Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

figure 17
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #^4F, 1994
Collection of the artist
Courtesy Metro Pictures,
New York
figure 18
Cindy Sherman
Untitled #184. 1988
Robert Shiffler Collection
and Archive,
Greenville, Ohio
48
figure 18
figure 17
the voracious hole of our gaze, they also incorporate us in their shiny
(Untitled #323) or gooey and rubbery {Untitled #3i4F) surfaces, which
are also depths. Thus, the black face— in its
both particular ("black") and
blandly neutral appearance—reverses into concavity, embracing our gazing
visage rather than serving as its
object (as the "black face" has long been
forced to do, whomever has engaged it).
Never full within itself, never clear in its signifiers or their signifieds, the
picture is
one element in a dynamic and ongoing system of our production
as social subjects. We are never just a gaze nor are we ever only objects;
we cannot, in the post- 1960 era, think ourselves outside of feminism, nor,
for that matter, out of the awareness of black consciousness, the
Chicana/o movement, gay/lesbian rights, etc.
(one might well ask why we
would want to). Rather, as the work of artists such as Sherman
suggests, we constitute ourselves as embodied subjects through technologies
of representation in relation to other embodied subjects (whom
we nonetheless may want to see simply as "pictures" to make the world
seem a less threatening place). The very "fact" of our embodied vision
(which Sherman engages so explicitly in every one of the series)
entails not our coherence and self-sufficiency but our reliance on the other,
and points to the particularities of how the circuit of intersubjective
identifications and repudiations take place. As Merleau-Ponty argued, "it
is
necessary that the vision ... be doubled with a complementary
vision or with another vision: myself seen from without, such as another
would see me, installed in the midst of the visible, occupied in
considering it from a certain spot ... he who sees cannot possess the