Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

I
racing the Subject
with
c
ukK Sherman
figure n
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #2T$, 1989
Collection of The Birmingham
Museum of Art, Birmingham,
Alabama; Museum purchase
with funds provided by
the Acquisitions Fund and
43
Rena Hill
Selfe
figure 11
The Hole Eye: The Dissolution and Particularization of the Body/ Self
The History Pictures seem to me to mark in interesting ways the transition
from a projective eye to a
"hole eye," from a perspectival rendering
of (female) bodies in architecturally conceived spaces (two-dimensional
renderings of three-dimensional containers), to a free-fall explosion
of dissolved bodies in non-perspectival, metaphorically open space. The
History Pictures are still, in fact, "pictures" as this is generally
understood (two-dimensional, rectangular in shape, vertical in emphasis
like the standard portrait) but, even lodged within the frame with
their deployment of obviously fake body parts, they begin to suggest what
has been called a kind of formlessness: the pictures elaborate a
slippage of body parts downward, which has been said to suggest "the
field of a desublimatory, horizontal axis that erodes the facade of the vertical,
bearing witness to the fact that behind that facade there lies
transparency of Truth, of meaning, but the opacity of the bod) *s
not the
matter,
which is to say the formless."' 8 But this "formlessness" of the bod)
is not vague or abstract but always ahead) experienced in its particularity,
as I interpret Sherman's exacerbatedl) artificial personae (clearly
marked in terms of gender and class m the Histor) Pictures) .is suggesting.
Further, Sherman's practice seems to me to put the lie
to the idea
th.it the body, its representations, or its orientation are facades hiding the
opacit) <>r formlessness of the bod) (themselves offered as a kind ol
"truth" m the above
>.
laim).
Rather, \\ hile the f //<///<•/ / ilm Stills seem to
enact the female) subject as an effeci of a projective vision (a "subject"
paradoxicall) defined through objecthood via an external I
Raze), undei