CINDY SHERMAN PAUL MOORHOUSE
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'SOMETHING OUT OF THE CULTURE' Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the world's leading contemporary artists, but her achievement is paradoxical. Although she has always used a camera, she has never bee n a photographer in any conventional sense. Sherman belongs to an important generation of avant-garde American artists that gained critical recognition from the 1970s onward. Their work, in all media, radically changed ideas abo ut the nature and function of art. During the 1950s American Abstract Expressionist artists took the modernist aesthetic to an extreme. The painters Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Barnett Newman (1905-1970) and Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), among others, turned away from depicting the recognizable world. Instead, they used colour and abstract shapes to convey a personal, inner domain of feeling and imagination. In the following decade, the Pop art movement that evolved in the United States and Britain rejected that approach entirely. In the United States the leading figures were Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Roy Lichtenstein ( 1923- 1977), Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) and James Rosenquist (b. 1933). They created a new, figurative art that investigated the social revolution brought about by the mass media and the values of popular culture. Sherman, along with such contemporaries as Robert Longo (b. 1953), Barbara Kruger (b. 1945), Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) and Richard Prince (b. 1949), extended Pop's engage ment with the 'look' of the contemporary world. Responcling to a society saturatcd by media-generated images, they explored the impact of cinema, television, advertising, magazines, newspapers, catalogues and other publica tions in shaping how people think about themselves and their surrounclings. Sherman's work has been described hy somc writc:rs as ·postmodern': a definitio11 uf art less concerned with developing new modes of individual expres sion than with quoting and exploring a range of existing styles. Her approach slums painting, sculpture or drawing. lnstead, using photography, it refers to more commonplace ways of representing urban existence, in particular those that have already entered the public consciousness through the mass media. Sherman herself commentecl, 'I wantecl to create something out of the cui ture.' Photography provided a more acccssible visual language, and one con nccted more closely with evcryday reality. Using the camera, she interrogated the visual evidence of modern life, from fi lms and telcvision to glossy maga zines and pornography, commenting on these sources and imbuing them with uncxpected, often enigmatic, significance. Today she is celebrated for an entirely distinctive, pioneering body of work that has extended the language and potentia( of photography in unprccedented ways. 4 Cindy Sherman, 2005.
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Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Cindy Sherman was brought up in Huntington in the suburbs of Long Islancl. She attended State University College, Buffalo, New York, where she studied drawing, painting and photography. Even as a student, a preoccupation with depicting herself was evident in several self-portraits that she painted from life using a mirror. Subsequently she abandoned painting for photography, but in her mature work used herself as the model when composing studio shots. Sherman's first solo exhibition of photographs was held in 1979 at Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York, an independent art space she formed with her then partner, Robert Longo (b. 1953), and a mutual friend, Charlie Clough. Photography is Sherman's medium but it would be wrong to describe her as a photographer. From the outset her intcrest in the medium as an end in itself has been minimal. Unlike celebrated photographers such as Irving· Penn (1917-2009) and Man Ray (1890-1976), whose principal subject has also been the human figure, Sherman has never becn concerned with exploiting the partieular facets of the photographic or printing processes. To this day, she uses commercial printers to produce the finał photographs, and the singular regard in which she is held depends less on the technical quality of her images than on their power and depth as carriers of meaning. Sherman has always viewed the camera as a tool. For her, taking photographs was simply the most effective means of realizing the characters and situations she invented. For this reason Sherman is morc appropriately understood as an artist who uses a camera. lt is ironie that, having rejected painting and sculpture as expressive processes, she has broug-ht photogn1phy so convincinglywithi11 the sphere of art. As part of that generation of younger artists who from the 1970s onward began to interrogate the imagery and symbols that pervade everyday modern life, Sherman's methods freely appropriate the conventions of the mass media. The Untitled Film Stills series rcfcrs to the visual language of 1940s and 1950s cinema, particularly that of Hollywood directors such as Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). There are also references to the appearance, style and storylines of B-movies and film noir, as well as to European cinema, notably French New Wave and Italian neo-realism. From the beginning, Sherman's art had an in ten se cinematic quality. Her Iater output expands and updates the range of connections. Television and magazines- from fashion to pornogra phy- are all implicatecl as stylistic models. But therc are few, if any, specific quotations from these sour ces. Although hcr work refers to an existing visual .. Sherman in 1990.
