A TALE OF TWO SHERMANS
an appreciation and attack on Cindy Sherman's work
By Immi Hill
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| ©Cindy Sherman/Untitled #56 |
The Cindy Sherman SFMOMA exhibition is a chronological march through Sherman’s career. Each room feels like a decade of female archetypes, patriarchal male voyeurism and, of course, Sherman’s face. It’s an unforgettable face and is front and center, always the focal point of the photos. It seems like terribly old news to say, but, here it is: Sherman takes on a wide variety of roles, from Hollywood starlets to aging society women, and she is what you might call a master mimic, a comic of being herself while imitating others. She reverses the question of spectatorship and presentation, not to mention the role of the photographer as artist. Her fame is as a photographer, but what she really does is model. It’s doubtful that she ever actually takes the “real” photograph. As I walked through the exhibition I felt a great deal of unease and by the latter part of the show I was mentally and emotionally screaming for the exit. It was one snapshot after another of flawed femininity and intermittent gross images. As the rooms got smaller, the photographs got bigger and it all left me with an empty cry out for my own womanhood. And it was true, I wasn’t wrong, the photographs definitely got bigger and Sherman’s persona, always present, became more and more ironically vain.
