Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

and Sherman's History Picture project as suggesting that the "facade"
;re is the body (which in turn, phenomenologically speaking, is the self as
experience it from the outside as well as internally). Thus, Sherman's
'Renaissance Man" in Untitled #213 (figure n) is not just a "dis-corroboration"
of the vertical axis of the sublimated image of Renaissance through
modern portraiture, but a "dis-corroboration" of the very idea of the subject
as externally defined via a congealing, projective eye. 29
Correlatively,
the picture is a "dis-corroboration" of the kind of reading that would stage
44 its type as a critique of Truth even while confirming the Truth value of the
interpretation itself.
As I read Sherman's image, it thus specifically engages again the trajectory of
exploration stemming out of feminist art theory and practice in the
1980s (perhaps most specifically not only gaze theory but the "images of
1970s and
women" discourse that attempted to look back into art history or into popular
culture to judge images of women as either "positive" or "negative" 30—
clearly this man/woman is neither). The images are still, as noted, definitively
pictorial, staging subjects within the vertical purview of the painterly
portrait, and yet the body of the subject of the picture, in Untitled #213
anointed with attributes that look simultaneously too "real" and too much
like they came from a cheap costume shop (fur collar, metal necklace,
gray hair/wig, hand clutching fruit),
begins to propose a viewing relation that
is
engaged rather than antagonistic.
In the History Pictures, there is
an ambivalence vis-a-vis the viewing eye. The
eye is
seduced by the exaggerated textures of the "subject" rather than simply
mimicked in its projective effects. The body/self of the spectator is still
posed as exterior gaze; but, through a kind of mirroring (itself proposed
through the conventionality of the pictures' portrait format), the body/self of
the spectator is
also absorbed into the picture. Like the body/self of the
depicted subject, the viewer becomes both fully embodied and fragmented,
artificial.
Far from being a "facade" with a "formless" interior, our embodied
subjectivities become dissolved in relation to each other (the History
Pictures' subjects are opened to the subjects of viewing: we constitute one
another). That is,
moving away from the structures that explore or confirm
an external gaze that defines the (female) subject as object, here, the pictures,
with their almost sculptural but artificial
"deep space," propose
subjects that point to the fact that we are never coherent in ourselves but
always take meaning from the others whose significance we in turn
project. (A dynamic, not incidentally, that could be said to describe the hidden
mechanics of art history as a discipline.) 31
Untitled #180 (figure 13): The human face is a pit of fossilized flesh that sucks
in rather than beckons the gaze; it is, literally, guttered in the center, rendered
as "spread'Vhole rather than whole. Untitled #175 (figure 12):
The (female)
body is
illustrated as either totally interior (vomit) or totally exterior (reflec-