Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

amson and Doane noted between "image" and "woman"). It is as if
we are leaning in closer and closer to view (to master) a woman's face
to realize that, in immediate proximity, it becomes a blur (blocked, in
tact,
by the back of her head or by the sheen of the picture itself).
Or, it is as if we are attempting to see ourselves in the mirror (of her face)
but are blocked from so doing by her head and visage. The picture insisitly
renders Sherman (whoever that may be) in the indexical thickness of
her bodv's apparent "presence" and simultaneously blocks both our
4° identification and our projection through the recalcitrant surface of the
print/her body.
The picture throws the gaze back onto itself in a gesture Duchamp
explored as a "mirrorical return" (where the image in the mirror and the
viewer bounce "gazes" back and forth, producing the flesh of one
another). 23 In this way, I see Sherman's Untitled Film Stills and subsequent
Rear Screen Projection series as setting the stage for her entire body of
work's performance of the sexual subject as an effect of the other (the
"fleshed" body/self whose identity is a projection of its embodied and
desiring observers). Ultimately, as I experience it, Sherman's practice participates
in what I
have argued to be the opening of the subject to otherness
(the baring of the circuits of desire connecting self and other in a
dynamic of intersubjectivity) that gives what we might call postmodernism
its most remarkable and particular antimodernist thrust. 1 In feminist and
phenomenological terms, the body, which instantiates the self, is a
"modality of reflexivity," posing the subject in relation to the other in a
reciprocal relationship; through gendered/sexual performances of
the body, the subject is situated and situates herself through the other. 22
The subject, then, is never complete within itself but is always contingent
on others, and the glue of this intersubjectivity is
the desire binding us
together (the projective gaze is
one mode of intersubjectivity but functions
specifically to veil this contingency by projecting lack onto the other
rather than admitting its own). It is the intersubjective dimension of
Sherman's work that has largely been ignored (not surprisingly,
since it
exposes the investedness and contingency of every reading of her
pictures—including this one).
Sherman's Rear Screen Projection series exemplifies this ambivalence
(the fulfilling and refusal of projective/identificative desires) as well. In
Untitled #66 (figure 7), Sherman is propelled outward from the fake backdrop—staged
in relation to the vanishing point marked by the perspectival
force-lines of the receding street. Sherman is both thrown into and cast
out of the projective eye: she is
both "viewed" and "viewer" (staged
"before" the scene like a spectator). But in Untitled #~6 (figure 8), raising
a liquid-filled bottle to her mouth, she is
both flattened against and
ancillary to the artificial environment. Her head protrudes only slightly