Non Fiction

Cindy Sherman Breaking the Mould

Postmodernism and its challenge to older conceptions of individual, sexual, and social identities

Preface

              Cindy Sherman is a well known American photographer whose work spans from 1977 to the present day. Sherman challenges the very role of photographer by turning the camera upon herself and becoming the central figure in the majority of her work. Nevertheless, her art is not an opus of self-portraits, it is a
interrogation of the self in its contemporary environment; multiple, sexual,
and above all, ambiguous.

Links to Cindy Sherman’s work can be found at the end of the essay.

              “[P]ostmodern photography and fiction both foreground the productive, constructing aspects of their acts of representing” (Hutcheon 22), and the representation of human identity is no exception. In traditional (Western) thinking, influenced greatly by Descartes, the individual is theorized as self-conscious and essentially coherent. To use Geertz’s words, the person is perceived “as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic centre of awareness, emotion, judgment and action, organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes” (Geertz qtd. in Sampson 1). Identity is thus conceptualised as stable, and fixed within certain limits. Problematically however, “the representation systems of the West admit only one vision - …they posit the subject of representation as absolutely centered, unitary, masculine” (Owens 58), creating a legitimate identity excluded from which are those cast as others and objects. Throughout her body of postmodern photographic work, Cindy Sherman disturbs this notion of a despotic, unwavering subjectivity, bending boundaries and playing with existing perceptions.

              Early in her career, Sherman produced her series of black and white ‘Untitled Film Stills’. In each image, she poses as a particular female stereotype, recognizable from 1950’s Cinema, such as the housewife of Untitled Film Still #35 (Sherman 42), the hysteric walking the clinical corridors of Untitled Film Still #27B (Sherman 64), or the tearful blonde in Untitled Film Still #27 (Sherman 33). With fascinating results, Sherman’s film stills play with core postmodern theory. Recreating the style, the abstract memento of 1950’s film, Sherman blends a potent mix of Jameson’s pastiche with its nostalgia for the lost past and Baudrillard’s simulacrum. Subsequently, many of her viewers are fooled into believing this series to be imitations of stills from existing Hollywood films, when in fact there is no exact historical reference. This confusion arises from the “simulacral nature of what they contain, the condition of being a copy without an original” (Krauss, Cindy Sherman, 17), exemplifying Norman Bryson’s notion of the postmodern subject as “a tissue of quotations, a complete elision of image and identity” (Bryson qtd. in Lueken 25). Postmodern art and literature unsettle ideas of individualized subjectivity by presenting the “ ‘death of the subject’ ” (Jameson 167), the postmodern person who is seen to “imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.” (Ibid. 169). At this point, a slippage occurs between Jameson’s essentialist separation of pastiche and parody. Both styles of imitation, Jameson describes pastiche as blank copy, while parody has underlying satirical motivation. Even as Sherman claims not to have any political intent in the creation of her Film Stills, there is nevertheless an undeniably sardonic effect. Sherman instigates a questioning of the construction of female identity by foregrounding the image of the female stereotype, the eternal feminine, whether “weeping, pouting, smiling, running or reclining, she is a doll. She is an idol” (Greer 60) that saturates Western culture in films, art, fiction, etc. The viewer recognizes the character (film, style) due to his/her experience of the world at large. It is in this sense that Sherman’s Film Stills can be termed as pastiche – the pictures are “innocent: you are guilty, you supply the femininity simply through social and cultural knowledge… recognition is part of their power in showing how an ideology works – not by undoing it, but by doing it” (Williamson 95). Sherman may claim the film stills to be harmless pastiche, yet the interpretive nature of photography means that many onlookers will perceive a mocking tone. Sherman’s postmodernist execution of pastiche and simulation contest the conviction in an individual identity which is “as unmistakable as your fingerprint” (Jameson 167), implying through the absence of an original that this uniqueness has never existed.

