Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

Tracing the Subject
with
Cindi Sherman
41
figure 8
figure 7
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #66. 1980
Saatchi Gallery,
London
figure 7
figure 8
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #76. 1 980
The Carol and Arthur
Goldberg Collection
from the patently unreal, blurry building facade behind—a low relief
gargoyle marking both the flatness and textured dimensionality of its
surround
(the photograph suggests that the female subject is
beginning
to be experienced and viewed as dimensional rather than simply a point of
projected desire 1.
And finally, in the 1981 Centerfold series, Sherman—not quite ready to
move out from under the grip of the projective gaze—mimics the
format of magazine pornography in Untitled #96 (figure to) by smashing
herself flat and phallic, to be "read" across the open spread (spread legs?
of the glossy porn-turned-art mag Artforum, a "pimp" prostituting art (here
the female body) as commodity. As if to emphasize this point, she performs
herself as a flat-chested adolescent dressed in i^>cs clothing
(signifiers of nostalgia deployed in most of the Untitled Film Stilb), clutching
a crumpled piece of paper. The paper is a just blossoming sprout
protruding from her groin, while her body is pinioned flat against the page
as it under a rigid sheet of glass.
While Barbara kruuer. in
this signature work Untitled (Your gaze hits the
side of my face) (figure 9). attempts to stop the projective eye in its vicious
path through the lirechtian strateu\ of using mterruptne text against the
seductive effect of the image, Sherman continues to negotiate:
"Yout v..\/c
hits the (resistant) flat <>t mj body." Sherman enacts the ua/e's spaces oi
desire— but doing, slows it to a crawl. I he turgid, inexorable two
dimensionality of this bod)
splayed across the "spread" doesn't just
mimi the path of tin eiferatmu. is I aura \lnl\e\ has argued, "the