labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet / décembre 2013  -julho / dezembro 2013

DE-SUBJECTIFYING WITH CINDY SHERMAN

Margareth Rago

Abstract: this text explores the possible meanings of the production of self portraits of Cindy Sherman, artist and photographer, stressing the manner in which they stage her de-subjectifying movement, at the same time they point to a good humored and ironic criticism of patriarchal culture, hitting the clichés and stereotypes on the female body promoted by the media, by the market and by the state.

Key words: art, feminism, culture critique, de-subjectifying

Introducing…

                                   Untitled Film Still n.21, 1978

Cindy Sherman, photographer and artist, was born in New Jersey (NY) in 1954, and became world famous when she photographed herself in over 5.000 photos. In an exposition at MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, held in 2012, her photos were exposed in a gigantic size, on a floor reserved for temporary expositions, emphasizing her own body on the foreground so as to express a sharp cultural criticism from the feminist viewpoint.

                                         Untitled #96, 1981

Being herself her own model, her many pictures aim paradoxically at questioning a world of growing visual saturation where the traditional representations of femininity predominate. Stewardesses, secretaries, efficient housewives, romantic girls, mistresses, huntresses, queens, bohemians, clowns, socialites, many are the characters that Sherman brings to stage, starting from the images of her own face and body.

                               Untitled #458, 2007

But her art is built not of romantic images alone. Rape scenes, women violated or dead, making use of disfigured or destroyed dummies, exposed in midst of rubble, excrement and repellent liquids also go to make up the vast repertoire of this artist that surprises us at each new image of herself.

                              Untitled #175, 1987

The artist debates, with her fictional self-portraits, fundamental contemporary questions: among those, she works the denunciation  of a world in which the individual must present herself in the public sphere devoid of emotions, without smells and faceless, as says Sennett in his classic work The Fall of the Public Man (1988). People in this universe become more reserved, expressionless and prudent, an attitude specially recommended to women, by the way. Sherman takes to the limit this lack of expression of the modern person, who seeks to protect herself and to dissimulate the feelings and emotions socially, but at the same time spurred to expose her intimacy virtually and to go into a public register not only for narcissism or exhibitionism, but to be able to exist in a world of absolute homogenization of the self. Hence the proliferation of the spectacle of the self in our days, of the “self-show” in facebooks, blogs, orkuts as well as the interest in the intimacy of the other, as is to be seen in reality shows (Sibilia, 2008).

However, this avalanche of images of Sherman by herself in museums, magazines and other spaces and cyberspaces, instead of revealing the self of the photographer shows nothing of her. She is here nobody, she is anywoman, any constructed image, easily recognizable, easily located. Her artistic work points then to the paradoxes of the individual in the privatist or “narcissist” society in which the lack of expression in public makes a contrast with the demand for the authenticity of the self.

Something especially strong is the contrast of the act of speaking of oneself without making it an autobiographical narrative, of producing a fictive self to make a social criticism of the female identity and of the dominant representations of the female body through the use of her own body, becoming herself a main character. Without aiming at self-revelation or self-affirmation, but rather desubjectifying and unmaking herself in the proliferation of foreseeable and stereotyped female figures and questioning the very use of photography as a means of rendering reality faithfully. Sherman manifests through art her criticisms to phallocentric cultural forms and exposes her own interpretations of the contemporary world. She brings to stage the multiple manners in which women are shown in the media, in the visual arts, in the cinema, in the culture, revealing the constructed nature of such representations. All the women embodied by her in these photos of herself are caricatures, at times ridicule and grotesque, the expression of the stereotypes and narrow-mindedness of our world, specially visible when she turns her eyes to the fifties and unmasks the deep boredom of consumer life in the American middle class some time before the beginning of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. These are images that subvert, that produce a shifting, an accusation of the prison of identities, images that laugh at themselves.

It is worth noting that her self-portraits show old figures, old-fashioned figures, decadent, disfigured characters, sometimes monstrous in their social masks; making use of the strategy of the masque the photographer asserts the exaggeration of the feminine, making femininity a performance, as observed by Cottington (2005: 78). On the one hand elements such as uncombed hair, smeared lipstick, exaggerated eyebrows, plastic smiles, yellow teeth, clothes discomposed in frozen expressions, compose characters that are dated and in disagreement; on the other hand the resource to objects such as the plastic breasts of the Virgin Mother has the effect of rendering motherhood sacred no more, that which was considered the defining essence of female identity for centuries. Sherman makes the world into a huge museum, its inventory on show. Surely a sign of the aging of the present ways of being, a warning of the need to transform, to re-invent the self and to produce new manners of existence.

