Cindy Sherman
Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954)[2] is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.
Cindy Sherman
American
State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo
Photographic self-portraits
Untitled#96, Untitled#153, Complete Untitled Film Stills, 1977–1980
Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collected Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media (especially arthouse films and popular B-movies). In the 1980s, she used color film and large prints, and focused more on costume, lighting and facial expression.
Music and films[edit]
In the early 1990s, Sherman worked with Minneapolis band Babes in Toyland, providing photographs for covers for the albums Fontanelle and Painkillers, creating a stage backdrop used in live concerts, and acting in the promotional video for the song "Bruise Violet."[61] She also worked as a film director.
Sherman moved from photographs to film with her movie Office Killer in 1997, starring Jeanne Tripplehorn, Molly Ringwald and Carol Kane. Dorine, played by Carol Kane, is a stand-in for Sherman. They have a shared interest in arranging bodies, like a puppeteer, in diorama-like scenes.[62] According to author Dahlia Schweitzer, Office Killer is full of unexpected characters and plot twists. Schweitzer considers the film to be a comedy, horror, melodrama, noir, feminist statement, and an art piece.[62] The film got negative reviews. In a review for The New York Times, art critic Roberta Smith states that the film lacks the artist's usual finesse and is a retrospective of her work - "a fascinating if lumpish bit of Shermaniana."[63] Movie critic colleague to Roberta Smith, Stephen Holden, called the film "sadly inept."[64]
Later, she had a cameo role in John Waters' film Pecker, and also appeared in The Feature in 2008, starring ex-husband Michel Auder, which won a New Vision Award. Echoing similar grisly and gory elements as her Untitled Horror series, the film includes several artistically executed murder scenes. Office Killer grossed $37,446 and received generally poor reviews, which called the film "crude" and "laugh-free."[65]
In 2009, Paul Hasegawa-Overacker and Tom Donahue completed a feature documentary, Guest of Cindy Sherman, about the former's relationship with Sherman. She was initially supportive, but later opposed the project.[66]
In the catalog essay[67] by Philipp Kaiser for Sherman's 2016 exhibition at the Metro Pictures Gallery, he mentioned six short films that Sherman made while in college, and how they were the precursors that eventually led to Office Killer being created. The catalog also includes a conversation between Sherman and the director of the exhibit, Sofia Coppola, in which Sherman admits that she may star in an upcoming film project.[64]
Feminism[edit]
In Sherman's Imitation of Life series of 2016 she poses, in vintage costume and theatrical makeup, as a variety of ageing actress-like women.[88]
When writing about Sherman's "Film Stills" in the journal October, the scholar Douglas Crimp states that Sherman's work is "a hybrid of photography and performance art that reveals femininity to be an effect of representation."[91]
However, Sherman does not consider her work or herself to be feminist, stating "The work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff."[92]
Many scholars emphasize the relationship Cindy Sherman's work has with the concept of the gaze. In particular, scholars like Laura Mulvey have analyzed Sherman's Untitled series in relation to the male gaze. In a 1991 essay on Sherman, Mulvey states that ″the accouterments of the feminine struggle to conform to a facade of desirability haunt Sherman's iconography,″ which functions as a parody of different voyeurisms captured by the camera.[93]
Others question whether this confrontation with the male gaze and a feminine struggle was an intentional consideration of Sherman's,[94][95] and whether this intentionality is important in considering the feminist standpoint of Sherman's photography.
Sherman herself has identified an uncertainty toward the Untitled series' relationship with the male gaze. In a 1991 interview with David Brittain in Creative Camera, Sherman said that "I didn't really analyze it at the time as far as knowing that I was commenting upon some feminist issue. The theories weren't there at all... But now I can look back on some of them, and I think some of them are a little blatantly obvious, too much like the original pin-up pictures of those times, so I have mixed feelings about them now as a whole series."[96]
In addition to questions of the gaze, Sherman's work is also given feminist analysis in the context of abjection. Scholars like Hal Foster[97] and Laura Mulvey interpret Sherman's use of the abject via the grotesque in 1980s projects like Vomit Pictures as de-fetishizing the female body.[93]
Scholar Michele Meager interprets Sherman as having been "crowned a resistant celebrity" to feminist theory.[98]
Art market[edit]
In 2010, Sherman's nearly six foot tall chromogenic color print Untitled#153 (1985), featuring the artist as a mud-caked corpse, was sold by Phillips de Pury & Company for $2.7 million, near the $3 million high estimate.[99] In 2011, a print of Untitled#96 fetched $3.89 million at Christie's, making it the most expensive photograph at that time.[100]
Sherman was represented by Metro Pictures for 40 years and also by Sprüth Magers before moving to Hauser & Wirth in 2021.[101]
In April 2023, Phillips NY auctioned the 159 cm x 359 cm sized-Untitled #546 (2010) for a well above-estimate $355,600. [45]
Influence on contemporary artists[edit]
Sherman's work is often credited as a major influence for contemporary portrait photographers. One such photographer is Ryan Trecartin, who manipulates themes of identity in his videos and photography.[102] Her influence stretches to artists in other art mediums, including painter Lisa Yuskavage, visual artist Jillian Mayer, and performance artist Tracey Ullman.[102]
In April 2014, actor and artist James Franco exhibited a series of photographs at the Pace Gallery called New Film Stills, in which Franco restaged twenty-nine images from Sherman's Untitled Film Stills.[103] The exhibit garnered mainly negative reviews, calling Franco's appropriations 'sophomoric,' 'sexist,' and embarrassingly clueless.'[104][105]
Personal life[edit]
Sherman lived with artist Robert Longo, from 1974 to 1980, whom also included her in his 'Men in the Cities' series of photographs.[106] She married director Michel Auder in 1984, making her stepmother to Auder's daughter, Alexandra, and her half-sister Gaby Hoffmann.[107] They divorced in 1999. She was then in a 5-year relationship with Paul Hasegawa-Overacker, creator of a documentary film about Sherman.[108] From 2007 to 2011, she had a relationship with the artist David Byrne.[109]
Between 1991 and 2005,[110] Sherman lived in a fifth-floor co-op loft at 84 Mercer Street in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood; she later sold it to actor Hank Azaria.[111] She bought two floors in a 10-story condo building overlooking the Hudson River in West Soho,[49][110] and currently uses one as her apartment and the other as her studio and office.[112]
For many years, Sherman spent her summers in the Catskill Mountains.[113] In 2000, she bought songwriter Marvin Hamlisch's[113] 4,200-square-foot house on 0.4 acre in Sag Harbor for $1.5 million.[114] She later acquired a 19th-century home on a ten-acre waterfront[115] property on Accabonac Harbor in East Hampton, New York.[116][117]
Sherman has expressed contempt for social media platforms, calling them "so vulgar."[64] However, she maintains an active Instagram account[118] featuring her selfies.[119]
Industry and advocacy work[edit]
Sherman serves on the artistic advisory committee of the New York City-based Stephen Petronio Company[120] and on the Artists Committee of the Americans for the Arts.[121] Along with David Byrne, she was a member of Portugal's Estoril Film Festival's jury in 2009.[122]
In 2012, she joined Yoko Ono and nearly 150 fellow artists in the founding of Artists Against Fracking, a group in opposition to hydraulic fracturing to remove gas from underground deposits.[123]
In 2023, Sherman served on the jury that chose Sarah Lucas as first winner of the New Museum’s $400,000 Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture Award.[124]
Works by Sherman are held in the following collections: