Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

figure 9
Barbara Kruger
Untitled (Your gaze hits
the side of my face), 1981
Courtesy of Mary Boone
Gallery, New York
figure 10
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #96, 1981
Collection of Robert and
Jane Rosenblum.
New York
42
figure 9
figure 10
'to-be-looked-at-ness' of femininity"), ir
slavishly subordinates itself to
"the texture of the photographic medium itself,"-
expertly the collapse of image into identity that is
and thus reiterates too
the feminine. Kruger's
image uses words to produce depth. Sherman's image refuses depth to produce
femininity as all surface, but this surface merges with its context
(here marked explicitly as that of the pornographic centerfold). 2 "
The
beaver/pubis is the gutter (of the magazine); the female body is the slick
surface of the photographic image: unattainable and impenetrable.
Moving to the late
19-os into the 1980s: dominant art discourses
begin to theorize a structure of viewing that was thought to have informed
the previous long history of image-making since the Renaissance and,
for at least ten years, the art world is
in thrall to the idea of the projective
eye, with its
aggressively dualistic politics of self and other and
its
reduction of the self/other relation to a two-dimensional dance of
eye/picture. But exploring the dichotomous effects of this projective eye
is, apparently, both a way of producing the very gaze it seeks to
explore and, ultimately, a very productive way of getting somewhere else.
After this, in the mid-1980s, Sherman thus suddenly explodes herself
beyond flatness and beyond the architectural spaces of the projective eye.
In so doing, she returns to the exchange of subjectivities that she
had first addressed in relation to the mirror, where sexuality, as "both
reflexive and corporeal, as signifying a relation between the embodied
subject and others," is
enacted as "a mode of situating oneself in terms of
one's intersubjectivity." 27