Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

did
could
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their common fascination with the use of masks as devices,
ityard and Sherman have both used similar photographic techniques
in terms of out-of-focus effects that impart dreamlike (or nightmarish)
states to certain of their images—Sherman in several works of 1994
(Unfilled #} 10 and #$i 1) (plate 142) and Meatyard in untitled images of
the early 1960s.
While the filmic origins of Sherman's work have been extensively
discussed by other writers, literary precedents have also played a role in
the proliferation of horror and the grotesque in Sherman's work,
not only the aforementioned Fairy Tales but also the late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century writings of such authors as Ambrose Bierce
(1842-1914), whose grim tales of horror evince a clinical fascination with
the unspeakable and the otherworldly. Bierce conjured terrifying
situations arising in the midst of ordinary, unremarkable lives in a way
that parallels Sherman's engagement with similar ideas and subjects
in series including Centerfolds and Fairy Tales as well as in her direction
of a recent horror film.
The light was powerless to dispel the obscurity of the room, and it was some time before I
discovered in the farthest angle the outlines of a bed, and approached it with a prescience
of ill. I felt
that here somehow the bad business of my adventure was to end with some horrible
climax, yet could not resist the spell that urged me to the fulfilment. Upon the bed,
partly clothed, lay the dead body of a human being. It lay upon its back, the arms straight along
the sides. By bending over it, which I
with loathing but no fear, I
see that it was
dreadfully decomposed. The ribs protruded from the leathern flesh; through the skin
of the sunken belly could be seen the protuberances of the spine. The face was black and shriveled
and the lips, drawn away from the yellow teeth, cursed it with a ghastly grin. A fulness
under the closed lids
seemed to indicate that the eyes had survived the general wreck; and this
was true, for as I
bent above them they slowly opened and gazed into mine with a tranquil,
steady regard. Imagine my horror how you can—no words of mine can assist the conception;
the eyes were my own!
—Ambrose Bierce
In her examination of the meanings of horror and of the abject, Julia
Kristeva writes that "far from being a minor, marginal activity in our culture,
as a general consensus seems to have it,
this kind of literature
[horror] . . . represents the ultimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate
and serious apocalypses. Hence its nocturnal power. .
. . Hence its
continual compromising. . . . Hence
also its being seen as taking the place
of the sacred. . .
," 12 Although Sherman's works succeed in vividly
invoking a myriad of terrors, however, they are never really terrifying;
their burlesque presence is
too potent. Amelia Arenas writes, "More than
the experience of watching a horror movie, Sherman's photographs
recall the visions that come to haunt us later, reminding us that
what keeps the child awake at night after a scary movie is
an image." n
not a story, but