Cindy Sherman: Her Life's Work Has Only One Subject, and It Shows Us Everyone | A Curious Person

For 40 years she has played other women — or, more precisely, different “images of women.” Many people read that work as a vanguard of feminism, even as the foundation of “male gaze” theory.

The cover of the latest issue of The Gentlewoman is a little unusual.

It flips between two photographs: first a yellow cover with a woman's face on it, then a white cover carrying the face of a male pirate. You have to look very closely to see that the two people are the same person.

That person is Cindy Sherman, and the trick is the simplest possible tribute to her art.

Sherman, now 65, has won nearly every honor an artist could want: the MacArthur Fellowship, the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, the National Medal of Arts.

The American magazine ARTnews also named her one of the “25 most influential artists of the 20th century,” alongside Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol.

Sherman's work always puts a different character at its center. There is no limit on who these characters might be — a student, a secretary, a minor celebrity, a housewife, a corpse, a clown, even a vampire. But whoever you see, it is always Cindy Sherman playing the part.

Because the subject is always herself, outsiders often call her work “selfies.” She has little patience for that. “I'm genuinely afraid people think that way, because I hate the concept of the ‘selfie.’ I don't take selfies, and I'm not trying to promote myself. I use myself as the model for these characters only because it's simpler. None of this work is about me personally,” Sherman told QDaily.

1.

On November 7, 2018, Sherman brought nine new works to the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai for her first solo show in China. In them she took the flood of selfies on social media as her raw material and pushed it into something exaggerated and playful.

That day, in conversation with the curator Gu Zheng, she said: “Photography has seeped into every part of our lives — all the time, everywhere: television, movies, the street, the computer. Photographs have become extremely accessible. They've turned into mass-produced goods or advertisements. I think that's a very common phenomenon now, and everyone can feel it. In this era, the meaning of photography is completely different from what we used to understand it to be.”

As an artist who works in photography, Sherman senses more sharply than anyone how the medium has changed from era to era.

The American visual artist Marilyn Minter once said: “You can't take a photograph if you don't know Cindy Sherman's earlier work.” She meant that Sherman's photographs overturned a great deal of conventional thinking about what photography is, where it sits and what makes it beautiful.

In 1980, Helene Winer, co-founder of the Metro Pictures gallery in New York, gathered a group of bold, inventive artists — Cindy Sherman, Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince — for the gallery's opening show.

Later they were grouped together as the “Pictures Generation”: artists drawn to photography, video, performance and other media, and more interested in what an image is than in what an image says. Through heavy appropriation and collage, they turned their attention to the nature of the image itself.

Sherman's work carries the obvious marks of the Pictures Generation — appropriation, performance, subversion, re-presentation — and they are easy to spot in her first photographic series, Untitled Film Stills.

Untitled Film Stills is 70 black-and-white photographs shot between 1977 and 1980, after she graduated from the State University of New York. Every picture in the series re-stages and imitates the images of women found in 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, black-and-white films, B movies and European art films. But these movie-like photographs are not stills from any particular film; they were shot to copy the angles and lighting of cinema. Sherman used different points of view to watch these young women in different settings — by a window, at a doorway, on a bed, in a kitchen, on the street.

The series quickly set off a fierce argument about photographic expression and gender politics. Even Sherman did not expect that a first series would put her among the famous. In October 1995, the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought the Untitled Film Stills photographs for $1 million.

Not long after, Sherman released Centerfolds, playing women as they appear in pornographic magazines, seen through the eyes of the male reader.

One picture in the series, Untitled #96, shows a short-haired woman in an orange short-sleeved sweater and a plaid skirt lying on a tiled floor, her left hand behind her ear, her right hand on her thigh, a crumpled scrap of paper in her fist. Her cheeks are flushed; her eyes drift to one side.

On May 11, 2011, Untitled #96 sold at Christie's for $3,890,500, a record at the time. It broke the $3.35 million mark set in 2006 by the photographer Andreas Gursky's 99 Cent II Diptychon.

2.

Cindy Sherman's life's work has only one subject, and yet it shows the viewer everyone. For 40 years she has played other women — or, more precisely, different “images of women.” Many people read that work as a vanguard of feminism, even as the foundation of “male gaze” theory.