                                 Untitled #299, 1994

It is worth observing that to get these productions done she plays multiple roles: that of model, she is her own photographer and also make up artist, hairdresser and stylist, taking on tasks she makes a point of doing herself, in the sophisticated creation of a myriad characters.

-       a post modern parody

Several moments may be emphasized in the production of her work, from the end of the seventies to now. They begin with the series “Untitled Film Stills”, where appear romantic young women, students or housewives, in black and white, in interiors, referring to film noir scenes or to known Hollywood images. She next works her photographs as colored pictures, making up a huge gallery of not so young female social types,  – such as the socialite, the intellectual, the philanthropist, the drunkard, the decadent aristocrat, the huntress, the madwoman – to get to the series in which she makes use of dummies, plastic dolls and other objects to produce scenes that are sad, heavy and repulsive, with their evocation of sexual violence, rape, disfiguration or body degeneration, to the image of death itself.

                                   Untitled #250, 1992

      Untitled #153, 1985

At the time she lived in Italy, between 1989 and 1990, Cindy Sherman composed  her “History Portraits”, that is, a set of thirty five photographs in which she parodies classic works of the Grand Masters of the Renaissance, the Baroque and of later periods. According to her declarations this work is not executed from the study of the originals, but from reproductions. As she says,

“When I was doing those history pictures I was living in Rome but never went to the churches and museums there. I worked out of books, with reproductions. It’s an aspect of photography I appreciate conceptually: the idea that images can be reproduced and seen anytime, anywhere, by anyone.”

Be that as it may, her photos – considered by some critics as more like paintings than photos, such is the artistic elaboration necessary in their making – disclose a rather extensive knowledge of the painting of the Grand Masters of the European tradition, as Piero della Francesca, Boticelli, Rafael, Rubens among others. In this sense her re-readings, far from being contemptuous or a critique of the classics, may be interpreted as a well-humored homage to tradition.

These works may otherwise permit us to think about the relationship established by the photographer with the present and the past, because, in my eyes, the resource to the parody of classic works aims at “playing”, or “being part of a game” with tradition, at questioning it with the production of effects of strangeness, as well as tossing feminist critiques to the sexist culture that persist nowadays, but that has a history.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #205, 1989                   Rafael, La Fornarina, 1518

Cindy Sherman, Untitled  # 224, 1990         Caravaggio, The Young Sick Bacchus,1593

It is known that the individual portrait gains importance in the Renaissance, leaving the old coins to the frescos and the paintings as a notion of individuality is constructed. According to the famous Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1898/2012: 52), in the IX Century, for instance, in the miniatures, mosaics and ivory reliefs that represented the popes and the powerful, the official clothes and the inscription sufficed to recognize them, and the artist could rarely see them up close. He tells that according to Vasari, it is from the XIII Century that more and more the Italian painters start to concern themselves with similarity, attempting to represent people in a more recognizable manner, nearer to the natural. Thus, it is St Francis of Assisi that is considered the “man whose representation in painting first shows the will to express a similarity meaningful in itself” in Italy (Burckhardt, 1898/2012: 52). With the utmost care with the absolutely individual image, his own in a self-portrait included, Giotto paints the portraits of famous personalities, besides a pope, that became the exemplary model in Italian painting (Burckhardt, 2012: 52).

Moving against these conceptual references, Sherman’s post modern parody deconstructs and disfigures the original, starting from the use of her own face and body. Moving through different times and keeping throughout a strong reference to the original, the artist exaggerates some of the traits of the character, transforming his facial expression for one, when she increases the volume of the eyebrows, lengthens the forehead or the nose, or when she adapts their garments or their ornaments, resulting in effects sometimes comic, sometimes strange, when compared with the original images.

It is thus that we see a longer nose in Untitled 211, a re-reading of the painting of Battista Sforza, of Piero della Francesca, or, in Untitled 226, the appropriation of the portrait of Barbara Pallavicino, painted by Alessandro Araldi. Her daring and lack of reverence come up when she puts a protuberant plastic breast in the Madonna in Untitled #216, referring to the Madonna with Child, by Jean Fouquet, or in the Untitled 223, that takes up a picture of the school of Leonardo, Madonna Litta, or again in Untitled 225 in which she overburdens and unmakes the delicate features of the character Simonetta Vespucci, of Sandro Boticelli.

                   Jean Fouquet, Madonna and child, 1450       Cindy Sherman, Untitled #216, 1989   

-       meanings

What are the possible meanings of this exhaustive production of reconfigured self-portraits of the masters of the Italian tradition? It is clear that the wish to be immortalized had long existed in the works of art that appeared in the West, but there had not always been the concern with similarity, with the “natural portrait”, as we pointed out from the explanations of Burckhardt, such as would appear in Italian paintings from the Renaissance on.

