Cindy Sherman: Working Girl Preview by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Cindy Sherman:

Working Girl

Cindy Sherman:

Working Girl

Contemporary Decade Series

Decade Series 2005 Cindy Sherman: Working Girl Published by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis 3750 Washington Boulevard St. Louis, Missouri 63108 www.contemporarystl.org This publication was prepared on the occasion of the exhibition: Cindy Sherman: Working Girl September 16â&#x20AC;&#x201C;December 31, 2005 Curated by Paul Ha, Director of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Allegiant Funds and National City Private Client Group are the Lead Sponsors of the exhibition and catalogue. Additional funding has been generously provided by Sara Lee Corporation, the Whitaker Foundation, Regional Arts Commission, Arts & Education Council, and Friends of the Contemporary, with in-kind support from the Chase Park Plaza Hotel.

Copyright ÂŠ 2005 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the artist, and the authors. All rights reserved. ISBN 0-9712195-8-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2005929549 Copy edited by Kate Wagner Designed by Bruce Burton Printed by Stolze Printing Company, Inc. Printed and bound in St. Louis, Missouri Available through D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10013 Tel: (212) 627-1999 Fax: (212) 627-9484

Cover: Untitled (Secretary) (detail), 1978, sepia-toned black-and-white photograph, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures Gallery, New York

Cindy Sherman: Working Girl

September 16–December 31, 2005

Table of Contents 4

Foreword Paul Ha

The Education of Cindy Sherman Catherine Morris

Exhibition Checklist

Artist’s Biography

Contributor’s Biography

Acknowledgments Paul Ha

Foreword

Cindy Sherman: Working Girl launches the Contemporary’s Decade Series. In these exhibitions, artists who have made signiﬁcant contributions to the dialogue of contemporary art are invited to work with us to develop shows that highlight a moment in each of their careers that has particular resonance. I am thrilled to inaugurate this series with an exhibition devoted to the work Cindy Sherman made between 1975 and 1978, the years spanning her transition from undergraduate student to emerging artist.

4 Foreword

This past spring, all over world, a fresh crop of artists crossed the first major hurdle of their artistic lives: graduating from art school. And while there is not a single institution of higher learning that can offer a guaranteed, step-by-step course in becoming a successful artist, the recent graduates still believe that they could be the next Cindy Sherman. In many ways the path of today’s young artist has not changed significantly since Cindy graduated from Buffalo State College in June 1976. The basic outline: finish school, move to a cosmopolitan city (pick one), be shocked at the difficulty of survival, find a means of survival (employment), and try to make your own work. In many cases artists’ first jobs give them the opportunity to handle, or at least be surrounded by, objects that will inspire their own artwork: working as museum guards, as gallery preparators, in frame shops, or for video production companies. As artists’ assistants many recent graduates glimpse the course they would like their own futures to take. Another route is to receive a tutorial on what to expect from a gallery, when and if the artist gets one, by working the front desk. With twenty-twenty hindsight it is tempting to say that, in reviewing the arc of Cindy’s career, she was clearly destined to become one of the most compelling artists of the last thirty years. But instead it should be noted that as a student at a small state college Cindy struggled and failed an introductory photography course she was required to take during her freshman year. So, who can predict where the next genius lies in wait? Is there a formula for being a successful artist? Who will, two years after graduation (or even before graduating), show with important galleries all over the world? Who will have sold-out shows? Who will be wined and dined and collected by major museums and important collectors? Who will receive a MacArthur—the genius grant? Who will be recognized by their peers, curators, critics, and dealers as one of the few artists who made a difference? We know that Cindy Sherman has achieved all of these things. Are there markers from her undergraduate years we can point to, suggestions that can act as a road map for the next group of entering freshmen who dream of becoming the twenty-first-century Cindy Sherman? In Buffalo, Cindy did in fact do a few not uncommon things to begin to establish herself. In fact,

many successful artists follow a similar path, either consciously or intuitively. The best strategy for survival is pack mentality: peer groups teach as much as classes, and peers encourage and spur one another into action. My advice: if there is not a scene, create one. In Cindy’s case, the artist-run, alternative space Hallwalls, which was founded by her friends Robert Longo, Charles Clough, Nancy Dwyer, and Michael Zwack, was the place where things were happening, and she not only positioned herself there, she moved into the building with Longo and in her own quiet way took ownership of it (she was the gallery’s bookkeeper). The pack at Hallwalls created their own opportunities. They found the space, curated their own shows, invited the artists they most admired to come and speak, and found the capital needed to keep the place running. In doing so, they generated attention and opportunities for themselves. To idle is to disappear. Other artists who have used this method are peppered throughout the relatively short history of contemporary art: George Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and the neo-expressionist movement in Germany in the 1960s; Damian Hirst and the Young British Artists movement in London in the 1990s. Currently there are hopeful signs of self intervention in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, proving that this is still a valid model: these artists have sought out others like themselves who want to be part of the zeitgeist of the art world and are willing to take action to further their careers.

