Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

out upon the world and places me in a situation there." The ;
performance
of the body is
thus seen to be a way to interrogate the social
nation of the subject and is, correspondingly, adopted as a key strategy
vminists and other artists intent on addressing the particularities
of their bodily codings (per 1970s identity politics, primarily gays and lesbians,
blacks. Asian-Americans, and Chicanas/os). The performative
and activist body merge.
3 8 With the specifically feminine masquerade, the "victim" takes on with a
vengeance all
of the myriad surfaces of femininity, which the gaze
wants to corral into "woman." She reiterates femininity with a twist,
opening the formerly sutured gap between its conventional codes and the
bodies these codes are designed to fix as ''female." The early
excursions into self-performance on the part of the formative Southern
Californian feminist art movement were explicitly posed in written
documents as attempts to explore stereotypical feminine identities so as to
produce new, positive images and experiences of femininity (Arlene
Raven proclaimed from her base in Los Angeles that feminist artists aimed
to construct "[p]ositive role models, role-free images, and equalized
Feminist social structures'"' in their work). Yet, regardless of the stated
"intention" (however it
may now be interpreted), these exploratory
performances—such as Karen LeCocq's overheated masquerade as a
"Victorian Whore" (figure 6)—can be seen as enacting the collapse of femininity
into image that Sherman's work would be soon to address,
paradoxically pulling it apart through this exaggerated enactment in the
-
masquerade. Regardless of where Raven, LeCocq et. al. believed
their identities to reside, these images handed down to us can only be
grasped as failures to secure a transparent relation between
appearance and essence (thus, LeCocq's whore is
pressed into the twodimensional
surface of the print: performing and so taking apart
the conflation of "woman" and "image," opening a gap for spectatorial
engagement but definitively not promising positive interpretations).
Performing Gender
The adoption of femininity as a sign of the ways in
which particular
subjects are allowed to experience themselves produces the subject
(whether anatomically male or female) as an object trapped within the
inexorable purview of the projective gaze. But as the 1970s and
1980s progressed, artists began to explore femininity as not only the sign
of oppression but as an indication of the performati\ lty of sexualitv
and gender, specifically in relation to oppositional structures (male/female,
hetero-/homosexual) staged conventionally via the projective eye
(in Judith Butler's terms, gender and sexuality are "performative" processes
designating the "very apparatus of production whereby the sexes
themselves are established)."' 5
Thus, Sherman's Untitled Film Stills.