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One has to be all eyes here. Cindy Sherman’s camera is busy. If her compositions aren’t bustling with vivacious color, they are pulsing with sensuality. Fashion unfolds too as well as centerfolds, fairy tales, horror movies, and portraiture. But this is not only photography. Unusual to her typical form of self-presentation, the artist employs other mediums to portray her narrative ‘clues’, such as sculpture, painting, film, installation, collage, and assemblage. Here we have postmodern photography by an artist who is famous for working without assistance, alone, in her studio, examining thoroughly her changing self-image parallel to the trajectory of American pop culture.
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“the artist employs other mediums to portray her narrative ‘clues’, such as sculpture, painting, film, installation, collage, and assemblage.”
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #458 (2007-08). Chromogenic color print, 6′ 5 3/8″ x 58 1/4″ (196.5 x 148 cm). Credits: Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. © 2012 Cindy Sherman
Hype, Money, Celebrity: Cindy Sherman at MoMA
By Harriet Zinnes
The Cindy Sherman exhibition, now showing at the Museum of Modern Art until June 11, 2012 spans the artist’s thirty-five year career from the mid-l970s to the present in one that demands close attention. The show includes 171 photographs comprising the complete “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-80), centerfolds (1981), and history portraits (l988-90) as well as fashion photography of the early 1980s, sex pictures of l992, and clowns and society portraits from 2008. In addition, in April, films drawn from MoMa’s collection selected by the artist will also be presented.
Sherman has been a forcefully present feature in the art world for over thirty-five years during which she has morphed herself into numerous personas. At one point she is the angry house wife, at another the movie star, still another, she becomes the disturbed socialite, and then the Renaissance courtesan, the clown, and Bacchus, the Roman god. All of these, she tells us, “are clues that tell a story.” Yet, Sherman’s work is not revealing of a recognizable narrative. The artist makes photographs using singular techniques or, as she rightly suggests, “Hype, money, celebrity. I like flirting with the idea of myself, but I know because my identity is so tied up with my work that I’d also like to be a little more anonymous.” A wish hardly granted by this show.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #425. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures
One has to be all eyes here. Cindy Sherman’s camera is busy. If her compositions aren’t bustling with vivacious color, they are pulsing with sensuality. Fashion unfolds too as well as centerfolds, fairy tales, horror movies, and portraiture. But this is not only photography. Unusual to her typical form of self-presentation, the artist employs other mediums to portray her narrative ‘clues’, such as sculpture, painting, film, installation, collage, and assemblage. Here we have postmodern photography by an artist who is famous for working without assistance, alone, in her studio, examining thoroughly her changing self-image parallel to the trajectory of American pop culture.
