Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

] this essay, I want to offer an historical framing of Sherman's work in
elation to several other twentieth-century artistic practices that perform
the particularized body (marked in
relation to the very structures
of representation as gendered, sexed, raced, classed, etc.) in the grasp of
:he photographic eye. Through these historicized vignettes, I
attempt to
stress something that has to my knowledge been overlooked in the voluminous
writings about Sherman: the situatedness of her work—its
embeddedness in a rich context of work (much of it
feminist) addressing
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the ontology of the subject and the politics of its
identifications
through the enactment of the artist's
body (the relationship of the self to
the world and its
others, and the role of representation and reproducibility
in conditioning the particularized subject). This strategic comparison
of images is
offered as a way of using Sherman's work as itself a lens
through which to view contemporary art and its
ongoing concern with the
profound issues of the structures of the self—with how we experience
and conceive ourselves in the contemporary world.
The Projective Eye: The Constitution of the Body as Object
As theorized in the 1970s and 1980s, the projective eye is
understood to
be violent and penetrative. It gazes purposively and captures its victims in
its vise grip; it is a simple but effective tool for the constitution of those
without a penis as pathetic specks pinioned by its inexorable force-lines.
As John Berger writes in his well-known 197Z book Ways of Seeing: "men
act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves
being looked at." 4
figure 2
Marcel Duchamp
Interior view of Etant
donnes, 1946-1966
Philadelphia Museum of
Art: Gift of the Cassandra
Foundation
figure 3
Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #39,
1979
Collection of the artist
Courtesy Metro Pictures,
New York
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figure 2
figure 3