in implication and interest. Confined to a wheelchair by a broken leg, the news photographer L. B. Jefferies (played by James Stewart) is forced to while away long days of recuperation by staring out of his apartment window. Opposite are the winclows of neighbouring apartments whose occupants he can watch unseen. Visible from afar, and framed by their individual rectangular apertures, characters appear intermittently as they go about their daily lives. Gradually Jefferies assumes the role of voyeur, unable to resist peering into these private spaces in order to understand the players and situations presented. Eventually his girlfriend Lisa (played by Grace Kelly) is drawn into the game and demands, 'Tell me everything you saw and what you think it means.' How something seems and assessing what it means is the predicament framed bySherman's photographs. Like the wordless scenes watched by Jefferies, her images present a surface only. Out of context, Hitchcock's winclows and Sherman's photographs offer characters and situations whose nature must be fathomed by seeking clues and explanations in the visual information alone. The entire body ofSherman's work can be seen in this light, as answering a personal artistic desire to create these characters. The cletails of their lives and natu res are left to be filled in by the viewer's imagination. The process of cleciphering appearances has a profound, incleed universal, significance. The gap between the extcrior of things and an underlying, unobservable reality is a fundamental condition of existence. we strive endlessly to bridge that divide. Viewed in this way, the fictional nature ofSherman's repertory, and their overt artifice, evoke a common human dilemma: to comprehend life we must seek explanations in its rnanifestations and in the pictures that our society produces.
of personae, their presentation as photographs and her references to mass-media styles. The resulting artworks are undoubtedly compelling, at once visually captivating and accessible yet also enigmatic. This elusiveness has provoked critical discussion and often misunderstanding aboutSherman's meanings. Before examining the inclividual works in more detail, then, we must first ask the question: how are these arresting images to be understood? As might be expected from an art so deeply involved with role-play, some commenta tors and theorists have focused on the issue of identity. Sherman 's fascination with transforming herself into a range of characters has been seen as testing the sense of self that everyone possesses.Some have taken this as evidence of personal exploration. The litera,y idea of 'identity poetics', in which the author's voice is said to engage directly with a sense of self, provides an intellectual framework for such readings. Others claim thatSherman's own identity is irrelevant to an unclerstanding of her creativity, her photographs standing as fictions in their own right. Yet others viewSherman's preoccupations in the light of feminist theory, seei ng their value and significance in terms of the way society views women. Many further theories are possible and to some extent all contribute to a generał appreciation of her art's import. At the same time, Sherman rcsists neat pigeonholing within a set theory. In the publication The Complete Untitled Film Stills (2003), the artist herself made the following comment about the Untitled Film Stills: 'The style of black-and-white gracie-Z motion pictures ... produced the self-consciousness of these characters, not my knowleclgc of feminist theo1y.' In a notebook entry of 1997, she wrote, 'Theories, theories, theories ... It doesn't seem to work for me.' In sum, Sherman outpaces her theorizers. The clarity and directness ofSherman's own comments contrast markedly with the more convoluted tone of much of the theoretical debate. At its simplest her standpoint has taken the form of 'Nothing has to make sense, you can mix things up because they look good together.' One predictable critical responsc to this kind of disarming assertion has been to warn against trusting any artist's cnmments about his or her owo procluction. Equally, however, to ignore her perspective would be short-sighted, especially bearing in mind a small but illuminating childhood recollection supplied bySherman herself in The Complete Untitled Film Stills: I had to go with my parents to a dinner party and wound up watching TV in the basement, cating my dinner alone watching Hitchcock's Rear Window while the aclults partied upstairs. I loved all those vignettes Jimmy Stewart watches in the winclows around him -you don't know much about any of those characters so you try to fili in the pieces of thcir lives.
3 Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) Jomes Stewart in o still lrom Rear Window. 1954
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Here, in essence, is the spirit and fabric ofSherman's art. In his masterly 1954 film, Hitchcock presents a simple situation from which arisc consequcnccs rich IO
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