PORTRAITS OF A LADY
Cindy Sherman’s art flickers between theater and autobiography. Over three decades she’s photographed herself while posing as movie starlets, sex show performers, circus freaks, great ladies from history, and pop culture icons. In each instance, as she imagines herself in these roles, she challenges female archetypes and, along with them, presumptions about gender, power, and representation.
In the self-portraits on display at her current show at Metro Pictures she channels grand dames from the 30′s, wearing marcelled wigs, bias-cut gowns, and boa-trimmed shawls. But the scenes are surprisingly placid, emptied of melodrama. These are ladies in repose, assured in their social status.
Earlier Sherman heroines possessed a jarring physical and psychic vulnerability. Their stilted postures and expressions (perched on a ladder, peering in a bathroom mirror, sprawled on a hotel bed) embodied fear, anxiety, and sadness. Those pictures had theatrically lit and composed backdrops that charged them dramatically, as if events – potentially tragic – were about to unfold.
In her new portraits the images Sherman takes as backdrops (a leafless tree, a hillside Mediterranean town, a modern waterfront) are strangely static. They are like the blandly pretty backdrops department store photographers use, and seem entirely unrelated to the women resting in front of them. Here Sherman isn’t depicting female archetypes but a notion of herself, potent, as a contemporary art star. She’s easily identifiable in each of the photographs, and in the gallery we stand looking at her, not the characters. It would be false to claim that these pictures feel like product, but they don’t feel like art either. They feel like opulent, gorgeously-crafted selfies.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2016. Courtesy of Metro Pictures.