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Untitled # 109, 1982

Untitled # 109, a photograph made in 1982 was, if not the first, among the first works by Cindy Sherman produced right after she finished her first and most successful (and admirable) series, Untitled Film Still. In the piece we are commenting on here, the image of the artist herself, or the altered representation of that effigy of a thousand faces known in the art world and social world as Cindy Sherman, is still easily recognizable as such (in fact, it is almost a self-portrait, although the affirmation that it were this in absolute terms would be a "false truth"), but at the same time there is something in it that leads us to believe that that face of a noble and conscientious Soviet Bolshevik, or of a grave peasant from the steppes, or of a woman condemned in the Gulag, or of a recent arrival at a concentration camp, one still not a member of the living dead, in all these possibilities, we say, still probable or very possible, there is an ever present suspicion, as in all of Sherman's work, or the shadow of a doubt that that mystification we contemplate might very well be a violent transgression of visual perception, or of its very hierarchy, but we are essentially left with the uncertainty of witnessing another truth, or witnessing a truth beyond the lie of art, of the fallacy of what is real.

In fact, it could be argued that Sherman's entire iconographic discourse, especially that in her works where we could say she is self-immolated in the baroque theatricality of her self-portraits, is an immense testing field where the real self makes an endless number of attempts at self-knowledge, in a tireless movement, outward and inward, in order to find, or discover, or guess, but never (intelligently) capture, the same thing André Bazin desperately sought in the cinematographic image, his ontological realism, his complicated and fleeting illusion of truth. When carefully contemplating this photograph, we realize that it is not so much the face of a woman possibly brought to justice that we are observing, but the magnificent and classic position of the open hands resting on the chest that attracts our attention most, and conclusively, what moves us most.

Those white hands falsely accused of a non truth seem to be saying Me guilty, of what? And with this, we are introduced into the very meaningfulness of the work, a moral rhetoric along with an expressive, pictorial rhetoric; this indeed being an equation shaping the core of the author's aesthetic ideas. In this utterly discreet and simple work by Sherman, so bare and stark, (apparently) hardly theatrical at all. It seems as if it were plucked from an episode, from a chapter, of a larger work, and that the author's wish is that we will not be able to gauge the totality of the argument, which forces us toward a didactic composition that multiplies the procedures of approaching the piece and the points of view arising in its contemplation. This quality is to play an increasingly important role in her later work. L. F. P.