Colecciones de arte

Trajectory

Glen Ridge, New Jersey (USA), 1954

Sherman earned widespread recognition in 1980 following her first exhibition at the Metro Pictures Gallery, a venue that would serve as a launch pad, providing much publicity for numerous American artists who, during the early eighties, jolted the art world in that city as the bearers not so much, or not only, of a critique of representation and the object, as these artists were theorized at the beginning of their careers, but essentially, when considered twenty years after those first attempts, of the conquest of a wide angle embracing the condition with which the work itself is contemplated, in other words: questioning and causing a crisis in the structures shaping the visual reception of the work of art, and therefore, naturally, its critique, when not its outright detraction, of the classic status of representation in art. Would this quality be one of the central premises that, throughout the decade, would fill thousands of pages with writings about post-modernity in art? Probably, but the hackneyed term and, essentially, its natural ambiguity compels us to isolate (or protect) this possibility within the humbleness and prudence of a wise interrogation.

The first works by Cindy Sherman exhibited in Spain were participant in the exhibition El Arte y su Doble in 1987 which included most of the American artists who had exhibited at the Metro Pictures Gallery, as explained above. In that group show, Sherman's work consisted of eight large colour photographs dating from 1981 to 1985, but there were no pieces from the earlier period, from the late 70s, specifically the series Untitled Film Still, which, with the passage of time, and above all with greater temperance and care regarding the overall analysis of the work, said series can be considered the most brilliant production of her career, inasmuch as it is inaugural with respect to the questioning of feminine identity, one of Sherman's most important, and perhaps her principal theoretical concern, if we take into account that over the years her work has gradually shifted toward a more general, open process dealing with the crisis that has come about regarding the subject represented, beyond gender, to the extent that in later works the figure itself disappears, fragmented, when not directly hidden or invisible amidst a sea of detritus and abjection, this being a highly criticized characteristic, her work accused of being worn out, fatigued and lost in its own representational ecstasy, devoid of the intelligent and violent message of her earlier works.

At present, Cindy Sherman's work, taking into consideration her entire production as a whole, is doubtless an extraordinary body of work and discourse; it is magnificent, intelligent and of a violent beauty that challenges many prejudices and blind spots with respect to the visual reception of art. Is her work classic? Certainly, and without a doubt, for indeed it has been so from the start, and yet it is "classic" inasmuch as it analyses and deconstructs some of the most essential constants shaping the meaning of art, for it explores the instability, the ambiguity, the fragility and the falseness of the cultural structures of classic representations of contemporary subjects. L. F. P.