The catalog for Cindy Sherman’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art includes a bibliography with more than 400 entries, which represent only a selection from a body of writing that has made her one of the most discussed artists of the last 20 years.
Anyone who reads much of it, however, will soon find prose treating “ideas” that have little to do with the actual appearance of the works. So, clearly, we have to return to the art, and only the art, as it will outlive its period or die not according to what has been written about it but to what it firmly, unmistakably embodies.
Sherman’s output appears successful in bringing a popular visual language of movies, television and advertising into a high-art context and assembling a compendium of female roles in which she repeatedly casts herself as the performer. Any more than that is wishful thinking.
Consider four prototypical pictures:
– A young light-haired woman (Sherman is herself the model) walks toward the viewer on a deserted alley or street. Night has fallen. A lamp behind the woman casts rays on the pavement. Presumably another lamp in front of her — we cannot see it — lights the side of a building and the woman’s face. Her hands are in the pockets of an open overcoat. Her eyes are raised up, focused anxiously on something outside the picture. The scene, in black and white, is on an 8-by-10-inch sheet of paper; it resembles a 1950s lobby card from a movie theater.
– A wet-haired girl (again, the artist is the model) crouches with hands outspread on a painted wooden floor. Light falls on the woman’s head and shoulders. We look down at her. She wears a schoolgirl outfit: white blouse and plaid skirt. She stares fearfully out of the picture. Her head, legs and one hand are cropped to fit a long horizontal format. The color image is on a 24-by-48-inch sheet; it looks like a frame from a 1960s film frozen on a widescreen television.
– A clown-faced mutant (Sherman is perhaps the model) glares monstrously down over its own nude body. Viewers look up from the pubic region, past the feet of a baby, a bloated belly (with nose for a navel), an infant’s hand and cartoonish breasts. All body parts look fake, united only by a red-orange light that plays on them. The vertical “portrait” is on a 71-by-46 1/2-inch sheet; it evokes a horror-movie poster without the lettering.
– A huge face (again, it’s Sherman) is painted gold and partially covered by a gold mask. The area of the face exposed by the mask’s eye holes is purple-red. The eyes glance malevolently out of the picture; the mouth, with corners exaggeratedly upturned, is fixed in a leer. The portrait of an imaginary being is vertically oriented on a 58-by-38-inch sheet; it recalls a small billboard for film or fashion.
These works are photographs; indeed, all of Sherman’s pieces are, though she does not consider herself a photographer. As she has said, the medium was primarily for her a short cut, a faster way of making images than how she was trained, in painting.
Sherman’s photographs do not use the rich formal constructions and associations of “fine art” photography. Twice in 20 years they employed only the most obvious conventions: One of her early small black-and-white pictures has the soft-focus look of a turn-of-the-century Pictorialist photograph and several works created in the mid ’90s — some with fake body parts — show an awareness of the unexpected juxtapositions of Surrealist photographs from the early 1930s.
Sherman is more interested by photography in advertising and the popular press. This kind of work has a pictorial language that does not demand anyone know art history to comprehend it. Viewers instantly “get” what’s going on from the images themselves, and details that communicate shades of meaning are less important than generic character types and kinds of action.
The same is true of B movies, the commercial films to which Sherman is most strongly indebted. B movies provided her with character types and kinds of action that she translated into the conventions of advertising photographs. And long after Sherman stopped regularly playing all the roles in her pictures, B movies continued to influence the look of her work, giving it the garishness common to science-fiction and horror genres.
When she turned to other popular sources — girlie magazines, fashion layouts, fairy tales, hardcore pornography — the large scale of the images and queasiness of their color still came from commercial movies, particularly those made on a low budget. Sherman applies a cheap look to her work like varnish on an academic painting. It glosses over formal shortcomings, making them seem part of a style that viewers either find chicly down-at-heel or self-consciously art-schoolish and slumming.
Either way, there’s an element of comfort. It’s a warm little comfort based on nostalgia for pop culture of the ’50s and ’60s. This plus the clearly exposed artifice of Sherman’s images — we always know it’s her impersonating some discomfited woman or stage-directing some imaginary terror — keeps even the most troubling content in the pictures from being deeply felt. Viewers achieve no suspension of disbelief because they’re always aware of Sherman as a performer who never completely submerges herself in a role or creates situations that peel away the coziness of pop-culture types and conventions.
Instead, with the rapid assimilation time characteristic of television, her glossy up-front images give a catalog of “expressive” faces common to the world of show biz. If each face seems only to dramatize a mood from contemporary culture — repressed, anxious, victimized, malevolent, diseased, deranged — it’s because each photograph is like a cardboard cutout in an advertising display that sells familiar emotional states in the forms of a low-budget movie and its subsequent novel.
That the emotional states are treated by a woman is all-important. Sherman’s large-scale pictures are confrontational but simultaneously detached, which is not how the establishment ever expected art by women to be. Once Sherman’s photographs advance from a long period of teasing with woundedness and discontent, they make sloppy messes over clothing, cosmetics, chocolate, zits and sex. One giant step for womankind: Art that is as nonchalantly and goonily extrovert as a rock star trashing his hotel room.
Sherman is too enthralled by pop culture to undercut it. In 20 years of work, the only thing she has satirized is Old Master painting, by mocking certain portrait types, as if to say, “Anything those artists could do, I can do easier, for a larger audience.” Easy widespread communication in a language apart from that of the museum was, after all, her effort.
In that, Sherman has without question succeeded. Her work speaks a kind of visual Esperanto intelligible to everyone. Yet this language of convenient types and actions is capable of clearly expressing only simple, direct, declarative content. Admirers find Sherman’s photographs critical of how the mass media have presented women or ironic about a relationship to the pictures’ ’50s and ’60s models. But is that enough to achieve first-class artistic status?
In 150 photographs on show there’s not a single implied narrative that is more complex than the movies produced by those giants of the drive-in, Ross Hunter and Roger Corman.
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“Cindy Sherman: Retrospective” continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., through May 31. 312-280-2660.
