Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

>le:
"[ojmnivoyance, Western Europe's totalitarian ambition, may here
ppear as the formation of a whole image by repressing the invisible."
is
for this reason (the long history of the development of the photoraphic
as a research and development arm of patriarchal, imperialist
Western society) that the object of the projective camera eye at
first knows only how to perform within the space allotted by this projective
gaze. Within the logic of this model, the object—like Marcel
Duchamp's dead and wounded female "Given" (figure 2)— folds herself
into its rigid scopic armature (a double-edged erotic moment: she
is
both caressed and repudiated, thrown back into the two-dimensional
surface of "picture" that is
femininity, blackness, and/or otherwise other).
Duchamp, like Sherman, exacerbates the structures of the gaze,
encouraging the viewer to feel
his participation in the oppressive erotics
of voyeurism.
Masquerade: Playing into the Projective Gaze
The artistic masquerade has its
own history. As the twentieth century
advances — paralleling the increasing challenges to the colonizing,
patriarchal gaze of the West—the strategic value of playing the game all
too well (per the exaggerations of the masquerade) becomes increasingly
clear. Artists of all
kinds, especially, acknowledge how performance
of the very codes by which the projective eye confirms its
authority can
deflate its
overblown claims of conquest. Masquerade becomes
increasingly common and then, toward the end of this century, a nearly
dominant mode of self-production (since the 1960s, this explodes
into popular culture as well). From the aesthete (Oscar Wilde at the turn
figure 4
Man Ray
Barbette, 1926
The J.
Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles, California
figure 4