This review of Cindy’s early work gives us a chance to test ourselves—to see if we can, after all these years, see what Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer saw when they ﬁrst encountered these strange black-and-white photographs of a girl playing dress-up. Do we have what it takes to acknowledge talent before anyone else can see it? And when we do recognize talent, do we have the courage and the vision to show it and to support it? This catalogue is dedicated to all the art students who will graduate this year. Paul Ha Director

5 Foreword

When Cindy moved to New York City in 1977, she planted herself at another alternative gallery: Artists Space. Employed as a receptionist, she was exposed to the work that was being shown at that groundbreaking venue for new art. More importantly, it was an environment where people understood what she was doing and she had time to think about her own work. Artists Space’s director, Helene Winer, who was introduced to Cindy at Hallwalls, presented Cindy’s work in a group show curated by Janelle Reiring, Winer’s school chum who was then working at Leo Castelli Gallery. The show also included works by Charlie Clough, Nancy Dwyer, Louise Lawler, Robert Longo, and Michael Zwack, all recent Buffalo transplants. Reiring and Winer would go on to open Metro Pictures and become Cindy’s longtime gallerists. They were another key to Cindy’s success because they understood Cindy’s ambition. Ambition in this sense means a drive to make work that supercedes everything else. Successful artists think about making their own art all the time. They are obsessed with making their work better. They are their own best and worst critics.

Untitled (Secretary), 1978, sepia-toned black-and-white photograph, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures Gallery, New York

The Education of Cindy Sherman Catherine Morris

indy Sherman entered Buffalo State College as a freshman painting major in the fall of 1972. By the time she moved to Manhattan in the summer of 1977—having stayed on in Buffalo for a year after graduating—Sherman had abandoned painting in favor of a conceptually-based photographic practice that incorporated lessons she learned from studying performance art, body art, and film theory of the late 1960s and 1970s. Though Sherman did not begin working on her milestone Untitled Film Stills series until the fall of 1977, the photographic experiments she pursued from 1975 to 1977 formed a significant foundation upon which her later critical reputation was built.1 Further examination of the narrative-driven, montage techniques Sherman explored in her early photographic and film work elucidates a course of formal and intellectual distillation that allowed for the breakthrough that became the Untitled Film Stills, while also revealing how the precedents of conceptual and alternative-media art forms of the 1960s and early 1970s played a vital role in that developmental process. 7 The Education of Cindy Sherman

Sherman established the tools of her photographic trade—makeup, costumes, and often banal yet telling props, combined with the artist’s elusive and ambiguous use of her own body as subject—early in life.2 Growing up in Huntington Beach, Long Island, Sherman was an avid player of dress-up, but, in her case, “It wasn’t about dressing up to look like Mom, or Doris Day, it was just fun to look different. It had nothing to do with dissatisfaction, or fantasizing about being another person; it was instinctive.”3 The adaptation of a rudimentary means of childhood expression and recreation into an intellectually coherent creative project began in 1975, when Sherman gave up painting and started taking photographs that documented the characters she had been dreaming up and dressing up as for years. The shift in medium and subject, along with her own burgeoning interest in conceptual art—learned in the classroom and also from her peers, including, most signiﬁcantly, Robert Longo and Charles Clough—resulted in the ﬁrst work Sherman felt was important or, as she described it, “doing something different.”4

Students and emerging artists of the mid-1970s were quick to understand the critical signiﬁcance of the conceptual art movement, and in the art world backwater of Buffalo, the young artists of Sherman’s circle found a way to take charge of their own contemporary art educations. Longo (who was Sherman’s boyfriend at the time) and Clough founded Hallwalls, an artist-run, alternative gallery space in 1974. Initially carved out of a hallway in a former ice-packing warehouse that had been turned into an artists’ living and studio building, Hallwalls would become one of two driving forces (the Albright-Knox Art Gallery being the other) for the local art scene. Living and working in the Hallwalls building while staging exhibitions and inviting the artists they read about in Avalanche magazine and other periodicals of the period to come and speak or stage a performance, Sherman and her cohorts created a self-directed course of study that signiﬁcantly altered their development as artists.

