Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

I
racing the Subject
initially presented within the context of these theoretical paradigms of the
\\ 1 1 1
i inch Sherman
male gaze and the masquerade, deploy technologies of envisioning the
subject (photography and film) to explore the particular ways in
which these function for bodies marked as female. Reading the masquerade
in a slightly different way from Doane, Judith Williamson
argues persuasively that, by enacting herself, Sherman proves femininity as
it is conventionally construed to be nothing but a surface effect that
gives an illusion of depth: "To present all those surfaces at once is
such a
superb way of flashing the images of 'Woman' back where they 39
belong, in the recognition of the beholder. Sherman's pictures force
upon the viewer that elision of image and identity which women experience
all the time."' 7
As Williamson suggests, because femininity is
produced as a surface effect
(through visual codes), its enactment through representation is
redundant.
By enacting the feminine through representation (the visual structures
of the projective eye), the artist doubles the effect of the feminine, perhaps
making it seem somewhat strange and constructed, and also encourages
the viewer to make note of "that elision of image and identity which
women experience all the time."' 8 Sherman's early pictures (especially
the Untitled Film Stills)
are notable precisely in that they interweave the
1970s feminist production of the subject as an effect of the gaze
with the twentieth-century exploration of the subject (via masquerade) as
a production of adopted and often exaggerated particularities (marked
in
terms of gender, sexuality, race, class, etc.).
In spite of the contortionist attempts by some writers to deny the
relationship of Sherman's Untitled Film Stills to the particular feminist
fixation on the projective eye in 1970s practice and theory, 1 cannot
imagine how one can avoid considering the way in which main
of the Untitled Film Stills seem explicitly to stage the positioning of the
female subject as an effect of the projective eye. At the same time,
this effect is never simple or consistent. While Untitled Film Still #;g
(figure 3)
produces "femininity" as contained within the conventional
structures of the gaze (trapped in
the architectural spaces of the
projective eye and either, depending on your point ot view, confirming or
dissecting "the phantasmagoric space conjured up by the female body"),
in Untitled Film Still #*6 (figure 5) Sherman is staged as "mirror"
for the viewing subject ami her image collapses into the surface ol
the
print. In both images, the choreography ot the ga/e seems dul)
noted: one image (#}<;) engages the viewer, but
through structures ot
voyeurism that are so familiar the) might produce .1 relation ot comfort .is
easily .is on.- ol estrangement; the other (#y6) both engages and repels
the projective eye. he face I <
> t the woman is so close, it becomes absorbed
in the surface of the image (exacerbating the idi il collapse