.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This work is registered as #478 in the Metro Pictures archive.
Since the beginning of her career in the mid-1970s, Cindy Sherman's work has been distinguished by her uncanny ability to assume the identity of a multiplicity of characters. In each of her photographs, the artist uses a range of costumes, makeup, wigs, and prostheses, and typically employs her own styling, to transform her physical appearance and radically obscure her identity.
Sherman singles out clich/as and archetypes encountered in popular media and manipulates these in ways that are simultaneously abject and alluring. Her body of work has been distinctly influential in shaping the field of contemporary art, prompting a profound appreciation of the complex and sometimes symbiotic roles of mediated perception and femininity in today's society.
While Sherman's practice draws closely on psychoanalysis and its theories of the male gaze, her portraits also relate to a post-structuralist critique of authorship--the "real" author all but disappears in her works and subjects become copies without an original. In her seminal early series Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), Sherman adopts backdrops from well-known movies, and photographs herself in poses mirroring hypothetical actresses. These pastiche scenes conjure up deeprooted stereotypes of women as ingnues, working girls, dumb blondes, femme fatales, and other generalized characters based on sexual difference. Classic film genres are thus dissimulated, prompting audiences to reflect on how images are consumed and identity constructed. In other series, Sherman's impersonations appear to externalize specific generational and societal expectations, with some works addressing the pornographic industry and others highlighting the unrealistic expectations often conferred upon women, whether by themselves or others.
Untitled (2002/2008) belongs to a body of work by Sherman in which she depicts herself against a background which was photographed separately and is often blurred, thus enhancing the already staged and theatrical nature of the shot. For the present work, Sherman models a woman standing within a park-like setting and holding a pen in her right hand. Her outward gaze and slight smile suggests she may be with someone else, while her hand gesture seems to indicate she is sketching. Loaded with cultural and gender-based signifiers, the work recalls the idea of packaged content in the advertisement industry, where lots of different, secondary meanings are often packed into one image.
Art historian Rosalind Krauss has elaborated on this idea of "packaging" in a passage that aptly describes the artist's practice: "[T]here is no free-standing character, so to speak, but only a concatenation of signifiers so that the persona is released--conceived, embodied, established-by the very act of cutting out the signifiers, making 'her' a pure function of framing, lighting, distance, camera angleSherman as de-myth-ifier is specifically allowing us, encouraging us to look under the hood. Even as she is also showing us the tremendous temptation to buy into the myth, to accept the signified as finished fact, as free-standing figure, as 'character.'"1
1Rosalind Krauss, Cindy Sherman 1975-1993 (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), p. 32.
Since the beginning of her career in the mid-1970s, Cindy Sherman's work has been distinguished by her uncanny ability to assume the identity of a multiplicity of characters. In each of her photographs, the artist uses a range of costumes, makeup, wigs, and prostheses, and typically employs her own styling, to transform her physical appearance and radically obscure her identity.
Sherman singles out clich/as and archetypes encountered in popular media and manipulates these in ways that are simultaneously abject and alluring. Her body of work has been distinctly influential in shaping the field of contemporary art, prompting a profound appreciation of the complex and sometimes symbiotic roles of mediated perception and femininity in today's society.
While Sherman's practice draws closely on psychoanalysis and its theories of the male gaze, her portraits also relate to a post-structuralist critique of authorship--the "real" author all but disappears in her works and subjects become copies without an original. In her seminal early series Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), Sherman adopts backdrops from well-known movies, and photographs herself in poses mirroring hypothetical actresses. These pastiche scenes conjure up deeprooted stereotypes of women as ingnues, working girls, dumb blondes, femme fatales, and other generalized characters based on sexual difference. Classic film genres are thus dissimulated, prompting audiences to reflect on how images are consumed and identity constructed. In other series, Sherman's impersonations appear to externalize specific generational and societal expectations, with some works addressing the pornographic industry and others highlighting the unrealistic expectations often conferred upon women, whether by themselves or others.
Untitled (2002/2008) belongs to a body of work by Sherman in which she depicts herself against a background which was photographed separately and is often blurred, thus enhancing the already staged and theatrical nature of the shot. For the present work, Sherman models a woman standing within a park-like setting and holding a pen in her right hand. Her outward gaze and slight smile suggests she may be with someone else, while her hand gesture seems to indicate she is sketching. Loaded with cultural and gender-based signifiers, the work recalls the idea of packaged content in the advertisement industry, where lots of different, secondary meanings are often packed into one image.
Art historian Rosalind Krauss has elaborated on this idea of "packaging" in a passage that aptly describes the artist's practice: "[T]here is no free-standing character, so to speak, but only a concatenation of signifiers so that the persona is released--conceived, embodied, established-by the very act of cutting out the signifiers, making 'her' a pure function of framing, lighting, distance, camera angleSherman as de-myth-ifier is specifically allowing us, encouraging us to look under the hood. Even as she is also showing us the tremendous temptation to buy into the myth, to accept the signified as finished fact, as free-standing figure, as 'character.'"