              In the Untitled Film Stills, Cindy Sherman models as Western female stereotypes, figures which in Patriarchal culture stand as “the definition of the female sex” (Greer 63), and can be seen most clearly in cultural products like films or advertisements. Williamson (1986) explains that because the viewer is presented with a set of numerous and diverse images of the female, the notion of a singular essential femininity implodes, destabilising its own authority. Untitled Film Still #2 (Sherman 57), in which a young female studies her reflection, provides a stunning example of the assembly of female identity. The woman is seen caught in the act of construction, composing her image in the mirror, enabling Sherman to point to identity, particularly femininity, as a superficial process. Using “cosmetics literally as a mask she makes visible the feminine as masquerade” (Mulvey, A Phantasmagoria, 142). Sherman’s photography simultaneously establishes and undermines the conventions of representation, implying a lack of ‘natural’ female identity. Instead, femininity is a sociological construct that is ‘multiple, fractured, and yet each of its infinite surfaces give the illusion of depth and wholeness” (Williamson 112). Compliant with postmodern simulation, such illusion conceals the loss of the real and natural, erecting artificial representations in their place to further the needs of a consumerist society reliant upon these images for capitalist advancement.

              Sherman appears as the subject of the majority of her photographic work. Cindy Sherman’s phantasmagoria of identities “- of each image as bodying forth a different presence – becomes manifestly a product of a manipulation of the complex social codes of appearance, a pure surface” (Bryson 218) underneath which the viewer struggles to pinpoint a secure, consistent personality. While “we can presume to recognize the same person, we are forced at the same time to recognize a trembling around the edges of that identity” (Owens 75). In her novel The.PowerBook, Jeanette Winterson contemplates a corresponding occurrence in the work of the artist Rembrandt:

During his lifetime he painted himself at least fifty times… No artist had so conspicuously made himself both the subject and object of his work… He was shifting his own boundaries. He was inching into other selves. These self-portraits are a record, not of one life, but of many lives – lives piled in on one another, and sometimes surfacing through the painter and into paint.  (Winterson 214)

              Sherman’s photography, like Winterson’s fiction and interpretation of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, demonstrates that the identity of the postmodern individual pivots on free-floating multiplicity. Postmodernism refuses to lock selfhood into one single subject position, choosing instead to explore its malleability and schizophrenia. Furthermore, Sherman’s repeated presence in her work as different characters troubles the notion of an authentic identity. Her positioning within the photographs mimics familiar images and gestures. “Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (Butler 173). Similarly, Sherman’s continual role-playing and dressing-up, like Butler’s theorization of drag, subverts the belief in any original or principal identity (Ibid.174) since clothing functions as a façade; our wardrobe presents a selection of masks, decorations, and disguises for the self. Sherman affirms, “ “I see myself as a composite of all the things I’ve done,”…It is perhaps in this that the message lies, in the artist’s ability to describe the person constantly wandering, not as a firmly established character but as the sum of curious details” (Kellein 9). Thus, postmodernism’s playful character pulls unitary, authentic identities into a state of crises, rendering them to be fictional structures.

              In 1981, Sherman created a series of photographs that have become known as the ‘Centerfolds’. In colour and shot from above, these horizontal images resemble the softly pornographic centrefolds from men’s magazines. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Mulvey analyses scopophilia (pleasure in looking) explaining that Freud associated this with “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey, Visual Pleasure, 16). This threatening gaze is (actively) male, projecting its desires onto the (passive) female, reiterating Owens’s claim that Western thought traditionally situates the male as subject and the female as object of representation (58-59). The traditional centrefold format illustrates this through its eroticism: the woman is usually scantily dressed while the male viewer experiences the image from a voyeuristic position as though he were on top of her as in sexual intercourse.

              “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning” (Mulvey, Visual Pleasure, 14-15)

              In Western tradition, sexual identities are manifested through the maintenance of binary oppositions such as man/woman, subject/object, active/passive, in which the female always occupies the negative pole. Sherman’s centrefolds confront this conception of women as othered, objectified and lacking autonomous subjectivity. Untitled #93 (Sherman 84-5) depicts a blonde lying in bed, clutching the sheets to conceal her night-clothed body. According to Morris, many feminist critics have argued that the image suggests that the girl has been sexually assaulted (61). Regardless of Sherman’s intentions, this hint of sexual subjugation is analogous with the “the oppressive erotics of voyeurism” (Jones 36), foregrounding the representation and cultural production of female identity. In Untitled #93 (Sherman 84-5) and Untitled #96 (Ibid. 90-1), in which a young girl lies fully clothed gripping a piece of paper, both models (Sherman) stare into some distant space. Both unusually absorbed in thought, they challenge the identity of woman as object/body, as sexualised fantasy, through their refusal to fulfil male anticipation. Sherman explains, “I wanted a man opening up the magazine to suddenly look at it in expectation of something lascivious and then feel like the violator that he would be” (Sherman qtd. in Nobody’s here but me: Cindy Sherman). As both object and beholder, model and photographer, Sherman is able to (re)direct the gaze to alert the male viewer (causing him discomfort) to his apparent penetration of the model’s physical and psychic space. Sherman blends postmodern with feminist theory, to harness their powers of resistance, “overstepping boundaries, defying limits and refusing to be contaminated in or by ready-made systems of signification” (Robbins 3). Through her postmodern appropriation of genre, she seizes the representational power of the gaze in order to trouble its supremacy, unbalancing the stability of polarised sexual identity by exposing the framework of its construction.

