13 Sep Cindy Sherman at SFMOMA

Last Monday I finally had the opportunity to take a walk through the traveling retrospective of the photographic and filmic works of Cindy Sherman, which is currently on display at SFMOMA until October 8th, 2012. I had yet to see Sherman’s work in person and considering the prior months of keen anticipation, I couldn’t help but enter the museum with slight cynicism. I was worried that her infamous large-scale self portraits would seem like minute thumbnails after years of fantasizing about them being miles high. However, I was soon to be met with stark contradiction.

As I approached the exhibit, I felt thrilled upon seeing the presentation of the title-board; an oddly-placed, pornstar-pink slab of dry wall, with dramatic black block-letters boasting her name. It was as prodigious, theatrical and brilliantly garish as I hoped her photographs would. I entered the gallery.

The exhibit was structured chronologically as a sort of stroll through the life and work of Sherman. The first wall was filled with some of her earliest small-scale photographic works as she began to experiment with what would become a long-term dedication to self-portraiture. It then transitioned into her extensive “Untitled Film Stills” series, and through the many artistic phases of her ongoing obsession with the self-portrait and themes such as constructions of identity, visual culture, and media, often via works of a bold, theatrical, fantastic, and sometimes grotesque nature. The exhibit concluded with one of Sherman’s more recent untitled murals from 2010, which, to put it crudely, blew my mind. It was everything I admire about Sherman’s work – ambitious, honest, raw, and unapologetically corporeal, with an overwhelming sense of the kind of bizarre and particular beauty that permeates her photographs. I left the museum with a renewed and fierce adoration for Cindy Sherman and the unique ways in which she absorbs and contorts the world around her.

Concluding Mural - "Untitled" 2010

Although her extensive exploration of the self-portrait is one which began nearly forty years ago, I can’t help but feel that the notions with which Cindy Sherman experiments and concerns herself, ring true in contemporary culture now more than ever. Exisiting in a cultural realm which is saturated with self construction, documentation, and display – one which has seen the proliferation of photo-booth and selfies; facebook and twitter, highly personal stream-of-consciousness blogs that read much like diaries, which invite mass groups of strangers into the highly intimate details of ones daily life – it is evident to me that the way in which Sherman constructs and documents these varying self-identities, then showcases them in such a public manner the way an exhibitionist might, is a disturbingly accurate mirror image of what thousands of people have begun to do on an hour to hour basis world-wide. Through her stark and shocking, yet unavoidably compelling self-display, Sherman subverts the role of viewer to that of voyeur, and forces her audience to consider the increasingly loose boundaries of self-construction, self-expression and self-promotion in a contemporary world of profile pictures and about me sections.

Untitled, 2000

More than anything, I appreciated Sherman’s earlier black and white experiments with costume, character, and self-portraiture. Asides from being some of her most iconic works (the Untitled Film Stills series), there is a beautiful simplicity to these early photographs that radiate a dreamy sense of playful escape. I found an ineffable sencerity in Sherman’s solitary exploration of fantasy and make-believe. I think this is because the photographs do not present themselves as a product of escapism due to some sort of inability to deal with a harsh reality, but more of a simple and lighthearted approach to the age old question of, “What would it be like if life were like the movies?”

Lucille Ball, 1975

I feel fairly certain that Sherman managed to answer this question in a complex and meaningful way through dedicating much of her artistic career to the exploration of the cinema, because as I was headed home on the bus after leaving the museum, I couldn’t help but shake this urgent need to run home and throw on a Fellini film.

Cindy Sherman will be on display at the SFMOMA until October 8th, 2012. You can buy tickets at: http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/448

Untitled Film Still #48, 1979

Claire Bargout
September 13th, 2012