*FE Cindy Sherman Feb 2012_2008 FEATURE TEMPLATE 1/4/12 5:39 PM Page 2 LEFT Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #7 , 1978. OPPOSITE Cindy Sherman, Untitled #474 , 2008. The Cindy Sherman Effect BY INVENTING HER OWN GENRE, CINDY SHERMAN HAS INFLUENCED THE WAY GENERATIONS OF ARTISTS THINK ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY, PORTRAITURE, NARRATIVE, AND IDENTITY BY PHOEBE HOBAN K R O Y W E N , S E Starting with the game-changing black-and-white “Untitled Film Stills” she created in R U T C the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman has shown herself to be the ultimate master of self-morphing, utilizing I P O everything from old-fashioned makeup and prosthetics to digital technology, inventing and portraying R T E extraordinary alter egos and multiple identities that brilliantly reflect our image-saturated culture—and M D N in the process inventing her own genre. A T S I Call it the Cindy Sherman effect. Whether it’s those iconic stills of faux cinema moments or her more T R A recent scary-funny clown series, the tragicomic coven of aging society women or the larger-than-life E H T Y S E Phoebe Hoban is a New York –based writer who covers art and culture for a variety of publications. Her biography T R U O Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2010. C 76 February 2012 ARTnews *FE Cindy Sherman Feb 2012_2008 FEATURE TEMPLATE 1/4/12 5:39 PM Page 4 ABOVE Ryan Trecartin, P.opular S.ky (section ish) , 2009, HD-video still. BELOW Jillian Mayer, I Am Your Grandma , 20 11, video still. I M A I M , Y R E L L A G O L L I T S A C D I V A D Y S E T R U O C : M O T T O B ; K R O Y W E N , E E D H T E B A Z I L E D N A T S I T R A E H T Y S E T R U O C : P O T 78 February 2012 ARTnews *FE Cindy Sherman Feb 2012_2008 FEATURE TEMPLATE 1/4/12 5:39 PM Page 5 photographic murals that popped up at the 2011 Venice making each of her staged characters the star of an im - Biennale (much to the delight of visitors who posed with plicit narrative, from the lush color centerfolds that fol - them), Sherman’s brilliant manipulations of her own lowed the “Film Stills,” in 1982, to the strangely image have mirrored—and in some cases anticipated— sexualized “Broken Dolls” of the ’90s. No wonder the the zeitgeist. Now, with the major career retrospective work of so many artists parallels Sherman’s, or at least that opens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on Feb - mines similar conceptual veins: role-playing and the na - ruary 26 (up through June 11), the full extent of Sher - ture of identity; sexual and cultural stereotypes; the man’s imagination and prescient vision will be on display. pressure to conform to the images of perfection promul - “Her work has in some ways presaged the media age gated through television, film, and advertising. Abe Frajndlich, portrait of Cindy Sherman on the cover of Penelope’s Hungry Eyes , 20 11. that we live in now and also absolutely responds to it,” Think of Lisa Yuskavage’s send-ups of idealized female L E says MoMA photography curator Eva Respini, who co- anatomy, George Condo’s bizarre cast of invented charac - S O M / organized the retrospective, which includes 175 images. ters, or the work of such chameleon-like performers as R E M “A number of younger artists are very much indebted to Tracey Ullman, Anna Deavere Smith, and Tamy Ben Tor. R I H C Sherman in their exploration of not just identity but also And then there is a whole new crop of artists whose sensi - S Y S the nature of representation. Now we all take it for bility has been shaped by the Internet and social media, E T R granted that a photograph can be Photoshopped. We live major influences that didn’t even exist when Sherman first U O C / in the era of YouTube fame and reality-TV shows and began her photographic odyssey. H C I L makeovers, where you can be anything you want to be Sherman’s paradigm shift was one step ahead of tech - D N J A any minute of the day, and artists are responding to that. nology. Her kaleidoscopic investigation of the essence of R F E Cindy was one of the first to explore the idea of the mal - her own—and, by extension, society’s—identity complex B A 1 leability or fluidity of identity.” has relied on ingenuity, not gigabytes. Thanks to today’s 1 0 2 © Sherman’s coup was