Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

1
1 acing
he)
with
the Subject
Cindy Sherman
figure 13
45
figure 12
figure 12
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #175, 1987
Collection of the artist
Courtesy Metro Pictures,
New York
figure 13
tion), tracing the trajectory of "food" within the feminine (where food is
the lever through which external body image is controlled as well as being
the matter, "originally vested in the other [the mother]," marking the
mingling of self and other).' 2
The splattering of the body/self across the
picture plane itself consumes the gaze of the viewer, opening up the dialectic
of inside and out that establishes the difference between self and
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #180, 1987
Collection of The Eli Broad
Family Foundation, Santa
Monica
other. The horizontal register elaborates not just the "formless" but the
space of traditional history painting, where subjects are rendered nor .is
"individuals" (per the portrait) but splashed across imperial \istas dominated
by the perspectivally symbolized force of the nation/gaze.
Suddenly (or it may seem suddenly if you haven't been watching and waiting
all along), the projective eye becomes blinded. We start to feel we cm
laugh at it
and even poke fun at our own obsessive fixation over its
"power": enough of the fetish already. The eye itself begins to be
"viewed" from the inside and out as a hole (like, in fact, the torn aperture
through which Duchamp stages his "Given" female nude). It no
longer projects lightning flashes of power (like .1 ray-gun in a B movie)
but sucks in. It begins to comprehend (from prehendere: to grasp; meaning
"to take in or embrace"). Open to its grasp (it sucks and pulls rather
than penetrating <>r wounding), those who used to think of themselves
.is victims of the projective eye (pinioned like dead butterflies at the
center of its sharp point [of v iew |i now fling themselves into the hole eye
(the) 're not onlj "there," at the center ol the gaze's trajectory ;
now
they're here, there, and everywhere).
I
no longei "pose" or "perform"
bin, rather, spew outward jubilantly, dissolving m the juic) and
succulent embra< e ol the hoi. I lu\ are both dispersed and insist em
mbodied as well .is
spe*. ific