              In the ‘Disgust Pictures’, Sherman’s work takes on a new direction as she begins to disappear from the focal point of her photographs. Instead, “[p]athetic objects serve as reminders of human existence” (Garrel 13), such as food, crumpled attire, condoms, and decay. This series engages with the abject, a psychoanalytic concept developed by Julia Kristeva, for the inability to distinguish between inside and outside, subject and object, of the human body – a distinction upon which traditional conceptions of a whole, self-contained identity rest. Examples of abjection are food loathing, excrement, corpses, in addition to a variety of human matter, many of which can be seen in Sherman’s disgust pictures. For instance, in Untitled #175 (Sherman 162-3), the picture is an array of food, waste and vomit. Food is of key significance due to its necessity for human endurance. To cite Kristeva, “since the food is an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself, within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself” (Kristeva 3). Furthermore, abject reactions, like vomiting, break through the boundaries of the body, pushing the subject to the periphery of his/her “condition as a living being” (loc.cit). Indeed, abjection

“is the body’s acknowledgement that the boundaries and limits imposed on it are really social projections… It testifies to the precarious grasp of the subject on its own identity, an assertion that the subject may slide back into the impure chaos out of which it was formed.”                  (Gross 90)

              Abjection is necessary in order to gain and preserve a durable, separate self, yet simultaneously leaves that selfhood vulnerable to collapse, dispersal and instability. Likewise, postmodern simulation maintains its sense of a ‘real’ and authentic self through the same artificial gesture that’s absence would cause its entire appearance to shatter. Sherman’s postmodern photography utilises abjection “because it never gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them” (Kristeva 15). Through abject and wretched compositions, Sherman picks apart the notion of a coherent self, threatening that even seemingly secure identities may burst out from within their confines at any moment.

              In the 1993 ‘Sex Pictures’, Sherman considers similar themes to the ‘Disgust Pictures’. By now, Sherman is completely absent from her work, replacing herself with mannequins and prosthetic body parts. While Eagleton discusses postmodernism’s preoccupation with body parts, such as “[m]angled members, [and] tormented torsos” (Subjects, 69), Brehm discloses that effigies are a recurrent motif in postmodern visual work, explaining that “this new ‘physical art’ sets out to question traditional images of the body and the human being” (108). Sherman’s mannequins are imitations of human beings, standing in to represent human life. Thus, the “idea of the individual is countered by a standardized replica of the body” (Ibid. 110), the mannequin, who is synonymous to all others and, as a depiction of humankind, denies the possibility of individuality and spiritual depth. Furthermore, mannequins are “already stamped with the sign of DEATH” (Kantor 253), acting as a stony reminder of human corporeality, and enabling artists to explore their metaphoric doubt in “autonomous subjects… Rather, this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification” (Jameson 168).

