I choose to share some of Cindy Sherman's photography, one of the artists listed as an influence to the visual artists included in the Gurlesque anthology. The website I've included gives a description of her life and work and provides dozens of her images. I enjoy the fact that she uses herself as a model throughout her work, and find this provokes questions concerning identity. Some of the images have a definite grotesque quality and it's easy to see how she's an influence on the artists in the anthology.
Toward the bottom of the webpage a commentator writes:
"Here is an artist who obsessively photographs herself yet does not celebrate herself. In fact, she goes out of her way to obliterate signs of herself and creates in her performances and her images women who reveal no sense of self, women who seem objectified and stereotypical.
It is the lack of narrative and the lack of the unique and particular that deadens empathy and objectifies the women. Sherman in each image uses herself as an object, like a chair or a room that is constantly reworked by aspiring decorators. In each image of her performances, she creates a still life - in which the major element is a distressed woman instead of the usual bowl of fruit or white porcelain water jog.
So much of Sherman's attitude is antiphotography. To begin with, there is the fact that she does not consider herself a photographer or her work photography. Secondly, she does not always take the photograph herself. Then there is the heroic scale of the larger pieces, 6 1/2 by 4 feet - more reminiscent of wall art than of art photography. Also, by purposely making her pictures visually uninteresting, she is telling us that the fact of her photographic documentation is more important than what is in the image. By calling each of her images "Untitled" and by divesting each woman of any characteristic details, Sherman keeps the information to a minimum, and dismisses photography as the art of the specific and unique. The same lack of detail restrains the viewer's memory and limits the nostalgia that the viewer typically brings to photography.
On the other hand, by creating performance pieces that only exist for the camera and only last as long as the exposure, she has appropriated one of the photography's oldest functions - documentation. Looking at the images of Cindy Sherman, one has to wonder if its author's phenomenal success has to do with the misogynistic objectification of women that this documentation embodies."
How about everyone else? Any thoughts, feelings, or impressions on Sherman's work? How it may relate to some of the visual artists in the anthology, or the poetry?
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/photography/Cindy-Sherman.html
I can't quite get past that paradox that she "obsessively photographs herself yet does not celebrate herself". Because still she is putting herself into the subject matter and she is the object in focus. So my question is does that go with her overall idea that she is in fact objectifying herself? Or is she purposely trying to be unidentifiable and a sort of "non-specific" object to generalize women?
ReplyDeleteIf that statement even makes any sense...
ReplyDeleteMany of these photos remind me of Friedan's essays about the feminine mystique and the plight of the 1950s housewife that we read about at the beginning of the semester. The particular photo that took me back to these readings was "Untitled Film Still #3-1977"--the one of the housewife standing at the sink looking over her shoulder. The expression on Sherman's face seems to be one of knowing while at the same time reflecting on an internal struggle. She reminds of the housewives with the "problem with no name" in Friedan's essays. Since the commentator does suggest that Sherman's work is more about documentation than content, I wonder if Sherman is commenting on that fact that these problems need to be documented. The "problem with no name" needs to surface and be recognized as something that is real and that is happening to women. I wonder if Sherman's work is meant to bring to light the plights that women were experiencing in the 1970s, but were consciously or unconsciously being ignored by patriarchal society. Perhaps her art is attempting to document these issues so that they cannot be avoided any longer.
ReplyDeleteI think we have to read Sherman's work as heavily ironic. More in line with the poems we read for this week than with Betty Friedan. Yes she is commenting on women and the ways women have been or are portrayed in film, but I don't think the work is earnestly political in the sense of trying to bring attention to the plight of women. By the time Sherman is making her work, everyone she is speaking to is well aware of the plight of women. But perhaps she is more interested in thinking about media and performance, Tons has been written about her work - If any of your are pursuing matters of media and performance for your final project, it'd be great to read some of what's been said about Sherman and other feminist artists of her generation. Let me know if you'd like to be pointed in that direction!
ReplyDelete