Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

sters, 1986-89
; the Middle Ages, Western culture has represented the body, with increasing frequency,
in
architectural metaphor of the society at large.
— Joanne Finkelstein-'
In its emphatic yet beautiful display of the disgusting, Sherman's
Disasters series is
indistinguishable from the Fairy Tales. She employs the
same theatrical devices and hallucinatory imagery to construct
TO
equally outlandish scenes. In these works, the body is
from the Fairy Tales reappear as hybrid human-doll creatures in
besieged. The beasts
Untitled #186 (plate m) and Untitled #187 (plate 112)
and as deformed
humans in Untitled #160 (plate 104). In other works, the body is
rearranged and/or hidden amidst detritus, as in Untitled #190 (plate 114).
It appears as a reflection in Untitled #175 (plate 107) and as a
series of obviously fake surrogates in Untitled #188 (plate 113), Untitled
#z _ - (plate 108), and Untitled #180 (plate 109). Finally, it disappears
altogether in Untitled #168 (plate 106).
An analogy can be drawn between these pictures of e.xcess and revolt and
our contemporary condition of violence and apparent chaos. While the
body politic is
under attack, we are obsessed with our individual physique
and its
fitness. In her analysis of the body as a metaphor for society.
Finkelstein asserts that in Western culture, bodily control is
a sign of
status. She discusses the many mutants that appear in nineteenth-century
literature such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Victor Hugo's
Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde. These creatures are violent as a result of their mistreatment
by society, and they are all
very close to being human.-- That, perhaps,
is why they so fascinate us, for "it is as if we harbored a secret self, an
immersed, repressed side ... of which we live in fear because it
could, at any time, burst from us accountably and. .
. . instantly
propel us
beyond the boundaries of the acceptable."" Sherman's images of
the assaulted body reveal this underside and resist the far more common
pictures of the cultivated and socialized body that we encounter
daily in the media.
History' Portraits, 1989-90
There is
something liberating in the way in which Sherman takes aim at the sheer weirdness
of Old Master art.
—Amelia Arenas
-
In her next series, Sherman created thirty-five works that are her
own unique renditions of historical portraits. She returns as a sitter in this
series, using props and wearing lush costumes, wigs, and fake
appendages to assume the character of the various nobles, mythological
heroes, and madonnas that have been depicted by court painters.