Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

i
As Abigail Solomon-Godeau
Cindy Sherman," New Left
points out in
her essay
Review 188 (July/August 1991):
"Suitable for Framing: The
136-150. In the 1990s,
Critical
Recasting of Cindy
Sherman," Parkett 29 (1991):
Sherman's work has been discussed
in
50
112-115, critics such as Peter
Schjeldahl, Lisa Phillips, and
Arthur Danto have written
about Sherman in
universalizing
terms; I
made the same
argument vis-a-vis Donald
Kuspit's description of
Sherman as an exemplar of
"the new subjectivism" in
my
essay "Postfeminism, Feminist
Pleasures, and Embodied
Theories of Art," in
New
relation to "formlessness"
and abjection. See
Mulvey, "A Phantasmagoria";
Krauss, Cindy Sherman; Amelia
Arenas. "Afraid of the Dark:
Cindy Sherman and the
Grotesque Imagination," in
Cindy Sherman (Shiga: 1996),
45-48; Rosemary Betterton,
"Body Horror? Food (and Sex
and Death) in Women's Art," in
An Intimate Distance: Women,
Artists and the Body (New York
Feminist Criticism: Art,
Identity,
and London: Routledge, 1996),
Action, ed. Joanna Frueh,
130-160; and Simon Taylor,
Cassandra L.
Langer, Arlene
"The Phobic Object: Abjection
Raven (New York:
HarperCollins, 1994), 24.
in Contemporary Art," in Abject
Art: Repulsion and Desire in
Sherman's work was consis-
American Art,
Craig Houser,
tently defined as paradigmatic
of the use of photography to
explore postmodern simulation
in essays from the late 1970s
and 1980s such as Douglas
Crimp's "Pictures," first published
as an exhibition essay
then expanded in October
(1979) and reprinted in Art after
Modernism: Rethinking
Representation, ed. Brian Wa Mis
(New York: New Museum of
Contemporary Art and Boston:
Leslie C. Jones, and Simon
Taylor (New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art,
1993). 59-83-
2 I will try to avoid the suggestion
that the feminism of
Sherman's work somehow
inheres in its structures— I want
to suggest its feminism is contextual
and linked to the work's
David R.
Codine. 1984). see
openness to and encouragement
of spectatorial engagement.
180-181. This formulation of
Sherman's work is extended in
Rosalind Krauss's Cindy
3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
"The Intertwining—The
Sherman: 1975-1993 (New York:
Chiasm," in
Visible and the
Rizzoli, 1993). and Sachiko
Osaki's "Cindy Sherman's
Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort,
trans. Alphonso Lingis,
History Portraits," in
Cindy
(Evanston: Northwestern
Sherman (Shiga, Japan:
Museum of Modern Art,
Shiga,
University Press, 1968), 143.
Feminist phenomenological
1996), 38-44. Laura Mulvey's
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative
models have informed my reading
of Sherman's work: see
Cinema" (published in
Screen
Luce Irigaray, 'The Invisible of
in 1975), reprinted in
Visual and
the Flesh: A Reading of
Other Pleasures (Bloomington
Merleau-Ponty,' The Visible
and Indianapolis: Indiana
and the Invisible,
"The
University Press, 1989), 14-26,
set the stage for feminist theories
of the male gaze. Her more
recent essay on Sherman to a
certain extent draws on this
earlier theory of voyeurism. See
Mulvey, "A Phantasmagoria of
Intertwining—The Chiasm," in
An Ethics of Sexual Difference,
trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian
C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993).
151-184; Iris Marion Young,
"Throwing Like a Girl: A
the Female Body: The Work of