Cindy Sherman
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.

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.

Untitled, 1983

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.