to cast herself as subject matter, digital hegemony, the notion of fluidity—for Sherman an ARTnews February 2012 79 *FE Cindy Sherman Feb 2012_2008 FEATURE TEMPLATE 1/4/12 5:40 PM Page 7 intellectual and artistic ploy—is now not just de rigueur that she’s been able to mine brilliantly for the last 35 but de facto. Polymorphously perverse has become per - years,” says Respini. vasive. The implicit has become increasingly explicit. Photographer Abe Frajndlich’s recent book Penelope’s Artistic personae can not only be instantly created but Hungry Eyes , published by Schirmer/Mosel, a collection of also instantly animated and disseminated. Art via avatar. his portraits of famous photographers, features a stunning picture of Sherman on its cover. Eyes closed, bare of any artifice but the slightest hint of makeup, Sherman is shown Take Rya n Trecartin, who was totally unmasked. anointed an art star in 2009, when his work was seen in Says Frajndlich, “What Cindy did, starting with the ‘Film the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” show. Now 30, Stills,’ is she realized the degree to which the stills used to he began taking pictures of himself and his friends role promote cinema influenced the way people portrayed them - playing and cross-dressing while still in junior high school, selves, and she saw it as pure theater. That’s what I see as when he was also introduced to Sherman’s work. Tre - cartin’s trippy videos feature himself and others in wild makeup, wigs, and costumes à la Sherman—if Sherman were on acid. His psychedelically hued, reality TV–infused shape-shifting is Proteus in a Cuisinart—perfect for the attention-deficit disorder of today’s app-addicted world. Says Respini, “He’s sort of the 21st-century inheritor of Cindy’s legacy.” The work of 27-year-old Jillian Mayer is somewhat simi - lar to Trecartin’s and shares with it a Shermanesque sense of masquerade. In the hilarious video I Am Your Grandma (2011), Mayer plays both the OPPOSITE Catherine future grandmother of a furious Opie, Pig Pen infant and the bawling baby. (Tattoos) , 2009. But this is grandma as gremlin. Wearing various Mardi Gras RIGHT Katy Grannan, getups—makeup, headgear, and Dale, Lombard S E masks that are alternately in - Street , 2006. L E G sectlike, coneheaded, witchy, N A S and shamanesque—she chants, O L , S “I wish I could have met you. I would have hugged you so. T C E J But you are in the future, you get loved by video.” In the O R P disturbing H.I.L.M.D.A. (2011), Mayer, like Sherman in her N E G “History Portraits” (1988–90), appropriates a famous art - E R Y work. Her impersonation of Venus de Milo takes a violent S E T turn when she amputates her own arms. R U O C Says Mayer, “Cindy Sherman opened a lot of the doors. / E I P She was the trendsetter in terms of distorted characters O E N I within self-portraiture. Originally painters painted self- R E H portraits, and then she kind of blew it open with photo - T A C graphic portraiture, and now there are all these avenues © : E T I younger artists are taking, which would not have been so one of her great strengths—the theatrics of camera vision. S O P easy without her work.” And she played it out incredibly, and then she just used that P O ; As Whitney Museum curator Donna De Salvo observes, as the stepping-stone to take it further and further and fur - K R O Y “Cindy is an incredibly influential figure. She fundamen - ther out. So much of her work is performance, so much is W E tally nailed it in terms of understanding the way images improvisation, so much is theater. I am sure there are all N , 4 9 are constructed. Portraiture was never considered some - kinds of people who look at Cindy as their god.” N O L thing conceptual in quite the way that she took it on.” Other Sherman progeny include Nikki S. Lee, who im - A S D By deconstructing and reinventing portraiture, which personates a member of a cultural group (yuppies, senior N A T in itself was something of a dead genre when she arrived citizens), interacts with each group, and then documents it S I T R on the scene, Sherman influenced not only photogra - in a snapshot; and Yasumasa Morimura, who photographs A E H phers but also painters and performance and video himself as various cinematic femmes fatales, from Audrey T Y S E artists.