Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

ore recent works of the mid-1990s inspired by surrealist photograph),
/"hile they suggest a narrative dimension, however, her images deliberately
I
the kind of stock resolution in which dismembered parts are
made whole or the slattern becomes the princess. Instead, she revels in the
mock horror—the perversely intertwined repulsion and seductiveness
of the shape-shifting moment itself. 4
While Sherman's practice cannot be construed as a social critique of the
24 mordant intensity or specificity of that of Bosch or of Goya, her undermining
of established genres—whether from popular culture and
media, art history, or literature— points to a satirical vein that underpins
her work's late twentieth-century ironic sensibility. Through her
exploitation of trenchantly absurd juxtapositions and transformations and
her embrace of melodrama, she succeeds in parodying the construction
and presentation of myth and archetype in all
of these genres.
Evincing delight in their unmasking, Sherman even uses the mask itself as
the central image of her most recent body of work, offering it
in a
dazzling variety of horrific, yet highly aesthetic, guises.
The moral implications of Sherman's use of satire lies in its ability to
reveal, and therefore to critique, the artifice of constructions of identity,
myth, and archetype and the social and psychological character
that they manifest. At the same time, any moral reverberations in the
horrific and grotesque aspects of her work are complicated and made
ambiguous by the irreverent humor and sense of perverse pleasure that so
clearly permeate her imagery. In her analysis of Sherman's engagement
with the grotesque, writer Gen Doy suggests a parallel with sixteenthcentury
author Francois Rabelais's comic use of the grotesque body, but
points to a significant difference between the affirmative worldview
of Rabelais that placed human physicality at the center of the cosmos and
the significantly more equivocal tenor apparent in Sherman's handling
of similar imagery. 5
The single series of Sherman's that can be described as stridently moralistic—
in which outrage overpowers the comedic—is the Sex Pictures.
These works were produced in the politically charged climate of the early
1990s, during which the religious right's presence increased, and
issues of censorship and freedom of expression took on new prominence.
Taking her cues from the conventions of hard-core pornography,
Sherman's use of genital prostheses and fragmented mannequin parts to
portray the body as monstrously sexualized—violated and violating— is
more frankly disturbing and debased than the most lurid of her gory
phantasms presented in other bodies of work. Other writers
have discussed these images' visual parallels to the surrealist photographs
Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) took of the violently distorted body parts of