Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

I
i.k ing the Subject
w ith
c nul\ Sherman
While Lynda Benglis (figure 14) and Kiki Smith (figure 15)— paralleling
Marcel Duchamp's sexual objects of the 1950s 36—draw on the threedimensionality
of sculpture to merge concavity and convexity into a confusion
of sexual parts, Sherman (as always) makes use of the illusionary
space of the photograph to stage the merging of female and male
into a repulsive amputated erotic object (subject?). In Untitled #263 (figure
16), Sherman extends the earlier feminist project of rendering the body in
fragmented parts to produce a mutant sex body that is
dangled in the
abyss of a gaze that takes place everywhere at once. 37 While we look from 47
"outside" at the picture as a theater of perverted desire (the penis
ringed, the cunt stuffed with a tampon), it is looked at from within by two
mannequin heads—one of which hides its
gaze from us, the other of
which (clearly male) confronts us at the same time as it
soaks in the gross
rubber body/bodies of desire. The ultimate point of this picture for me is
the production of the male gaze itself within the picture and as an object.
Specifically viewed within the history of feminist and gay male uses
of fragmented bodies (which explode the projective space of the male
gaze into a hole), Sherman's latest work can be seen as producing a
subject that complicates the projective thrust of the gaze that was
theorized and no doubt experienced by nonnormative subjects well into
the 1980s. It
seems to me that all of her series use the technology
of photography (which, again, was developed precisely out of the
compulsion to master the world through a monocular gaze) to stage
scenarios that engage or repulse this projective eye in one way or another,
ultimately turning it inside out (into the sucking hole eye). Most
important, I think, her work always poses itself (and "itself" is most often
Sherman, as she collapses the artist into the work) in
relation to the
structures not only of "viewing," per se,
but of the intersubjective engagements
that constitute us as bodies/selves in the social arena. I
ler
project I
thus determine (through my own projective desires) to be fully
feminist—inasmuch as it insists upon the picture (the "woman" in
Williamson's terms) as constituted via a circuit of particular identities and
desires. (Even her ostensibly "male" characters, ,is in the "Renaissance
Man" History Picture noted above, wear a masculinity that appears .is but
a
thin gloss on their reference to the "female" subject Sherman.)
Finally, after a hiatus of a tew years (where the bod) part reigned in
grotesque yet somehow crotically engaging scenarios ot desire), Sherman
has returned insistently to the \.-\ck:. The face is either "real" and
made to look like .1 mask
I
1 Entitled #323) (figure 1) or it is .1 mask that
nonetheless dike Gilbert Stuart's Washington or the Worn I isa) looks out
with an uncannily affective gaze (Untitled (figure 17). ["he face fills
the space oi the picture, which itself more than tills the space of our vision
(these, like the List several series, are large, over life size im tges). 1 eeding