Colecciones de arte

Untitled, 1983

DESCRIPTION

This second work by Cindy Sherman, Untitled, produced just a year after Untitled # 109, possesses some features and characteristics, although somewhat tempered or presented in a more discreet fashion, typical of the representational exuberance that would burst forth into Sherman's work in the mid-eighties, coinciding with her being cast into the limelight as an artist.

Yet what is indeed entirely present in this work is the visual representation of history or, in other words, the perceptive alteration of the classic iconography of certain part of art history (painting), or also: the distillation in the present, this indeed being a quality very representative of post-modernity, of a "memory of history" that is just as real as it is fictitious or dreamt, but insofar as it is restored to the pure present, it is erected as a catalyser of a hypothetical truth beyond its scientific reason, its historical rigour. Observing the figure, or situation, represented herein -a page, a camel merchant, a shrewd and slick trader of goods, a now freed ex-slave, a hypocritical thief begging for mercy?- what interests and attracts us most is not so much discovering the picture's exact meaning, or guessing the artistic source utilized by Sherman as inspiration -in which Annunciation, in which Nativity, in which Epiphany, etc.?-, no, none of this is really important, because what Sherman is after is not revealing or proving her knowledge and admiration for the history of classic painting, but to unmask a, let us say, "historical content", through the gesture -an extremely important aspect in all of Sherman's work- of the "action's moral", or from the discursive ethic of representation, the latter given and offered as an indication or sign of the moral component of history.

This is a clean photograph, and representation, for there is still no presence of the masks, prosthesis, false members, monstrous injuries, unreal outfits and makeup, the artificial gloomy beaches full of detritus, or the interiors lit in Caravaggio style (although these would appear soon afterward). Naturally, in this very carefully composed and contrived photograph, and this is obvious when it is contemplated, one can already glimpse the forthcoming representational orgy, although another concern is still dominant in it, more in keeping, in a way that can be perceived in retrospect, with her early works, certainly not in its formal aspect, but, to be sure, in its self-reflection about the voyeuristic nature of the images, and especially in the psychoanalytic reading of the action, which in this work would be magnificently presented in the forced gesturing of the semi-kneeling figure, in a position halfway between humiliating and offering of a moral action, although for this the author has disguised that same action with the attire of a miserable Bedouin captured in the chilly desert night. L. F. P.