Word: shermans
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...CINDY SHERMAN, 33, belongs to a new American avant-grade which emphasizes content, narrative and ideas while exploring the effect of the visual image on the self and on culture. Sherman herself has attracted international attention for her provocative and grotesque photographs, most of which she appears in. Yet Sherman's photographs, which will be on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) through January 17, cannot be called self-portraits, for the artist uses make-up, costumes and wigs to create different characters, different personae in each piece...
...floor exhibit at the ICA is organized according to different periods in Sherman's short career. Her earliest photographs are "film stills," small black-and-white pieces in which she assumes the role of an imaginary starlet caught for the camera in a contrived Hollywood moment. Already in these early works, which date from the late '70s, one sees the artist's preoccupation with her own transformed image. The film stills reflect, says Sherman, "the role playing that everyone does through life...
Moving from these small black and white photos, one is startled by the large, horizontal, color "centerfold" images which make up makeup Sherman's next series of pieces. Commissioned and then rejected by Vanity Fair, these photos picture the artist crouched on the floor or on a bed in various costumes and wigs. In all the images, her characters express fear, alienation and helplessness. Some accuse Sherman of reinforcing negative female stereotypes, but she resolutely denies the charge. She wants, she says, merely "to make people uncomfortable in their expectations of seeing cleavage...
CLIMBING THE stairs to the second floor of the exhibit, the viewer is confronted by 10 "costume dramas," enormous, eight-foot tall color fashion photos. From the rosy-checked all-American girl to the angry looking woman with the blonde hair in her face, Sherman has perfected what she calls the look of "anti-glamour." Many of these works were commissioned by Paris fashion designers, and Sherman's seems to have deliberately tried to make herself look ugly in their glamorous clothes...
...familiar and self-important fixtures in New York life. At the top of the heap are "social X rays," rumpless women of a certain age who believe one cannot be too rich or too thin. Sixtyish men of this stratum are frequently accompanied by "lemon tarts," sleek, young blonds. Sherman McCoy is a decent well-bred sort, neither more nor less lustful than most confident 38-year-old males and particularly amusing when he gives facts and figures about how one can go broke in Manhattan on $1 million a year...