Unit 3 - Area of Study 1

Interpreting Art

• “Cindy Sherman’s photographs are not self-portraits. It is true that she is the model for her own pictures, but that is beside the point. As a matter of practicality, Sherman prefers to work alone. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist and wardrobe mistress.”

-Eva Respini Will the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up?

• Born 19th January 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey (New York)

• Youngest of five children (grew up in the town of Huntington, Long Island)

• Father: Engineer

• Mother: Reading Teacher

• Her parents showed very little interest in the arts.

• Sherman “…belongs to the first generation of Americans raised on television, Sherman was fully steeped in mass-media culture…”

• Another activity that kept Sherman occupied was dressing up: “I’d try to look like another person – even like an old

lady… I would make myself up like a monster, things like that, which seemed like much more fun that just looking like Barbie.” – Cindy Sherman.

• Enrolled at the State University College in Buffalo. – She did not pass her initial photography courses and

this is why she first pursued painting.

– Frustrated with the limitations of painting and feeling like she had done all that she could, she gave up.

– “…there is nothing more to say (through painting). I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.” – Cindy Sherman.

• Met Barbara Jo Revelle (new photography lecturer)

– Revelle was less concerned with technical perfection and exposed her students to Conceptual art and other contemporary art movements.

– She showed Sherman the meaning and excitement of photography, beyond the technical aspects.

– Sherman liked the immediacy of images produced by the camera.

• Established HallWalls (with Robert Longo and Charles Clough) – a venue (artist run space) through which contemporary artists can display their works (on the walls of a hallway).

• Sherman attended college at a time when attitudes about fashion and women’s bodies were changing. Gone were the girdles and restricting undergarments of her mother’s generation, replaced by a more natural approach to grooming.

• A Play of Selves (1975) • A visual tale of a young woman

overwhelmed by various alter-egos working at odds within her and her final conquering of self-doubt.

• Acted out with 16 separate characters, the 71 photgraphic assemblages mark Sherman's earliest explorations of her ground-breaking use of herself as the subject in staged photographs.

http://www.metropicturesgallery.com/exhibitions/2006-11-11-cindy-sherman/

• A Play of Selves (1975) • Sherman originally shot hundreds of

photographs of herself costumed as the various characters in dozens of poses.

• After cutting out the individual images from black and white prints, organize the images into the 4 act "play".

• The piece was first shown at the artist-run, alternative space, “Hallwalls”, in Buffalo, NY in 1975.

http://www.metropicturesgallery.com/exhibitions/2006-11-11-cindy-sherman/

• 1976

– Graduated from Buffalo

– Moved to New York City (to embark upon her career in art).

– Focused on creating a unique portfolio.

– Used herself as the model (practical purposes).

• In 1976 Sherman graduated from Buffalo

• She moved into a loft on Fulton Street, Lower Manhattan, New York City

– Focused on creating a unique portfolio.

– Used herself as the model (practical purposes).

Untitled Film Stills begun in 1977 • Sherman places herself in roles of B-movie actress • Her photographs show her dressed up in wigs, hats, dresses, clothes unlike her

own, playing the roles of the characters. • These photographs only play with elements of self-portraiture. • Plays a type – not an actual person – a self-fabricated fictional one. • Through titling each of the photographs as “Untitled”, as well as numbering

them, Sherman depersonalizes the images. • “She wanted viewers to be able to invent their own stories to suit the scene,

perhaps even insert themselves in it” – Victoria Olsen • The women in these photographs “are on their way to wherever the action is

(or to their doom)… or have just come from a confrontation (or tryst)”. – Sherman.

• Untitled Film Stills can be divided into several distinct groups: – The first six are grainy and slightly out of focus, and

each of the ‘roles’ appears to be played by the same blonde actress.

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/photography/Cindy-Sherman.html

Untitled Film Still 1 Untitled Film Still 2 Untitled Film Still 3 Untitled Film Still 4 Untitled Film Still 5 Untitled Film Still 6

– The next group was taken in 1978 at Robert Longo’s family beach house on the north fork of Long Island.

– Later in 1978, Sherman began taking shots in outdoor locations around the city. (e.g. Untitled Film Still #21)

– Sherman later returned to her apartment, preferring to work from home. She created her version of a Sophia Loren character from the movie Two Women (e.g. Untitled Film Still #35 (1979))

– She took several photographs in the series while preparing for a trip to Arizona with her parents. Untitled Film Still #48 (1979), also known as The Hitchhiker, was shot at sunset one evening during the trip.

– The remainder of the series was shot around New York, like Untitled #54, often featuring a blonde victim typical of film noir.

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/photography/Cindy-Sherman.html

Untitled Film Stills • http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/gallery/2/mobile.php Curator, Eva Respini: “These black-and-white pictures explore the stereotypes of film. You see Sherman herself posing in a variety

of guises that refer to the publicity still, usually shot on set and used to advertise a film. She's referring to 1950s and 60s film, B-movies, or European art house films. However, none of these photographs depict actual films. These are completely fictional moments that are made to look like stills.