But in the aesthetical and ludic work of Sherman, we should inquire about the meanings of the disfiguration of the face and of the denaturalization/disfiguration of the body, if we can so call the use of plastic breasts in the sexless figure of the Holy Mother… Questioning the possible meanings of the self-portrait production of this photographer, I emphasize the manner in which they aim at an ironic critique of patriarchal culture, assailing the stereotypes of the female body promoted by the media and bringing into question the place of women and of the feminine in society. In this lack of realization of her own subjectivity, in this production of the self as another, or in this movement of desubjectifying, there may also be read her own restlessness and the interpretations that the author produces of our own present, her “writing of the self” in the foucautian sense of the term, where appears a Cindy Sherman that is a radical rebel, lewd and disobedient.

                                       Untitled #146, 1985

-       subjectivity and politics

It would also be worth thinking about the political dimension of these images as they question the primacy of the subject and of the narratives they elicit. Art appears as a form of critique of culture, a denunciation of the forms of social exclusion and of the confinement and oppression of women in certain identities and social roles, revealing the refined capacity of observation of the photographer. As a way of expressing her feminist interpretation of the world and subverting the notion that photography renders reality faithfully, she is able to build up theatrical or pictorial scenes referring a daily life that is prosaic and boring, as lived by the housewives, stewardesses or secretaries of the fifties. So other modes of subjectivization can be seen in this sharp criticism of the social normativity imposed on women.

I finally emphasize the element of feminine inconstancy presented in her repeated images of herself, embodying different figures of women with whom she plainly does not identify. As is known, the so-called inconstancy of women was interpreted often, in masculine discourse, as a sign of her moral inferiority, of her lack of capacity to become a civilized figure and so, sedentary, tied down since always and for always to one identity only – that of the woman-of- the-house-hygienic-family mother. But this is exactly the point provoked and de-stabilized by Sherman as she re-thinks the inconstancy of women from a feminist point of view, bringing to light other possible meanings, as  Norma Telles reminds us in her work on the woman writers of the XIXth Century (2012). This author sets herself to think about female fickleness in the key of deleuzian nomadism, as opening lines of flight (“lignes de fuite”) that allow women to go to a whole range of colors/movements/recognition of moods, of creation of mute images (Telles, 2012: 256).

Cindy Sherman challenges the cultural imagination in a radical manner, she denounces the social normativity that for so long prevented women from knowing and defining themselves, acting also on the masculine codes of art, and is surprising in a way that is creative, original and joyful.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BURCKHARDT, J. 2012.O retrato na pintura italiana do Renascimento. Campinas, SP: Editora da UNICAMP; SP: FAP-UNIFESP

COTTINGTON, D. 2005. Modern Art. A very short introduction. Oxford, New York: Oxford    University Press,

COLLADO, A. M.1999 “La mujer y la seducción en el universo de la representación de la  década de los 80 y 90” in Asparkía nº 10, , pp. 73-85, Universidad Jaume I.

CRUZ, Amada; SMITH, Elizabeth A. T.1977. JONES, Amelia. Cindy Sherman   Retrospective. New York: Tames and Hudson

DÖTTINGER, C. Cindy Sherman. History Portraits. Verona: Schirmer/Mosel, s/d

FABRIS, A.2003. “Cindy Sherman ou de alguns estereótipos cinematográficos televisivos”,Rev. Estud. Fem., vol.11, no.1, Florianópolis, jan./jun

RESPINI, E. Cindy .201.2Sherman. The Museum of Modern Art, New York,

SENNETT, R. 1988O declínio do homem público: as tiranias da intimidade. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras

SHERMAN, C.2005. Working Girl. Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, Misouri, Decade Series

SIBILIA, P. 2008. O show do eu: a intimidade como espetáculo. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira,

TELLES, N. 2012. Encantações Escritoras e imaginação literária no Brasil do século XIX. São Paulo: Intermeios

_____ 2006 .“As Belas e As Feras”, Labrys, estudos feministas, n.10, jun./dez.

http://www.tanianavarroswain.com.br/labrys/labrys10/livre/belafera.htm

WEST, Shearer.2004 . Portraiture. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Translated by Ricardo Lopes

Biography

Margareth Rago is associate Professor at Department of History of State University of Campinas and was Fulbright Visiting Professor, Columbia University in 2010-2011.

 All images were taken from:

https://www.google.com.br/search?q=cindy+sherman+no+moma&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei

=dP5GUvvsIoq29gT0t4DYDQ&ved=0CC0QsAQ&biw=1600&bih=791&dpr=1 Acess on September 26, 2013

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet / décembre 2013  -julho / dezembro 2013