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Employing a conceptual approach situated at the interstices of self-portraiture, photography, performance and popular culture, Cindy Sherman, first gained art world attention and critical acclaim for her epochal Untitled Film Stills, of which Untitled Film Still #19 is an early example. In this series of black and white photographs, begun in late 1977, Sherman carefully manipulated pose, gesture, costume, makeup, lighting and composition to create film stills that suggested various 1950's cinematic subgenres. Each image re-presents a particular cliché of femininity both constructed and reinforced through cinema, acted out by Sherman herself. By simultaneously performing many different feminine stereotypes, Sherman's project highlights not just the constructed nature of stereotypes but powerfully suggests masquerade as an inherent condition of femininity. Feminism aside, Sherman's redeployment of mass media imagery and suggestion that the self is subsumed under an avalanche of mediated clichis situated her work firmly within the broader discourse of post-modernism emerging at the time.
By 1980, Sherman felt like she had exhausted the potential of the Untitled Film Stills; wary of the glamour which her Film Stills nonetheless exuded, and to some extent of their overwhelming success, Sherman began to create other contexts for her persona and unconsciously strove to propel her audience into more difficult and demanding territory.
Sherman drew on fashion, art history, fairy tales and horror films as sources for her images, using elaborate makeup and prosthetics to create dark, disturbing images of bodily excess. In the Sex Pictures series, of which Untitled #264 is an example, Sherman applied these abject lessons to transform the realm of pornography first explored in the Centerfolds. The fetishized, fragmented and objectified body of pornography is materially mimicked in the monstrous arrangements of anatomically detailed mannequins and body parts sourced from medical catalogues. With a strong focus placed on the very visible genitals, the constructed tableau literally objectifies sex. Produced during the politically-charged culture wars of the early nineties, these surrogate bodies allowed the artist to explore issues of nudity, sexuality, perversity and obscenity, without placing her own body on display.
At first glance, Sherman's most recent work, a return to the traditional portrait format that defined much of her work of the eighties, suggests a move away from her longstanding interest in the abject and perverse. However, the garish makeup, flamboyant costume and spectacular digital Technicolor of Untitled #418, from her Clown series, only serve to emphasize not just the melancholy traditionally associated with the tragicomic character of the clown, but also the uncanny and menacing quality explored by Bruce Nauman. Recalling Freud's assertion that jokes are often how repressed aggression and violence manifests, these works ruminate on this ever present, dark and perverse underlayer of humor.
CINDY SHERMAN (b. 1954)
Untitled # 418
細節
CINDY SHERMAN (b. 1954)
Untitled # 418
signed, numbered and dated 'Cindy Sherman 5/6 2004' (on a paper label affixed to the reverse)
color coupler print
72 x 44¼ in. (182.9 x 112.4 cm.)
Executed in 2004. This work is number five from an edition of six.
Untitled # 418
signed, numbered and dated 'Cindy Sherman 5/6 2004' (on a paper label affixed to the reverse)
color coupler print
72 x 44¼ in. (182.9 x 112.4 cm.)
Executed in 2004. This work is number five from an edition of six.
來源
Metro Pictures, New York
出版
B. Graw, Cindy Sherman: Clowns, Hannover, 2004, p. 20 (illustrated).