Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

980s and again in the mid-1990s. Many of Goya's images present
ugerated, grotesque scenes of death, decay, and hideous transmogrifications
of humans into terrifying, otherworldly creatures or into an
malgamation of body parts. These works satirize popular superstitions
concerning witches, vampires, and other monsters, as well as point
a
finger at the clergy for fomenting such superstitions among an ignorant
public. Sherman's grotesqueries, ranging from the half-pig/half-human
of Untitled #140 (plate 96), to the doll-like yet hideously fluid-secreting
22
death mask of Untitled #180 (plate 109), the repulsive close-up of
pimpled buttocks in
Untitled #177 (plate 108), and assorted dismembered
body parts amid decaying fields of oozing organic matter in Untitled #167
and Untitled #190 (plate 114)
evoke similar phantasms from the world
of popular myth and superstition.
In this respect Sherman's work also evokes the graphically demonic visions
of sixteenth-century artist Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), whose monstrous
hybrids of human anatomy, animals, insects, reptiles, and inanimate
objects engaged in a plethora of violent, scatological, and otherwise
gruesome activities are iconographic experiments in the representation of
evil.
In such well-known works as The Garden of Earthly Delights
(figure 5),
The Last Judgment, and The Tower of Babel, as well as in his
numerous drawings of subjects such as monsters, witches, and bizarre
amalgamations of human and landscape forms in The
Hearing Forest and the Seeing Field and The Tree
Man, Bosch developed a vivid pictorial language
that appears fantastical but that was deeply rooted
in the late medieval spiritual fabric in which
witchcraft, alchemy, and magic were feared and moral
abstractions were concretized as animals, demons,
or monsters.
figure 5
Hieronymus Bosch
The Garden of Earthly
Delights
(detail of the right win£
ca. 1500
Collection of
Museo del
Madrid, Spain
Prado,
When we consider themes of spirituality and morality,
figure 5
however, Sherman parts company with Goya and
Bosch. Her work is
far from the spiritual attributes
of Bosch's highly detailed treatment of the misfortunes of the ungodly and
the dilemmas and confusion confronting humankind, and also departs
from the moralizing genre of satire so readily apparent in Goya's
work about such topical issues as the deplorable ignorance of the populace,
the stupidity and fatuousness of the monied classes, or the irrational
savageries of the Spanish Inquisition. Sherman prefers to play
with the cliches of the grotesque, evincing an obvious delight in her
penchant for the morbid and the fantastical. Here a new affinity presents
itself, an additional art historical parallel with that of the mannerist
painter Arcimboldo (1 527-1 593), whose arch allegorical fantasies of
human forms composed of still-life elements Earth, Fire, Air, Water, for