and masculine desire.
The feminist performance pieces of 1970s artists include Eleanor Antin and Andrian Piper whom Sherman herself acknowledged as early influences and the inspiration for the Untitled Film Stills. During the 1970s, Antin dressed up as a variety of personas, including a nurse, a king, a ballerina, and a black movie star. In 1970, Adrian Piper launched her Catalysis public performance series in New York. Hence the date both artists’ pieces are primarily known through photographic documentation.
Eleanor Antin
Portrait of the King, 1972.
Andrian Piper
Catalysis IV, 1971.
Sherman began work on her next series in color for the first time in 1980. She later used it more and more effectively. Her new series Rear Screen Projections would have the artificiality of a television show, while her black and white Untitled Film Stills would have the nostalgia of an old film. She took a picture of herself in front of a screen onto which she had staged interior and outdoor images. Most of these series portray youthful, middle-class women in the real world. Rear Screen Projections is more contemporary than her previous projects.
Sherman’s imitating media to critique it has parallels to Barbara Kruger, a famous conceptual artist. Since she was working in advertising, Kruger mimics the imagery of ads to expose their manipulations.
Later in 1981, Sherman received an invitation to produce a set of pictures for the Artforum magazine. Her decision to construct a series of pieces that reference pornographic magazines came from the fact that she intended to design something for a two-page layout.
Cindy Sherman. Untitled #96. 1981.
According to Liz Kootz, rather than solidifying the persistence of these gendered perspectives, the artists who draw attention to these ambivalences disturb it. Centerfolds performs this idea and Sherman forces us to question by emphasizing it.
Sherman addressed earlier criticism of her series by using a vertical format, to remove the pieces from the vulnerability of the character implied by horizontal format.
However, she continues to mimic porn models, posing this time with just a pink chenille bathrobe. Sherman describes these pictures as representations of the models in between takes. She is looking straight at the observer, senseless and deliberately unsexy.
Same as her previous works, the figure fills most of the frame with almost no background. The only difference is after the Pink Robes she started using more theatrical lightning.
Cindy Sherman.
Untitled #98, 1982.
Sherman created four collections of fashion photos over the course of her career. The first one was in 1983, commissioned by Diane Benson for Interview magazine. As one can imagine this shoot was not your ordinary fashion photoshoot. It was the antithesis of glamour ads. In 1984, Dorothée Bis made the second commission, which was for French Vogue. Compared to the last image, these ones were even more odd. Sherman collaborated with Harper's Bazaar on an issue in 1993 as well. Lastly, she created fashion shoots for the Japanese clothing brand Comme des Garçons in 1994.
Cindy Sherman. Untitled #150, 1985.
In 1985, Sherman made her own fashion works called Fairy Tales. Vanity Fair asked her to design a fairy tale-inspired piece. The end work of Sherman was nothing like the sweet fairy stories. Instead, she made a rather theatrical -dramatic lightning, vivid colors, and props- pieces highlighting the creatures in more gruesome tales.
Between 1986 and 1989, Sherman started working on a new project called Disasters. This series uses the same theatrical imagery as the Fairy Tales series. In these works, the body is encompassed. The characters in these works are either human-doll hybrid versions of the creatures in the Fairy Tales or deformed and rearranged, hidden somewhere.
According to an analysis by American activist Finkelstein, many of the mutants who occur in literature from the 19th century, such as Frankenstein and Hunchback of Notre Dame, are quite near to being human and become violent due to mistreatment. And maybe that’s why we’re so interested in this topic. The possibility of them being inside us waiting to burst out and making us ‘the unacceptable’. Sherman’s horror pieces work in favor of this idea, resisting the common socialized body forced upon us daily by the media.
Cindy Sherman.
Untitled #223, 1989.
Sherman's next series consisted of thirty-five historical portraits. She goes back to role-playing and wearing costumes and wigs. This time, she’s performing as a variety of aristocrats, mythological figures, and madonnas as they have been portrayed by artists.
Artes Magnus came up with the concept in 1988. Sherman was commissioned by Magnus to produce porcelain pieces for a firm named the Limoges in France. Sherman created a new piece with herself as the figure dressed in a period costume using the original 18th-century molds for Madame de Pompadour's creations.
The History Portraits aren't an interpretation of any particular painting, just as the Untitled Film Stills aren't from any single film. Despite the fact some artists have identified possible inspirations for certain works, Sherman only confirmed three paintings: Untitled #224 as Sick Bacchus by Caravaggio, Untitled #216 as Madonna of Melun by Jean Fouquet and Untitled #205 as La Fornarina by Raphael.
She spoofs the awkwardness of female anatomy in Old Master paintings by using fake breasts, and in Untitled #225 the bosom of an aristocrat squirts fluids. The ridiculousness of these series creates the most memorable and humorous images.
After History Portraits, Sherman turned raunchy. Started using medical body parts and anatomically accurate mannequins. She made her hybrid dolls. Pornography is portrayed as absurd in Sherman's phony artwork. The figures exhibit their sexuality instead of engaging in it. She had been trying to incorporate total nudity in her works. And she found encouragement when Jeff Koons’s sexual works with her wife started controversy. Ellen Willis, a journalist, points out that because of the complexity of pornography, radical conservatives and feminists have formed an unexpected partnership. While conservatives view pornography as evil, feminists oppose it as an exploitation of women.
Between 1994 and 1996, Sherman returned to images of horror, which she started in the Fairy Tales series. She also continues using artificial body parts, just like her Sex Pictures, to create monsters. She combines various body parts to create surreal imagery.
In the end, from her first series Untitled Film Stills to her surrealist pictures her art has come full circle. Every other series was inspired by her previous works and her determination to try new things. She started using props to turn herself into different characters, and she is now ending with picturing props.
Cindy Sherman.
Untitled #12, 1978.
Cindy Sherman.
Untitled #345, 1999.
References
-
Amada Cruz, ‘Cindy Sherman: Retrospective’, Movies, Monstrosities, and Masks: Twenty Years of Cindy Sherman, Thames & Hudson Inc., 1997, pp.1-19
-
Catherine Morris, ‘The Essential Cindy Sherman’, Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1999