Cindy Sherman - Retrospective (Art Photo Ebook)

25 Mulvey, "A
Phantasmagoria," 143; here,
Mulvey uses her own terminology
from "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema."
26 In her chapter on the
Centerfolds (Cindy Sherman:
1975-1993. 89-97). Krauss
again proposes her particular
determination of meaning for
the Centerfold images as inherent
to the photographs.
Arguing that the "signifier" at
issue in these images is
"point-of-view," or the shift
from the vertical to horizontal
axis, Krauss then proceeds to
offer a narrow interpretation of
what the significance of this
shift entails. Critiquing
Mulvey's feminist reading (as
still "firmly fixed on the signified"),
she eradicates the obvious
link between "centerfold"
and "pornography," failing to
acknowledge that her own
reading also supplies a fixed
"signified" to the "signifier" of
point-of-view. Krauss uses the
language of semiotics to naturalize
her particular assignment
of a signified, posing her
reading as simply obvious or
natural (precisely the function
of myth, as Roland Barthes
describes it in a model Krauss
employs here to debunk
Mulvey's reading).
27 Butler, "Sexual Ideology
and Phenomenological
Description," 89.
28 Krauss, Cindy Sherman:
1975~ 1 993. 174-
29 Ibid. In this sense,
Sherman takes the
Renaissance portrait, which
John Welchman argues to offer
"the self as a gorgeously specific
object and not as an interior."
and postmoderni,
("The Renaissance figure
becomes a ghost that haunts
the forms and disguises of the
postmodern self"). )ohn
Welchman, "Peeping Over
Wall," m Narcissism
Ar
Reflect Themselves (Escondido:
California Center for the Arts
Museum, 1996), 16, 18.
30 Criselda Pollock summarizes
these arguments in her
essay "What's Wrong with
Images of Women?," in Screen
Education, no. 24 (Autumn
1977): 25-33.
31 See Donald Preziosi,
Rethinking Art History:
Meditations on a Coy Science
(New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1989).
32 Betterton in "Body
Horror?," 144; she is citing
Maud Elman.
33 Random House Dictionary
of the English Language, second
edition (New York: Random
House, 1987), 420.
34 By Krauss (Cindy Sherman:
1975-7993, 208), who links
Sherman's sex doll imagery to
Hal Foster's discussion of
Bellmer's dolls in his essay
"Armor Fou," October no. 56
(Spring 1991): 86.
35 See especially Mulvey's
essay "Fears, Fantasies and the
Male Unconscious or 'You
Don't Know What is
Happening, Do You Mr.
Jones?'" (1973), m Visual and
Other Pleasures, 6-13.
36 On Duchamp's sex objects
see my Postmodernism and the
En-Gendering of Marcel
Duchamp (New York and
Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press,
1994), 90-93.
37 According to )an Avgikos,
these are made with medical
dummies; see )an Avgikos,
"Cindy Sherman: Burning
Down the House," Artfbrum ji,
no. 5 (January 1993): 78. have
I
a hard time viewing the obviously
lui
rgan portions
of these perverse doll
"lily
38 Merleau-Ponty, "The
Intertwining—The Chiasm,"
134-135-
39 To a certain extent I
am
obviously speaking to the normative
(white) subjects of the
art world here. Peggy Phelan
elegantly explores Sherman's
work in similar terms, arguing
that it marks the failure of the
53
subject to be rendered within
the terms of the visible and in
so doing gives us another way
of understanding our link to
the other within and without
ourselves. Phelan, Unmarked:
The Politics of Performance
(New York and London:
Routledge, 1993), 69.