Artists & Works

Cindy Sherman
American
(b. 1954)
UNTITLED DOCTOR/NURSE (1980-92)
silver prints
9.5" x 7.5"

STYLE: mass media,
photography,
feminism

Cindy Sherman's photographs are unusual for several reasons. The first, and most important point, is that the subject of the photograph (at least through 1996) is always Sherman herself, disguised in various costumes and surrounded by different props and settings. But other aspects of her working method are equally interesting. In spite of Sherman's avowed interest in B-movie personas, and fashion-model types, her self-created fantasy women do not conform to any easily recognizable stereotype. She deliberately includes elements that throw the viewer off—smeared lipstick, a spot of blood, shabby thrift-shop apparel. Here, Sherman shows that she does not mean her characters to be quickly classified, and also reveals her preference for horrific effects. Other significant aspects of the photographs are their heavy graininess, their extreme shadows, and their occasional out-of-focus quality. Sherman is challenging slick, high fashion techniques, rather than emulating them. She denies the fantasy its glamour.

Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey in 1954. She studied art at the State University College at Buffalo, receiving a B.F.A. in 1976. During her residency in Buffalo, after working in photography for about two years, Sherman started cutting out paper dolls, trying to create as many characters as she could. This led to an involvement with transforming her own physical image and photographing the results, in order to play out roles that had long fascinated and amused her. "I decided to use the camera as a means for exploring my experience as a woman." Sherman was one of the founding members of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo during her residence there. Joining with other famous Hallwalls members, such as Robert Longo, and Charles Clough, Sherman began to exhibit widely in the early eighties, quickly moving into the New York, and then the international art scene. She has had solo shows at major museums and galleries all over the world.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Jack Cowat, Curator The St. Louis Art Museum, 3/1/83
"Cindy Sherman's photographs operate in domains of performance and theatrical behavior, B-movie stills, Hollywood film fan magazines, urban street life and the reactionary nostalgia of the New Wave....Her photographs exhibit both criticism and wonderment...Her large color prints with heavy grain, curious tones, extreme shadows and oddly emphasized details detour our conventional photographic notions...It is as if Sherman does at times wonder what it would be like to be a magazine model, but as she lives out the fantasy she denies it the glamour....by appropriating known types, her disruption of bourgeois conventions becomes all the more direct, obvious and effective....She is neither a dispassionate avant-garde robot nor a cynical nihilist, but an artist distinctly highlighting complex and high impact media messages."

Interview with Noriko Futo, Art in America, 6/97
...NF: Someone told me that one day Longo said to you that if you were going to spend so much time dressing up in front of a mirror, you ought to take a photograph of yourself doing it. CS: That's essentially what happened. But it wasn't as if I was obsessively dressing up to go to dinner or something like that. I was dressing up to become other characters. I would use makeup to try to turn my face into someone else's face. I don't really know why I was doing that. I don't think it was out of frustration or depression. I don't think I didn't like who I was, or was trying to be somebody else, It's more ... I was just curious. In my childhood, I used to play dress-up using my mother's and my grandmother's clothes, but even then, very often, I wasn't dressing up to be pretty, I'd try to look like another person. There's a picture of my girlfriend and me. We were walking around the block where I lived, both of us dressed up like old ladies, just for fun. I would make myself up like a monster, things like that, which seemed much more fun than just looking like Barbie....

Even though I've never actively thought of my work as feminist or as a political statement, certainly everything in it was drawn from my observations as a woman in this culture. And a part of that is a love-hate thing-being infatuated with make-up and glamour and detesting it at the same time. It comes from trying to look like a proper young lady or look as sexy or as beautiful as you can make yourself, and also feeling like a prisoner of that structure. That's certainly something I don't think men would relate to.

Mary Ellen Haus, ARTnews, 10/87
"Cindy Sherman's latest pictures seem to have been disgorged whole from her psyche, not composed in front of a camera. And these gruesome, somewhat crude scenes of exhaustion and despair down at Metro pictures seemed all the more urgent and cathartic...[compared to retrospective at Whitney] While much of her new work fails—childishly mimicking cheap horror movies without adding enough irony to compensate—some of it was surprisingly affecting...In big, luridly colored C-prints, taken from sharply careening angles, we come upon Sherman's prostrate form in the dirt, staring numbly at tufts of furred flesh spotted with flies...And Sherman herself has become little more than an accessory—as in both "to the whole" and "to a crime." More than anything, these pictures seem to be about the inner female self—no longer the manifestation of some external, usually male, vision. After playing out the female role in all its media and popular myth inspired guises, Sherman now explodes that mystique, in an apparent fit of disgust, to give us only its unpleasant paraphanalia...the latest pictures are so impulsive, so raw, that Sherman has finally managed to remove her self-conscious self from them—not, as she has thus far—merely disguise it."