               A good example is Untitled #258 (Sherman 206), in which a mannequin, seen from behind, lies on its front. This doll is fully assembled except for the genital area, which has been left empty, creating a gaping hole that reveals a hollow interior. This view, like the disgust images, perturbs the demarcation of inside and outside, while indicating “man’s degeneration into an empty shell, a thing” (Brehm 112). Sherman demythologises enlightenment conceptions of subjectivity, decentring them by using the artificial figure to expose the reality of human identity in its many contexts. This in turn “exposes us to the artificiality of what we call reality” (Ibid. 120), constantly threatening to cast attempts to define the self into ambiguity. Untitled #258 (Sherman 256) has additional implication for sexual identity. Even though the mannequin’s genital component is missing, the viewer cannot help but assume that the figure is female. The viewer’s inescapable association of the black hole with female genitalia divulges the extent to which binary sexual identities are embedded in the western cultural mindset. Certainly, conventional thought “links our genitals to our social position (as women or men)” (Jackson and Scott 14). Sherman progresses to challenge this in Untitled #263 (Sherman 212) with a mutilated, dislocated, hermaphrodite pelvis, on one side a penis, the other a vagina. In this image, Sherman dismantles the absolute categorisation of an either/or sexual identity. By depicting a body that is both male and female, Sherman contests social/sexual identity divides, “creating the kind of slippage that is meant, precisely, to blur their meaning, rather than to reify it, or better, to create meaning itself as blurred” (Krauss, Cindy Sherman, 208). In her postmodern art, Sherman creates images of identity that resist categorisation, thus keeping with postmodern dogma by representing the unrepresentable.

              The power of Cindy Sherman’s work lies in its ability to erode the notion of a single, unchanging identity, breaking down divisions and blurring the boundaries of classification. Like typical postmodernist art, Sherman’s photography “is arbitrary, eclectic, hybrid, decentred, fluid, discontinuous, pastiche-like” (Eagleton, Literary Theory, 201), in much the same way as the subjectivity she explores. In doing so, Sherman employs postmodern aesthetic strategies and theory, integrated with other schools of critical thought such as feminism and psychoanalysis, enabling her to question and controvert existing designs of identity that promote enlightenment ideals. Postmodern art and fiction do not completely obliterate older conceptions of identity as unified and static, as in order to pose their challenge to it they inescapably acknowledge this conception. Potently, Sherman utilises a “repertoire of culturally available images” (Silverman qtd. in O’Neill-Butler), ranging from 1950’s cinema to more recent pornography, to reveal the way in which individual and sexual identities are built up through and within the Western social world. Her appropriation of abjection adds weight to this through its investigation and illustration of human fragility, by using matter that has erupted out of the self-contained body and its person. In Sherman’s work, her images and her own perception of selfhood are constantly shifting. Such fluctuation, and even contradiction, implies that people “are constantly in the process of combining [their] own flesh and blood with the continually new and ever changing images of advertising, films and other media” (Kellein 10). As it is absorbed into culture, Sherman’s work, and postmodern thematic at large, will add to the vault of ideas and representations, providing greater freedom within self-presentation and weakening the dominant authority of restrictive codes of identity. Social, sexual, and individual identities are elusive. While her work is concerned with images of the unknowable, untouchable self, the “genius of Cindy Sherman is that if you cut her photographs, they are sure to bleed” (Morris 112).

Bibliography

Website

http://www.cindysherman.com/

Primary Material

Sherman, Cindy. Untitled Film Still #2. 1977. Metro Pictures, New York. Cindy Sherman. By Rosalind Krauss. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 57.

Sherman, Cindy. Untitled Film Still #27. 1979. Metro Pictures, New York. Cindy Sherman. By Rosalind Krauss. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 33.

Sherman, Cindy. Untitled Film Still #27B. 1979. Metro Pictures, New York. Cindy Sherman. By Rosalind Krauss. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 64.

Sherman, Cindy. Untitled Film Still #35. 1979. Metro Pictures, New York. Cindy Sherman. By Rosalind Krauss. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 42.

Sherman, Cindy. Untitled #93. 1981. Metro Pictures, New York. Cindy Sherman. By Rosalind Krauss. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 84-5.

Sherman, Cindy. Untitled #96. 1981. Metro Pictures, New York. Cindy Sherman. By Rosalind Krauss. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 90-1.

Sherman, Cindy. Untitled #175. 1987. Metro Pictures, New York. Cindy Sherman. By Rosalind Krauss. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 162-3.

Sherman, Cindy. Untitled #258. 1992. Metro Pictures, New York. Cindy Sherman. By Rosalind Krauss. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 206.

Sherman, Cindy. Untitled #263. 1992. Metro Pictures, New York. Cindy Sherman. By Rosalind Krauss. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 212.

Books

Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations”, in Peter Brooker ed. Modernism/Postmodernism. London: Longman, 1992. 151-162.

