Cindy Sherman: From singularity to transgression in photographic art.9 minutos de lectura

Cindy Sherman left the painting because she thought she couldn’t give it more and turned herself over in the photograph, but not to reproduce what everyone sees, but what he doesn’t see, what is hidden, even finally what is rejected.

The world is wide and diverse, and good and evil, ugliness and beauty, life and death, love and horror are mixed. An incomparable witness to that dichotomy through her work, interpreting herself as a self-model from the beginning as a channel for an inner look at everything that surrounds us, Cindy Sherman has been and is a permanently erupting volcano. And continue, because although she is over sixty years old, there is still an artist to see and a journey to surprise us.

Diverse and unconventional, a masterful interpreter of the female figure in all its aspects, a tireless fighter against stereotypes and the classic “femininity” imposed for a long time by Hollywood and the establishment, Sherman is, without a doubt, one of the great figures in History of Photography and also of the moving image, although it has less cinematographic production than pure photographic production.

Cynthia Morris Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and is, in life and work since she was born in that area near Long Island of the great metropolis, an unrepentant New Yorker. In fact, she has exhibited at MOMA for three decades, always posing in her photographs the role of women and the artist in the world through her own image, as a vehicle for her theme.

She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the USA Academy of Arts and Sciences and has numerous distinctions, including three of the most important in the world of the arts: the award. International Foundation of the Hasselblad Foundation, the Praemium Imperiale, and the Wolf Prize in Art. Graduated in Visual Arts from the University of Buffalo, it was only until her college days that she became interested in Art. In 1976, she decided to move to New York to fully embark on her artistic career, renting a loft on Fulton Street in lower Manhattan. It was then that she began taking photographs of herself, conceptual self-portraits that would come to be known as Complete Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980). In them, she stages situations with costumes and objects that want to give the photographs the appearance of a cinematographic still, using aesthetics and planes typical of film noir and showing characters built with wigs, hats, dresses and clothes different from her own. Her fondness for costumes since childhood was already beginning to manifest itself. In each of these photos, Sherman takes on stereotypical female roles: housewife, prostitute, woman in danger, crying woman, dancer, actress …

During the 1970s, Cindy Sherman played a leading role in the feminist restructuring of the body, an attitude maintained by feminists of her time. The militants of this movement believed that everything personal had political influence and it was necessary to have attitudes of individual change for true social change to take place.

Sherman combines truth and artifice at the same time. It emphasizes the moment that arises when a woman no longer knows whether she is playing a role or revealing her own self. Sherman’s collection of stills implies an imaginary redirection of women in a society ruled by men.

There is a substantial difference between its first stage and the last. Her first photos contain the innocence of youth. Cindy is then young and attractive and the photographs she takes of herself are pleasing, even from an erotic point of view. And at the same time, they are indirectly uplifting. There is an extraordinarily sexy photograph, Untitled Frame, from 1978, showing a voluptuous blonde Sherman picking up an art book from a library shelf. Although she is holding the book, her gaze is not on the shelf but is directed towards something we cannot see. Her hair is spilled over her forehead, while a headband tries to keep it in order. In this photo, the lack of spontaneity, the certainty that it has landed, introduces the notion of artifice and yet, strangely, it contains at the same time a certain feeling of authenticity.

Over time, Sherman changes to create images that show, in a process of apparent anger with life, a woman whose interpretations reach a shocking and transgressive ugliness. There is also a progressive mythical isolation. She does not want to be accompanied by other people because her costume always tries to produce suggestive and unique hits.

Their costumes are, each time and with the passage of time, more provocative, further removed from conventional beauty, seeking a critical effect that, sometimes, even visually hurts. Madura even made a war against herself, against which she herself was. This acceptance that maturity also transforms the artist, makes her fight even against her first visions and works. Something that, for example, also happened in painting with Picasso.

Photographs from the late eighties and early nineties can look gruesome and grotesque, adding synthetic body parts. Deliberate ugliness in art has a long history, however in Sherman’s case, the disfigurement is very pronounced.

In Untitled, (1992) shows the face of an old and horrible woman with a practically bald head that looks directly at the viewer. The body rests on tangles of hair, and it is extremely unpleasant to observe but applying a little distance, it is seen that Sherman is not trying so much to horrify as to raise awareness.

It is difficult to imagine such a change between the beginnings that made her famous and its later evolution. In another somewhat earlier work, Untitled (1983), Sherman portrays herself as a vulgar singer who wears plastic earrings from which artificial pearls dangle, her arms outstretched and her mouth wide open: and who shows us: vulnerability. Another image from 1984 shows Sherman in a red and yellow striped suit, with a cigarette in her left hand and a beer can in her right. Her face, though partially shadowed, looks scared despite her half smile. Again, it is an image of an evident vulnerability, although the idea of ​​physical disfigurement is beginning to take shape as a sign of anguish and psychic.

By the year 2000, Sherman makes it clear that cross-dressing and deep irony will be her great themes. The images of clowns that she uses since the beginning of the new century and until the middle of the first decade of the 21st century are terrible. Her exaggerated makeup in basic colors adds to looks of real evil.

The idea of ​​a past beauty, finished today, appears frequently. In one of her recent plays, she portrays a grand lady on the outskirts of Central Park in a strapless dress, a pearl necklace, and a gigantic pendant. We can see the wrinkles under the blush on her cheeks and on her lips. The idea of ​​bitterness does not seem very distant and the role that Sherman plays is unpleasant.

Cindy Sherman now shown seems to be making a constant complaint. In her immense production of more than 500 images exhibited in galleries and museums, the artist captures the history of femininity without succumbing to ideologies. Under the guise it seems that Sherman’s ideas about wanting to be loved and accepted have a certain subversive quality. She simultaneously interprets and personifies the different positive and negative aspects of her genre through a theater that becomes so authentic that political realism breathes within the photography.

It is not about looking at what seems obvious but looking for its deeper content. The real Sherman is somewhere between his costumes and the vulnerability of his characters. All this creates an impressive artistic figure that occupies a unique and prominent place in the art of the last fifty years.