The Education of Cindy Sherman

Sherman has cited the conceptually based performance work of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Bruce Nauman (among others) as important precedents in her own critical process.5 For Sherman, the pioneering body work Bruce Nauman, Studies for Holograms (a–e), 1970, a portfolio of ﬁve screenprints, 26 x 26 inches each, edition of 150. Published by Castelli Graphics, New York. these artists produced Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York did not represent an art movement to emulate so much as it offered examples of radical activity-based and process-oriented work from which to develop her own approach to using her body as a subject. The change of Sherman’s reaction to Acconci’s slyly confrontational and often outrageously discomforting works—such as his infamous Seed Bed (1972), in

which he masturbates into a microphone while hidden under a false gallery floor—from “feminist indignation and repulsion” to the realization that “his art pushed limits and made you hate it without really knowing what it was”6 shows how her thinking moved from involuntary reaction to a more analytical criticality. The guerilla-like tactics Acconci employs to engage, enrage, or repulse his audience also contain an important element of ambiguity: after an initial reaction, such as Sherman’s, the viewer is left wondering how to respond. Visual ambiguity would become the backbone of Sherman’s own practice. Like Acconci, Chris Burden’s extreme acts of masochistic body art—having himself shot in the arm, crawling through fields of broken glass with his arms tied behind his back—operate in a shocking yet liberating manner. Bruce Nauman’s facial and bodily manipulations are a sly exchange of humor and intellectual challenge with his audience. Of his Studies for Holograms (1970) Nauman wrote, “if you perform a bunch of arbitrary operations, some people will make very strong connections with them, others won’t.”7 Sherman’s work has always reflected a similar sensibility: an inflected moment appears to hold some specific, graspable meaning, but in its very elusiveness, no final, satisfying connection can be made.

9 The Education of Cindy Sherman

Another vital piece of Sherman’s educational experience was the example of women artists who also used their bodies in experimental and radical productions. Lynda Benglis, Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, and Hannah Wilke played signiﬁcant roles in solidifying Sherman’s thinking. On a pragmatic, art-world-role-model level, she has noted, “Just the fact that they had a presence made a difference.”8 On critical and formal levels, the differences they made were manifold. One was the liberation gained by seeing women make compelling work in the new mediums of body and performance art. As Lucy Lippard has pointed out, “The inexpensive, ephemeral, unintimidating character of the Conceptual mediums themselves (video, performance, photography, narrative text, actions) encouraged women to participate, to move through this crack in the art world’s walls.”9 Second, the highly politicized content that was a driving force in the conceptual art movement comes to bear most clearly in Sherman’s work in the form of feminism. Feminist voices supplanting the heretofore male-dominated dialogue about female representation and identity in the ﬁne arts offered a form of validation for Sherman’s own burgeoning feminist interests. As Douglas Fogle has noted, “The use of the artist’s body in the photographic practice of the time was closely related to another use of self-portraiture in the service of interrogation of identity.”10 Consciously or not, making the choice to transform and manipulate her

own body as a subject has its roots in the feminist discourse of ideation established by these pioneering artists.

10 The Education of Cindy Sherman

Eleanor Antin, whose experiments in documenting her own personal transformation in film and photography began in the 1960s, can be seen as an influence in the spirit of the “personal is political” thinking of the day, but formal relationships to Sherman’s work also exist. Gail Stavitsky has pointed out the parallels between Sherman’s use of makeup and how Antin employs makeup in her Representational Painting (1971).11 In this thirty-eight-minute, black-and-white film Antin archly plots a political link from the oppressive and banal activity of a woman applying makeup as a form of social defense to the history of painting and traditional representations of women. Similarly, in Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972), which consists of 148 black-and-white photographs Antin took of herself from various angles over the course of a 36-day diet, the artist uses her own body to make a simple political point about the tyranny of the idealization of women’s bodies, while simultaneously engaging in the critical discourse of temporality and transformation inherent in body and process art. The sequential, quasi-narrative transformations undertaken by Sherman in two works made in 1975 mirror Carving: Eleanor Antin, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (detail), 1972, installation view, 148 black-and-white photographs and text, 7 x 5 inches each. Courtesy Ronald Feldman A Traditional Fine Arts, New York. Collection of The Art Institute of Chicago Sculpture. Both untitled works document a process of transformation using straightforward headshots against plain backdrops. The first Untitled, composed of thirteen images presented horizontally, depicts the transitioning or maturing of a young girl with a lousy poker face into a reserved young woman. In the second Untitled work—which the artist has referred to as her “first serious work”12—Sherman morphs, over the course of twenty-three images displayed in a grid, from a rather sullen, unexceptional-looking male teenager into a full-blown, pre-punk vamp.

