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Lot Essay
Although three decades have passed since their inception, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills still resonate with incisive freshness. Executed at the height of the feminist movement, these works skillfully expose gender as a construct by their tongue-in-cheek embrace of female stereotypes. In the present media saturated era in which obsession with female celebrity has exploded and their fabrications around certain contemporary ideals of femininity proliferates, Sherman's work appears extremely prescient and relevant.
Sherman began Untitled Film Stills in 1977 when she was just twenty three years old. Three years later, she concluded the series with sixty nine images. In these small 8 x 10 black and white photographs, Sherman re-enacted various types of female characters from B-movies. She imitated and confronted an assortment of representational tropes that explored the way in which women and the female body were depicted by effective contemporary image-makes and propagated by mass media sources. She spoke to a generation of women who had absorbed the pervasion of female portrayals from film, television and magazines as cues for their future.
Untitled Film Stills are simultaneously photographs and performances. Since the works were not actually film stills - there were no film to begin with, but an allusion to film through the recreation of fictional heroines in narrative settings - they are photographic records of performances and performative accounts of filmic images. Sherman acts as set designer, make-up artist, costume designer, actress, director and photographer as she stages the scene, molds her character, strikes a pose, calls "Action!" and snaps the picture.
Untitled #382 is an early film still. An actress playing an actress, Sherman adopts a stage persona with heavy make-up, a peroxide blond wig and floral dressing gown. She feigns horror/surprise as though imitating/commenting on classic film noir. One imagines a damsel in distress awaiting the rescue of her herobut perched on a stool in a makeshift space, Sherman's character appears to be rehearsing or auditioning for a role. In other words Sherman plays the role of an actress playing a role. Alternatively, the scenario may also real directly as a diva in her dressing room being abruptly interrupted by a scary intruder. Although made explicit as a construction through the exaggerated make-up and pose, the level and degree of role playing is left unclear. The open narrative invites the viewer into participation; indeed the image is inherently voyeuristic. Yet, no matter how murky the plot, it is implicitly clear that the female is the victim of male salvation or aggression, and that she is the subject of his gaze. Confronting this recurrent paradigm in various mediums, Sherman subverts its very premise.
Exposing gender as a fabrication of the truth, Sherman's Untitled Film Stills have wider ramifications for the construction of identity - a concept that expands to include race, religion and sexual orientation - and as such, have reverberations in the modern age.
Sherman began Untitled Film Stills in 1977 when she was just twenty three years old. Three years later, she concluded the series with sixty nine images. In these small 8 x 10 black and white photographs, Sherman re-enacted various types of female characters from B-movies. She imitated and confronted an assortment of representational tropes that explored the way in which women and the female body were depicted by effective contemporary image-makes and propagated by mass media sources. She spoke to a generation of women who had absorbed the pervasion of female portrayals from film, television and magazines as cues for their future.
Untitled Film Stills are simultaneously photographs and performances. Since the works were not actually film stills - there were no film to begin with, but an allusion to film through the recreation of fictional heroines in narrative settings - they are photographic records of performances and performative accounts of filmic images. Sherman acts as set designer, make-up artist, costume designer, actress, director and photographer as she stages the scene, molds her character, strikes a pose, calls "Action!" and snaps the picture.
Untitled #382 is an early film still. An actress playing an actress, Sherman adopts a stage persona with heavy make-up, a peroxide blond wig and floral dressing gown. She feigns horror/surprise as though imitating/commenting on classic film noir. One imagines a damsel in distress awaiting the rescue of her herobut perched on a stool in a makeshift space, Sherman's character appears to be rehearsing or auditioning for a role. In other words Sherman plays the role of an actress playing a role. Alternatively, the scenario may also real directly as a diva in her dressing room being abruptly interrupted by a scary intruder. Although made explicit as a construction through the exaggerated make-up and pose, the level and degree of role playing is left unclear. The open narrative invites the viewer into participation; indeed the image is inherently voyeuristic. Yet, no matter how murky the plot, it is implicitly clear that the female is the victim of male salvation or aggression, and that she is the subject of his gaze. Confronting this recurrent paradigm in various mediums, Sherman subverts its very premise.
Exposing gender as a fabrication of the truth, Sherman's Untitled Film Stills have wider ramifications for the construction of identity - a concept that expands to include race, religion and sexual orientation - and as such, have reverberations in the modern age.