Sherman Essay Research Paper Artist Cindy Sherman

Sherman Essay, Research Paper

Artist Cindy Sherman has taken modern society by the bullhorns. Appalled and disgusted by the media myself, I find relief in Sherman s satire use of the camera. Sherman s work is unique in the way that her ideas challenge the notion of innate, female sexuality exposed as the fiction of a real woman through the advertising media. I have recently indulged in the mechanics of photography and for this reason am passionate about the cause for her concern, which I believe she has developed like a true master. Her photographs represent a highly theatrical method of characterizing the ever-changing face of the human condition. Her artistic cause started when she was a young girl, collecting knick-knacks, old clothing, and costume materials. As the youngest of five, Sherman was raised as a middle-class, suburban child from Long-Island New-York. Ironically enough, Sherman failed her first photography course at the College level. However, it wasn t long before Sherman discovered to what extent the lens could warp and mask the human identity. She presents this dehumanizing aspect of the camera by giving little or no explanation regarding her prints, as all of her prints are Untitled. It is through her exploration of the mutilated female image that Sherman developed her theory of the projective eye and it s role in the world of the media. Mimicking the trajectory of this projective eye, she takes the results to an extreme in her collection of photographs entitled Fairy Tales. This series of sexual images reflect her feminist concerns regarding the misrepresentation of the female body.

It is through her exploration of identity issues that Sherman uses her untitled works to dissect the nature of the impact of representation. Sherman introduces her own body as a vessel. She stages several drastically different film characters in her series of Untitled Film Stills. The characters she depicts range from a floozy in a slip with a martini glass, a perky-B librarian, a film noire victim, an innocent runaway, to a voluptuous, lower-class, Italian woman. In the hopes of demonstrating how the human body acts as a medium for the influence of media images, Sherman completely separates herself from her body. Sherman s cause with the idea of identity is reiterated and made quite clear in her neglect to title her images. The simplicity of the presentation of her works allows for Sherman to hint at the voyeuristic nature of her Stills. Much to Sherman s dismay, the construction of identity has too often fallen into the hegemonic tendencies of the silver screen. By deliberately neglecting to include her personality in her portraits, she reminds the viewer that, what keeps [a] child awake at night after a scary movie is not [the] story but [the] image. By successfully personifying her chosen representations of these Hollywood characters, Sherman inevitably raises the issue of their validity. According to Sherman, Hollywood insinuates that identities are easily created and destroyed. In this sense, what Hollywood is manufacturing is actually a desire to conform. In response, Barbara Kruger questions, Is it impossible to construct a way of looking which welcomes the presence of pleasure and escapes the deception of desire.

Untitled Film Still #56(1981, black & white photograph, 8×10), forces the viewer to confront this very identity. This particular image of Sherman s has been labeled as a mirrorical return . The image in the mirror and the viewer exchange glances. Because these gazes bounce back and forth, they result in creating another image. Thus, the third image created is in fact an effect of the other, a body that is merely a projected outcome of the viewer s desires. Because both the viewing subject and the image collapse into the surface of the print, Untitled Still #56 both engages and repels the projective eye. In addition, since the face of the woman is so close, it eventually becomes absorbed in the surface of the image. Within this close proximity, the image becomes blurred, and is then almost obnoxiously blocked off by the back of her head. It is almost as if Sherman proposes that in attempting to see ourselves in the mirror, our identity is blocked by the presence of our body. The reflection is never quite complete in its self, as it is dependant upon the desires of others. (Please refer to attachment A)

I also feel it crucial to relate the intersubjective element of Sherman s work to the cause of an artist by the name of Orlan. Orlan sacrifices her body in the name of art through a series of surgical operations to transform her body. She chooses to alter her identity in the hopes of relaying her inherit desire to trash society s aesthetic abuse of the human body. Orlan feels that her work and it s ideas incarnate in [her] flesh, poses questions about the status of the body in our society and its evolution in future generations via new technologies and upcoming genetic manipulations. (Orlans) (Please refer to attachment B)

Accordingly, Sherman s Untitled Film Stills not only enact the photographed body as a projected vision, they define the woman s body as a stereotyped role. Sherman s work portrays women as victims of the projective eye, which in turn, is a direct effect of a patriarchal society. In Untitled #96(1981, color photograph 24×48), Sherman illustrates the female body as a commodity. Her blank stare, which