INVESTIGATING IDENTITY:, Exams of Photography

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INVESTIGATING IDENTITY:

GLOBAL ART since 1980: (FOCUS: Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa

Morimura, and Shirin Neshat)

ONLINE ASSIGNMENT:

http://smarthistory.khana cademy.org/cindy- sherman.html

TITLE or DESIGNATION: Untitled Film Still 21 from her Untitled Film series

ARTIST: Cindy Sherman

CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: Postmodernism

DATE: 1978 C.E.

MEDIUM: gelatin silver print

ONLINE

ASSIGNMENT:

http://academinist.org/w p- content/uploads/2010/06/ 010112Wagner_Yasumas a.pdf

TITLE or DESIGNATION: Portrait (Futago)

ARTIST: Yasumasa Morimura

CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: Postmodernism

DATE: 1988 C.E.

MEDIUM: chromogenic print with acrylic paint and gel medium

TITLE or DESIGNATION: Rebellious Silence from her Women of Allah series

ARTIST: Shirin Neshat, photo by Cynthia Preston

CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: Iranian-American Contemporary

DATE: 1994 C.E.

MEDIUM: Ink on photograph

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #92, 1981, chromogenic color print

Photography, performance art, and video are especially popular practices among artists who are interested in constructed, unfixed identities. Cindy Sherman, who became well known, staring the 1980s, for using herself as model in staged photographs exploring female identity, has made many series that deconstruct stereotyped images that are presented in the fashion world, advertising, movies, pornography, and other mass-media sources. Sherman is never an unchanging, unchangeable self in her photographs; she assumes a different identity in each one, reinforcing the idea that identity is artificially constructed and transformable.

Cindy Sherman. Untitled Film Still 35, 1978, gelatin silver print

In her Untitled Film Stills Cindy Sherman took active control of her own image as she directed herself performing a series of prototypical film noir characters and codified images of femininity for the camera.

By using herself as a model to replicate other models, she forces us to consider our conditioning, to deflect our gaze away from the female as the object of (male) desire and toward representation itself. Part performance artist, part photographer, Sherman is both subject and object, image and author. Her women and her work project a vague anxiety readable as a mixture of desire, anticipation, and victimization.

In her series Historical Portraits (1989), Sherman posed in female and male costumes and used makeup and fake body parts to parody the figures in historical paintings. The series demonstrates how photographs, like other images, offer compelling role models for building identity, but models that do not apply in all times and places. Identity is always transformable.

Top Left: Cindy Sherman. Untitled Film Still 21, 1978, gelatin silver print

Bottom Left: Cindy Sherman. Society Portrait series, 2008

Uncannily, she doesn't resemble any of her own pictures, not even the ones that seem fairly straightforward. Considering that she has become, through no effort of her own, a darling of academics and has inspired reams of arcane post- modernist criticism, it's also pleasing to discover how plain-spoken, unpretentious and down-to- earth she is. Like many artists, Ms. Sherman tends to talk about her own work when she looks at the works of others in the museum. She reacts enthusiastically to what's on view, but art history per se doesn't interest her much. She has an omnivorous appetite for images and sure instincts for adapting them to her own purposes, but she isn't concerned about their past. She once said her goal was an art that was accessible, "not one that you felt you had to read a book about" to understand.

Left: Cindy Sherman. Untitled No.216, 1989, Color photograph; Right: Jean Fouquet. Madonna and Child, c. 1450, tempera on wood

Sherman’s obvious use of prosthetic body parts and theatrical setting compel the viewer to think about the posturing and modeling of the original historical sources. For this reason, many critics have praised Sherman’s deconstruction of overtly masculine visions of the female in the history of art.

Left: Cindy Sherman. Untitled No.228, 1989, Color photograph

Center: Cristofano Allori. Judith with head of Holofernes, 1613, oil on canvas

Right: Sandro Botticelli. Judith with head of Holofernes, 1497-

The elaborate period costumes and drapery, fake breasts, and assorted props that Sherman turned to in the late 1980s made the act of staging even more obvious.

History painting is also evoked, as in her version of Judith with the head of Holofernes in her Untitled #228 from 1990, a subject made famous by both Caravaggio and Artemisia. But because she is using only herself as a model, she has done without Judith’s maid, presenting a stripped-down version of history painting’s narrative complexity.

Furthermore, the obvious costuming and props – particularly the head of Holofernes in the form of a rubber Halloween fright mask – are as likely to suggest another series of associations with the anachronistic details characteristic of the type of low-budget movie destined to become a cult classic.

Ms. Sherman said some of her pictures take a day or two to finish; others can take weeks to set up and photograph. “I never know what I want at the beginning,'' she said. Sometimes she will start with a body part like a fake nose and play with it,” she said. “Then I'll see what costumes work with it. The makeup comes after.”

Is it difficult to engage viewers these days? “It's challenging,” she answered, “trying to reach a jaded public seeing God-knows-what in movies and television. We've become more callous to things than ever before.” How can art compete with television and movie images? “It can't,” she said. “It should incorporate it -use imagery as if from those things.”

Sherman’s dazzling skill as a perpetual shape-shifter is perhaps her major contribution to contemporary art. A less conspicuous but equally important legacy involves the way her work has permanently blurred the line between fine art and photography. Sherman’s oeuvre, from her first solo show, in 1981, helped bring about a seismic shift in the curatorial and art- historical debate about photography as high art.

“I still like the idea of challenging myself through the more hands-on methods, only because I think it’s more challenging when you are limited,” Sherman says. “With Photoshop anything goes, and I don’t want to make easy crazy characters just because I can. I think there are some artists who are fine without any boundaries. It somehow frees them. But I really need certain limitations to know how far I can go and work within that.”

Yasumasa Morimura. Portrait (Futago), 1988,

chromogenic print with acrylic paint and gel medium