The work was shot in 35mm black-and-white ﬁlm, and Sherman hand colored some of the images for heightened effect. Like Antin, Sherman employs ﬁlmmaking techniques, such as storyboard photographic narratives, to develop a series of narrative transformations that speak to issues of female identity and a form of psychological exegesis.

In the closing scene of the ﬁlm—billed as the “cast in order of appearance”—Sherman montages the individual photographs she used in the ﬁlm to produce an accordion-like string of images that echo all of the doll’s movements and postures in Doll Clothes. This method

11 The Education of Cindy Sherman

The strong interrelationship between Sherman’s photographic practice and her interest in film has been well documented.13 Early in her Buffalo years Sherman worked for the experimental filmmaker Paul Sharits, and she took introductory film courses. The three-minute silent animation Doll Clothes (1975) was made for one of her classes. Employing cut-out photographs of herself in arrested postures that as a group depict her character’s movements, Sherman becomes a paper doll come to life. The story line is simple: the doll flips through plastic sleeves holding her clothing options (school clothes, dresses, casual wear), selects a dress, and gets a moment to admire herself in a dresser top mirror before a human hand descends into the frame to grab, defrock, and replace her in the sleeve of the folder that houses both her and her clothes. In Doll Clothes Sherman has chosen a subject—a paper doll—that lends itself ideally to her photographic interests. Rather than make a film in which she actually appears, Sherman chooses Hannah Wilke, S.O.S. Starification Object Series, 1974-82, 10 black-and-white to make a film photographs, 15 gum sculptures, 41 3/16 x 58 3/8 inches (framed). Courtesy Ronald about photographic Feldman Fine Arts, New York representations of herself in arrested moments of movement. The removal of herself as subject while retaining her body as a backdrop for an imaginary construction that characterizes her mature work has begun.

of undulating motion appears again in two works she produced the following year. While Sherman has dismissed these two pieces, Untitled (Mini) and The Fairies, as “contrived and girlie,”14 the accordion-style presentation is an interesting experiment in using movement to convey stereotypical femininity.

12 The Education of Cindy Sherman

Lynda Benglis and Hannah Wilke were both interested in exploiting and manipulating brazen postures related to female sexuality to their own ends. Both artists were often perceived in the 1970s as operating outside the parameters of orthodox feminism. The overtly stereotypical modes of sexual seduction they favored in their work were interpreted as being detrimental to the cause of women’s liberation, though Benglis and Wilke believed in reclaiming their sexual identities through the very means used to exploit them. Sherman’s work can be seen as similarly, if more gently, adapting the methods of Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974) and Benglis’s infamous depiction of herself as a dildo-wielding vamp in the pages of Artforum (1974) by the use of stereotypical attention-getting devices. In Sherman’s Untitled (Mini) the fluid movement and preening gestures of a young girl viewing her ensemble of minidress, platform shoes, and large, round glasses from all angles seem to happen in front of an unseen mirror. The viewer of the work becomes the mirror in which this decidedly unsexy young woman checks herself out, and the confident sexuality of Benglis and Wilke is humorously and painfully transformed into the reality of socially proscribed sexuality. The Fairies takes a similar tack, this time in the form of a young child dressed up in a fairy costume acting the part. By illustrating a simple performative moment, stretching out a series of actions that do not actually result in any definitive transformation, a painful mockery is exposed. A comment Yvonne Rainer made about her own work can be applied here: “irony is a way of revealing the pressure points in an unjust society—for instance, depicting the female self trapped between habitual modes of behavior and new knowledge of social structures. True irony is only a first step, a tearing of a hole in the fabric and peeking through.”15 While Sherman has said she was not aware of the term “male gaze” at this stage of her career,16 the fact remains that her figures operate from within the social confines young girls experience early in life. Judith Williamson, in a 1983 essay on the artist, remarks, “Sherman’s pictures force upon the viewer that elision of image and identity which women experience all the time: as if the sexy black dress made you be a femme fatale, whereas ‘femme fatale’ is, precisely, an image; it needs a viewer to function at all. . . . Within each image, far from deconstructing

the elision of image and identity, she very smartly leads the viewer to construct it; but by presenting a whole lexicon of feminine identities, all of them played by ‘her,’ she undermines your little constructions as fast as you can build them up.”17 The viewer, as mirror, is needed to complete this awkwardly painful construction.

