Cindy Sherman at Hauser & Wirth | East 69th Street
Greater than forty years in the past, Cindy Sherman debuted “Cindy Sherman,” the polymorphous persona that, since then, has been the artist’s major topic: a mirrored image not solely of herself, but in addition of mass tradition’s typically unusual and troubling depictions of girls as a complete. The seventy images from Sherman’s 1977–80 “Untitled Movie Stills” collection are a part of an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth that examines a few of her earliest forays into self-portraiture. In fact, as acquainted as these works—and the cinematic tropes they mine—have turn into, they by no means fail to unsettle. Take Untitled Movie Nonetheless #7, 1978, by which the artist transforms herself right into a louche Las Vegas kind, leaning awkwardly out of a sliding glass door wearing a white slip holding a cocktail glass and adjusting her garter belt; or Untitled Movie Nonetheless #58, 1980, the place she’s a resolute-looking heroine in a black wig and scarf, standing earlier than a high-rise whereas staring fearlessly out of the image, past the viewer’s gaze; and Untitled Movie Nonetheless #53, 1980, by which Sherman, disguised as an elegantly made-up and coiffed character resembling Princess Diana, friends disconcertingly to her left. The form of the glass torch lamp behind her humorously echoes her spherical coiffure, whereas the background mild forces her face right into a veil of shadow.
On the one hand, Sherman’s photos reside within the playacting custom of nice Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron; within the revolutionary identity-shifting oeuvre of Surrealist Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob (aka Claude Cahun), and even the searing confessional self-portraiture of Francesca Woodman. However, Sherman’s groundbreaking significance actually emanates from how her work subverts the premise that images could be trusted as sources of reality. The concept that a photograph isn’t what it says it’s as a result of it represents a conceit and never a certainty was radical a long time in the past (and exquisitely articulated by Susan Sontag in On Images [1977]). Some individuals who noticed Sherman’s works after they have been first exhibited claimed they really knew the movies the photographs have been ostensibly based mostly on—however that was her artwork taking part in its intelligent video games on their extremely mediated reminiscences.
Sherman’s “Stills,” with their onion-like layers of that means, questioned the veracity of even essentially the most compelling and sincere photos being made on the time by street-photography luminaries similar to Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. These small, wealthy, and surprisingly demure prints (all eight by ten inches, like previous Hollywood headshots) have been initially hung in downtown Manhattan galleries whereas the superbly produced, overbearing billboard-size portraits and nonetheless lifes of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn—seductive photographs knowledgeable by the exaggerations and lies inherent in promoting and vogue—have been being displayed uptown. Right this moment, Sherman’s early works appear as vital as ever, demanding of us far more than the shiny fictions she makes enjoyable of, insisting that we glance rigorously at our sources and browse between the traces.
— Robert Becker
