A young woman at the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA missed the point rather badly, observing about the artist, “She’s pretty. Why does she do all of this?" Sherman has made a career of dressing up in costumes, makeup and wigs and then photographing herself. One one level her project is about how superficial social identity is, and specifically about how women are so often called upon to be something that they’re essentially not. But the seductive quality of her work makes it difficult to categorize simply as feminist or media art. I look at these pictures and fall right into them.
It was stunning to see Sherman’s small black and white photographs from the late 1970’s, film stills, mounted together in groups. When seen one-at-a-time in magazines and online, each one has a smart, iconic presence. But when seen en masse their artifice is apparent, and it’s at odds with their poignancy. The women pictured in them, observed without their knowledge, are psychically and physically vulnerable. They fall into recognizable feminine archetypes (abandoned, ambitious, ruined, hunting) but also arouse sympathy. (Sherman’s later works, when she’s disguised so elaborately or pointedly that no part of herself shows through, don’t have the same emotionalism.) Sherman strikes an even finer balance between honesty and artifice in her color photographs from the early 1980’s, the rear projection series. The washed-out stock image backdrops, and the absence of shadows connecting her figure to the scene, give them a special ambiguity. These are alluringly incomplete tableaux, without a middle ground and without a simple explanation. Who is this lady, where is she going, and what’s troubling her? With simple means, the pictures harbor mysteries.