The relationship to her earlier work remains, however, in Sherman’s interest in retaining the ambiguity between of her intention and the viewer’s response to the images. Adrian Piper, whose series Catalysis (1970) was intended as a direct confrontation of unsuspecting people in public places, including buses, said, “I’ve been doing pieces the signiﬁcance and experience of which is deﬁned as completely as possible by the viewer’s reaction and interpretation.”18 The relationship to the conceptual practices of performance and body are retained.

13 The Education of Cindy Sherman

The Bus Rider series, which Sherman produced in 1976, is markedly different from the earlier Untitled works. First, these photographs operate as discrete character studies rather than presenting the transformative moments of her earlier pieces. As such, the Bus Riders can be seen as transitional images, carrying the fluid narrative of the work that preceded them toward the more stop-action, snatchedmoment images she would turn to in the Untitled Film Stills and beyond. The fifteen characters the artist interprets were inspired by individuals she saw riding the bus, and they reflect a spectrum of society one would expect to find on any type of public transportation. Each of the photographs is highly staged, and the goal of identifying individual characteristics takes precedent over formal refinement. Sherman seems not to care that camera wires, tape markers, and discarded props from previous sittings intrude upon the Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970/71, black-and-white photographs, 16 x 16 inches. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York images.

Putting her Buffalo years behind her, Sherman moved to Manhattan with Longo in the summer of 1977 and began her working life as a full-fledged artist. While Sherman’s Untitled (Secretary) (1978) is not a part of the Untitled Film Stills series that she started in the fall of her arrival on the New York art scene, it is yet another link between her early work and the photographs that would become her first work as a mature artist. A dress-up snapshot of Sherman in the role of secretary, Untitled (Secretary) was taken on site at Sherman’s New York day job as a receptionist at Artists Space, the alternative gallery that would define the second chapter in her career. Untitled (Secretary) announces Sherman’s transition from student to working girl and closes the chapter on Cindy Sherman’s formal education.

14 The Education of Cindy Sherman

See Gail Stavitsky, The Unseen Cindy Sherman: Early Transformations, 1975–1976 (Montclair, NJ: Montclair Art Museum, 2004). Stavitsky’s essay concisely outlines Sherman’s biography and the course of her thinking during this period. See also Early Work of Cindy Sherman, (East Hampton, NY: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2000).

Cindy Sherman, “The Making of Untitled,” in Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003). See also Stavitsky, Unseen Cindy Sherman; Calvin Tomkins, “Her Secret Identities,” The New Yorker, May 15, 2000, 74–83; and my The Essential Cindy Sherman (New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1999).

Sherman, “The Making of Untitled,” 12.

Jeanne Siegel, Art Talk: The Early 80s (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 270. Also quoted in Stavitsky, Unseen Cindy Sherman, 9.

Stavitsky, Unseen Cindy Sherman, 11; Acconci and Burden visited Hallwalls.

Stavitsky, Unseen Cindy Sherman, 11.

“Talking with Bruce Nauman: An Interview by Christopher Cordes,” in Bruce Nauman Prints: 1970–89 (New York and Chicago: Castelli Graphics, Lorence Monk Gallery and Donald Young Gallery, 1989), 25.

Sherman, “The Making of Untitled,” 5.

Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xi.

Douglas Fogle, The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 16.

Stavitsky, Unseen Cindy Sherman, 12.

Stavitsky, Unseen Cindy Sherman, 14.

Television and movies factor into Sherman’s development from her early childhood. In her mature career, from the Untitled Film Stills, to the Rear Screen Projections (1980–81), to Sherman’s own experiment in ﬁlmmaking with Ofﬁce Killer (1997), her relationship to movies and moviemaking is clear.

Sherman, “The Making of Untitled,” 6.

Yvonne Rainer, in Laleen Jayamanne, Keeta Kapur, and Rainer, “Discussing Modernity, ‘Third World’ and The Man Who Envied Women,” Art and Text (Melbourne) 23, no. 4 (March–May 1987), 50. Reprinted in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, Reconsidering the Object of Art, 1965–1975 (Los Angeles and Cambridge MA: Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1995), 201.

Sherman, “The Making of Untitled,” 9.

Judith Williamson, “Images of ‘Woman’: The Photography of Cindy Sherman,” reprinted in Hilary Robinson, Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 453.

Adrian Piper, section of an ongoing essay, January 1971, from 26 Contemporary Women Artists (Ridgeﬁeld, CT: Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, April 1971). Reprinted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 234–35.

15 The Education of Cindy Sherman

16 Untitled, 1975, 13 black-and-white photographs, 9 3/4 x 45 inches. Collection of Elizabeth and Frank Leite, Prescott, Arizona