Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

figure 14
Lynda Benglis
Parenthesis, 1975
©Lynda Benglis/ Licensed
by VACA. New York
figure 16
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #263, 1992
Collection of the artist
Courtesy Metro
Pictures, New York
46
figure 15
Kiki Smith
Uro-Genital System
(male and female), 1986
Photo courtesy
PaceWidenstem
figure 14
figure 16
figure 15
Sherman's exploded selves—the vomit and sex dolls— in the work of the
late 1980s and 1990s have a place within a trajectory of mutilated
and grotesque bodies in twentieth-century art history. While Hans Bellmer
has been invoked as a singular origin for Sherman's Sex Pictures, 34 one
might just as easily stage them in relation to another—feminist
trajectory. Women and gay male artists have, for one reason or another,
often resorted to bodily fragments as a way, perhaps, of exploding
the congealing, external force of what might appear to be an inexorable
(heterosexual male) gaze. Thus, while Bellmer mutilates doll bodies
that most often appear to be female, and that still
propose what Mulvey
would call a fetishistic relation (whereby the female body is
broken into
sexualized bits or fetishes to allay anxieties about male subjectivity,
wholeness, and power), 35
artists from Meret Oppenheim to Louise
Bourgeois to Jasper Johns to Hannah Wilke, Lynda Benglis, Kiki Smith,
Annette Messager, Mona Hatoum, Robert Gober, Faith Wilding,
and Sutapa Biswas have produced fragmented bodies (of all types) that
produce an effect of the eye as hole (dark continental abyss where
the coherent subject dissolves in engagement with others who are highly
marked in their gendered, sexed, raced, and class particularities).