Brehm, Margit. “The Body and its Surrogates”. Trans. Mary Fran Gilbert and Keith Bartlett. Cindy Sherman. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1996. 98-120.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990.

Bryson, Norman. “House of Wax”. Cindy Sherman: 1975-1993. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. 216-223.

Davidov, Judith Fryer. Women’s Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in American Visual Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory, Second Edition. Oxford: Blackwell publishers, 1996.

Eagleton, Terry. “Subjects”. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Massuchusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc, 1996. 69-92.

Foster, Hal. “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic”. October 78 (Fall 1996). 105-124.

Garrel, Batty van. “Untitled”. Trans. Ruth Koenig. Cindy Sherman. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1996. 9-13.

Gross, Elizabeth. “The Body of Signification”. Abjection, Melancholia, And Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. 80-103.

Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. Herts: Paladin, 1971.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.

Jackson, Stevi and Sue Scott. “Putting the Body’s Feet on the Ground: Towards a sociological Reconceptualization of Gendered and Sexual Embodiment”. Constructing Gendered Bodies. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. 1-24.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, in Peter Brooker ed. Modernism/Postmodernism. London: Longman, 1992. 163-179.

Jones, Amelia. “Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman”. Cindy Sherman: Retrospective. London And New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997. 32-49.

Kantor, Tadeusz. “The Theatre of Death: A Manifesto”, in Huxley and Witts, ed. The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader (2nd edition). London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 249-259.

Kellein, Thomas. “How difficult are portraits? How difficult are people!”. Trans. Sebastian Wormell. Cindy Sherman: 1991. Stuttgart: Dr.Cantz’sche Druckerei GmbH & Co KG, 1991.

Krauss, Rosalind. Cindy Sherman: 1975-1993. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993.

Krauss, Rosalind. “Informe without Conclusion”. October 78 (Fall 1996). 89-105.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Lueken, Verena. “Cindy Sherman and her ‘Film Stills’ – Frozen Performances”. Trans. Ruth Koenig. Cindy Sherman. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1996. 98-120.

Morris, Catherine. The Essential Cindy Sherman. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Visual And Other Pleasures. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1989. 14-26.

Mulvey, Laura. “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman”. New Left Review188 (July/ August 1991). 136-150.

Mulvey, Laura. “Cosmetics and Abjection: Cindy Sherman 1977-1987”. Fetishism And Curiosity. London: British Film Institute, 1996. 65-76.

Nobody’s here but me: Cindy Sherman. Dir. Mark Stokes. Arena and Cinecontact Production for  BBC and the Arts Council of Great Britain. BBC2. 1994.

Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism”, in Foster, ed. Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, 1983. 57-82

O’Neill-Butler, Lauren. “Reconsidering Cindy Sherman’s “Sex Pictures” ”. 7 pp. Online. Internet. 28 Oct 2003. Available FTP: www.tenverses.org/ten1.html.

Robbins, Ruth. Literary Feminisms. London: Palgrave, 2000.

Sampson, Edward E.. “The Deconstruction of the Self”. Texts of Identity. London: Sage Publications, 1989. 1-19.

Smith, Elizabeth A. T.. “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”. Cindy Sherman: Retrospective. London And New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997. 19-31

Steiner, Rochelle. “Cast of Characters”. Cindy Sherman. London: Serpentine Gallery, 2003. 7-23.

Williamson, Judith. ‘A Piece Of The Action: Images of ‘Woman’ in the Photography of Cindy Sherman’. Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture. London & New York: Marion Boyars, 1986. 91-113.

Winterson, Jeanette. The.PowerBook. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000.

Cindy Sherman Hyperlinks

Untitled Film stills

#35 = http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1997/sherman/jpgs/sherman35.jpg

#27 = http://www.bbc.co.uk/collective/dnaimages/030613/sherman3.jpg

#2 = http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/artmuseum/exhibitions/archive/hope/sherman.jpg

Centerfolds

#96 = http://www.cindysherman.com/images/photographs/sherman3.jpg

#93 = http://www.cindysherman.com/images/photographs/Untitled93.jpg

Disgust Pictures

#175 = http://server1.fandm.edu/departments/English/d_steward/sherman.jpg

#263 = http://u-blog.net/frampaillon/img/Cindy_Sherman_untitled_263_1992.jpg

Alison Gibbons