The success of this body of work is in the seemingly endless variation of female types that Sherman has presented to us the girl on the run, the bombshell, the bored housewife, the vamp. Sherman has mined these stereotypes to great effect and presented us with a variety of characters that are familiar, but also spark our own narrative. While the photographs can be appreciated individually, their success really is in their multiplicity an encyclopedia or a cataloging of female types.

This is the only series of photographs Sherman shot outside her studio. All of these photographs were set up kind of guerrilla-style. She carried around a little suitcase with a wig or some costumes, and then quickly she would turn into that persona—snap a few pictures and then develop them.

One of the hallmarks of this body of work is that the prints themselves are unremarkable. These were made to seem cheap, like throwaway prints. The publicity still was 8 x 10 inches, glossy. It wasn't treated like an artwork, and the format of these Untitled Film Stills mimics that.”

• 1980 – run out of clichés. • Unlike the media images they refer to,

Sherman’s stills have a deliberate artifice that is heightened by the often-visible camera cord, slightly eccentric props, unusual camera angles, and by the fact that each image includes the artist rather than a recognizable actress or model.

• She created a series called Rear-Screen Projections (1980 -81) in which, Sherman dresses up and paraded against a projected slide background.

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/school-educator-programs/teacher-resources/arts-curriculum-online?view=item&catid=732&id=152

Untitled #74 (1980)

http://www.cindysherman.com/biography.shtml

• Her Centerfolds (1981) and Fashion (1983–84) series elaborated the codes of what film theorist Laura Mulvey termed the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of female representation.

• Emulating the signifiers of the centerfold, the closely cropped photographs reveal a body that is available to the camera and bathed in a vivid light.

• Cindy Sherman : Fashion I “Exclusive” I Art21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtATCPCC8b8

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/bios/688

• Disasters and Fairy Tales series (1985 – 1989) • For the first time in her public career, Sherman was

not the model in all of the images. • These images are far more grotesque than her earlier

work. • Often intentionally dressing to look scared and

deformed. • Sherman sets herself in strange, indefinable settings

which often feature oddly coloured lighting in shades of blue, green and red.

• Sometimes employs doll parts or prosthetic body parts to substitute for her own and many a scene is strewn with vomit, mold and other vile substances. Untitled #153 (1985) http://www.cindysherman.com/biography.shtml

• History Portraits Series (1988 -1990) • Again, using herself as a model, except this time she

casts herself in roles from archtypally famous paintings. • Using prosthetic body parts, Sherman recreates great

pieces of art and thus manipulates her role as a contemporary artist working in the twentieth-century.

• Sherman lived abroad during this time in her life, and even though museums would appear to be the source of inspiration for this series, she is not a fan of museums:

"Even when I was doing those history pictures, I was living in Rome but never went to the churches and museums there. I worked out of books, with reproductions. It's an aspect of photograph I appreciate, conceptually: the idea that images can be reproduced and seen anytime, anywhere, by anyone."

Untitled #183 (1988) http://www.cindysherman.com/biography.shtml

• Sex Pictures (1992) • For the first time, Sherman is completely

absent from these photographs. • She uses dolls and prosthetic body parts, this

time posed in highly sexual poses. • Prosthetic genitalia - both male and female -

are used often and photographed in extreme close-up.

• Photographed exclusively in color, these photographs are meant to shock.

• Continued to experiment with the use of dolls and other replacements for what had previously been herself.

http://www.cindysherman.com/biography.shtml

• Headshots (2000) • Sherman has invented

characters who have fallen victim to the cycle of desire, ambition and failure of Hollywood.

• These images depict would be stars, failed actors and has-been performers posing for headshots for agents and agencies.

http://artadvisor.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/cindy-sherman-retrospective-at-the-dallas-museum-of-art/

Untitled #354 (2000)

• Clowns (2002 - 2004) • All of the subjects in this serise are dressed in bright

colours and carnivalesque makeup, a jovial and even comical surface layer for the chacters.

• Sherman is using clowns because, undernath and vibrant burts of colour and wise tooth cimles, in an underlying sadness.

• “clowns are sad, but they’re also psychotically, hysterically happy.”

• Sherman is using the persona of the clown to have a converstaing – people can paint themselves to look happy, even if they are sad underneath.

• Sherma goes to the extreme to show the vast emtional possiblities beginf a painted smile.

Untitled #4 ()

http://artadvisor.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/cindy-sherman-retrospective-at-the-dallas-museum-of-art/

• Society Portraits (2008) • Huge colour images show the

struggle of status-obsessed culture, women with mounds of makeup and cosmetic alteration clinging to youth.

• In these Sherman makes her characters vulnerable behind all the costuming and make-up, commenting on society’s perception and intense focus on beauty.

Untitled #475 (2008) http://artadvisor.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/cindy-sherman-retrospective-at-the-dallas-museum-of-art/

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiszC33puc0&list=PLvTvk2kUnhMxKGnWXIUSMWrh_3Qu-nfqF

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #2, (1977) Gelatin silver print, 24.1 x 19.2 cm.

Untitled #466 (2008) Chromogenic colour print, 246.7 x 162.4 cm Museum of Modern Art, New York