Sherman would rather people did not mix up cause and effect. The work happens on its own, she says; if people interpret it as feminist, that is a good thing, but it does not mean she set out to make it in that frame of mind.

Still, look back at the timeline of the American women's movement and it is easy to see why her work strikes a chord with feminists.

Second-wave feminism was rising in American society in the 1960s. Many women began to rethink how women were pictured in the media, and kept asking themselves one question: “Is society fairer now?” The wave reached every field, art included. The American photographer Cynthia MacAdams made a photo book around that time called Emergence, recording the faces of many women; she said the feminist wave changed how women looked.

Because the current ran so hard, people tended to meet the theories and the arguments before they met Cindy Sherman. At the opening of a 2012 Sherman retrospective, the curator Darsie Alexander said that “Cindy Sherman's silence has almost become part of who she is.” When people argued eagerly over what her work meant, Alexander said, Sherman looked surrounded.

Sherman is not keen to join the argument about her own meaning, but the “interpretive frenzy” her pictures set off still amuses her, and now and then she answers back.

“I felt people were accepting my work far too easily, so I made more work that was horrifying and grotesque. I deliberately took a hostile stance toward collectors and critics — call it my small rebellion. I wanted to make something visually aggressive, and at the same time seductive, beautiful, textured. It pulls you in first, then it turns you away,” Sherman said.

Besides the constant demand that she explain what her work means, Sherman is troubled by a question even she finds hard to answer: who is Cindy Sherman? Which of these characters comes closest to the real one?

“For a long stretch of time, when I caught my reflection in the mirror I'd think, ‘That's not me. That's someone else.’ I loved those moments. I was fascinated by that flash of insight that vanishes as soon as it comes. I think it took me a long time to work out who I was and what I needed,” Sherman said.

Even the name the public knows her by is not her real one. Her name is Cynthia; for her work she simply kept Cindy, the nickname from her childhood.

3.

The American director and visual artist John Waters once described Cindy Sherman as “a woman impersonating women.” Sherman answered in a simpler, funnier way: “I'm collecting breasts.”

Her studio is indeed full of fake fingernails, fake eyebrows, fake breasts, fake flesh and horror masks. Most of the props, she says, come from antique shops or secondhand markets. “Fake blood, fake noses, that sort of thing — I find them very interesting. I see something really interesting in what other people call ugly. As a kid at Halloween, I always tried to make myself look as frightening as possible,” Sherman said.

None of these fake body parts frightened her, and she understood early on how people use “fake” things to draw out real feeling. She has loved horror films all her life, she says, and as a child would tune in on schedule to cheap, lousy horror programs. “I watched King Kong over and over, and other lousy horror movies, or Japanese monster movies.” When a childhood friend watched with her and got scared by the monsters, she would say right away: “It's fine, they're all fake.”

Perhaps out of that fondness, Sherman has never tried to make the props in her work look “real.” In her photographs the fake parts matter as much as the figures. In pieces imitating medieval Madonna-and-child paintings, for instance, she pushes the fake breasts forward, showing exactly where a viewer's eyes land when looking at such a painting.

The interest in “fake stuff” seems to have carried into the virtual world too. Sherman's official Instagram account has lately filled up with heavily retouched selfies. They look nothing like her earlier work, and they are thick with bad taste, on purpose.

The photographs show that she uses editing apps unlike most people. She might take the “lengthen” tool and stretch her neck without end instead of her legs, push the “enlarge” tool to its limit until her eyes look as big as a fly's, or lay a mass of wrinkles over perfectly smooth skin.

“I often don't know what I'm after until after I've finished shooting. What's interesting is that people can extend my ideas and come up with a concept that fits their own theories. I want clues to a story scattered all through the work, so people can invent stories of their own,” Sherman said.

On May 5, 2016, Sherman turned to Hollywood again and brought back a number of the old stars. But these photographs differ from her earlier work in one clear way: the women's faces carry many more wrinkles and marks of time. Sherman told The New York Times that, as a woman heading into old age herself, she was feeling what older women struggle with. “I relate to these women. They look like they've been through a lot; they're survivors. There's some pain in there too, but they still look ahead and keep going.”

By now Sherman has made more than 500 works. “I hope it can somehow transcend time,” she said.

The cover image and all photographs in this article are by Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the Fosun Foundation, Shanghai.