Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

Centerfolds or Horizontals, 1981
While Sherman may pose as a pin-up, she still
cannot be pinned down.
— Craig Owens 20
In
1981, Sherman was asked to create a portfolio of images for an issue
of Artforum. Inspired by the magazine's horizontal format and the
request for a two-page layout, she produced a series of works that refer
to the photo spreads in pornographic magazines. Large enough to be
life-size, each image is in color, with Sherman as a different young woman
or teenage girl looking off to the side with a vacant or pensive look.
The figure fills the frame, cropped and in close-up, in a technique that she
has continued to use often. She keeps background details to a minimum.
The lighting is theatrical in works such as Untitled #88 (plate 73),
highlighting certain areas of the figures and throwing the rest into darkness.
Some figures are lying down, as in Untitled #90 (plate 74),
Untitled #93 (plate 76), and Untitled #96 (plate 78), and others are
crouched down on the floor, such as in Untitled #92 (plate 75). The
vantage point of the viewer, who looks down on these women, reinforces
their vulnerability, as does their mostly disheveled look.
When the series was shown, Sherman was criticized by some as having
created images that reaffirm sexist stereotypes, and Artforum eventually
rejected the pictures. The most potentially suggestive of the works,
Untitled #93 (plate 76), depicts a woman with messy hair and smudged
makeup in bed covering herself with black sheets. She looks toward
a light that shines in her eyes. Although some critics read this as a scene
after a rape, Sherman has stated that she was imagining someone
who had just come home in the early morning from being out partying all
night, and the sun wakes her shortly after she has gone to bed. 21
The controversy underscores the power of the frameworks created by the
media and the risks of appropriating those strategies for purposes
of critique. A curiously parallel situation occurred in 1974, also within the
pages of Artforum. In a hilarious illustration (and send-up) of penis
envy, Lynda Benglis inserted an ad into the pages of the magazine with a
nude photograph of herself holding a large dildo. Some of the editors
of the magazine responded in the following issue with a statement about
the "extreme vulgarity" of the photograph and termed it
"a shabby
mockery of the aims of . . . [the women's] movement." 22
As with the Untitled Film Stills and Rear Screen Projections, in the
Centerfolds Sherman mimics and repeats mass media modes, thereby
diffusing their potency. Liz Kootz discusses artists (specifically Lutz Bacher
and Abigail Child) who "investigate the instabilities and ambivalences
elicited when female artists invite female spectators to identify with
conventionally male subject positions. . . .
" 23
She suggests that by highlighting
these ambivalences, the permanence of these gendered