| Cindy Sherman’s retrospective exhibition by French curators Régis Durand and Véronique Dabin straightforwardly shows the career of a very un-straightforward artist. In Sherman’s photographs, what you see is not what you get. Or, what I get takes me through complex notions of postmodern theories of (female) identity. This is not to say that the curators are oblivious to these issues—they include Laura Mulvey’s 1991 essay on Sherman in the catalogue, which acknowledges the influence of Amelia Jones’ incisive analysis of the artistic self in her essay in the 1998 retrospective exhibition catalogue, “Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman.” |  |
Cindy Sherman Retrospective – Jovana Stokic
Cindy Sherman’s retrospective exhibition by French curators Régis Durand and Véronique Dabin straightforwardly shows the career of a very un-straightforward artist. In Sherman’s photographs, what you see is not what you get. Or, what I get takes me through complex notions of postmodern theories of (female) identity. This is not to say that the curators are oblivious to these issues—they include Laura Mulvey’s 1991 essay on Sherman in the catalogue, which acknowledges the influence of Amelia Jones’ incisive analysis of the artistic self in her essay in the 1998 retrospective exhibition catalogue, “Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman.” But, they are smart enough not to try to out-do what has been so thoroughly done by feminist art historians.
The exhibition puts together a large body of Sherman’s work in a disciplined, historical progression, following her development of works done in series. The very messiness and abjection that grows more evident in Sherman’s later works make this way of showing her work seem less strictly linear. As Linda Nochlin rightly recognized, Sherman deliberately “shattered the idea of the body as a whole, natural, coherent entity with an imagery characterized by grotesquery, redundancy and abjection” in her works starting from “Fashion series” (1983-84), “Fashion series” (1993-94), followed by “Fairy Tales” of 1985, “Disasters” (1986-89), “Horror and Surrealist Pictures” (1994-96), and culminating in “Civil War Pictures” of 1991-92, “Sex Pictures” of 1985 and “Broken Dolls” of 1999. Showing these works chronologically by series helps one understand the development of Sherman’s complex strategies with coherent pictorial representation of the supposedly unified subject. Moreover, this progression helps trace, in Nochlin terms, “a fierce new antibeauty” of Sherman’s imagery.
And yet, the quite evocative nature of Sherman’s “History Portraits” of 1989-90 in which she poses with a range of props, costumes and prostheses, refer to the classic notions of beauty. Interpreted by curators as a “masterly deconstruction of the norms of easel painting at different periods in the history of art, decomposed and re-transcribed into her personal plastic vocabulary,” these photographs’ treatment of light and color approach classic beauty less belligerently, “beyond a certain mocking quality.”
The meticulous attention Sherman directs toward the elements of light and treatment of fabric in photography appears in her series “Pink Robes” of 1982. In these photos, the wall text explains that the “protagonist appears to adopt a completely unstaged, unaffected pose, staring straight at the camera, in total contrast to Sherman’s earlier works, with their emphasis on dressing-up and play-acting.” I would argue that Sherman just brought play-acting to another field—that of naturalistic representation. Her bare face with no make-up and the employment of minimal props—namely, the classically draped robe—is a guise in itself. To me, these images get as close as one can to the art historical construct of classical beauty. Like numerous bathers who stared at viewers in the course of Western art history, Sherman appropriated this visual trope, showing how ultimately alluring the notion of natural beauty is. And, finally, how constructed in its nature it is.
Play-acting indeed is evident in Sherman’s earliest works, which open this retrospective. Cindy Book, an apparently typical adolescent photograph album shows the author at different moments in life. But, a deep-seated ambiguity about the coherence of one’s identity is obvious from this first series. The series “Bus Riders,” “Murder Mystery People,” and, ultimately, “Film Stills” follow the investigations of appearance of the subject in a number of guises. Seeing venerated film-stills, all 69 of them, in a salon-like display changes one’s perception. There, juxtaposed in a small space, the intentional diversity of places, atmospheres, characters and times allows them to be observed outside of the iconic aura that they acquired in the course of time. As the curators correctly point out, the subject in this series “appears like a dismembered body” of a woman torn by disparate aspirations.
Regarding the question of the femininity of the subject, this retrospective succeeded in showing how complex and beautifully ambiguous Sherman is as an artist. Her ambiguousness is captured via the dilemma that Carol Amstrong so aptly poses: “Is a ‘woman artist’ a woman who happens to be an artist, or the other way around, an artist who happened to be a woman?”
