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October Files
Cindy Sherman, Volume 6
Critical essays on Cindy Sherman and one of contemporary art's most innovative bodies of work.
With her Untitled Film Stills of the 1970s, Cindy Sherman became one of the era's most important and influential artists. Since then, her metamorphosing self-portraits and appropriation of genres can be seen as a continuous investigation of representation and its complicated relationship to photography. Sherman and her work are often discussed in terms of postmodern theories and ideas that were coming to increasing prominence as her career began--feminism, subjectivity, mass media, new forms of mechanical reproduction, and even trauma, among others. Yet her refusal to acknowledge any of these themes as particular concerns raises questions about the relationships between the meanings projected upon a work of art and those produced by it. Cindy Sherman's art fascinates us in part because of its capacity to suggest--while at the same time slipping away from--so many possible readings. The discussions in these illustrated essays span Sherman's almost three-decade-long career, from her striking debut in the black-and-white Untitled Film Stills through her color photographs using back-projection, prosthetic body parts, and the ever-ingenuous modes of disguise and self-fashioning seen in such later series as Centerfolds, Fairy Tales, and Disasters. The essays--by such well-known critics as Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss--respond not only to Sherman's work but also to the arguments and postulations made about it, becoming part of the ongoing critical conversation about an artist of major significance.
With her Untitled Film Stills of the 1970s, Cindy Sherman became one of the era's most important and influential artists. Since then, her metamorphosing self-portraits and appropriation of genres can be seen as a continuous investigation of representation and its complicated relationship to photography. Sherman and her work are often discussed in terms of postmodern theories and ideas that were coming to increasing prominence as her career began--feminism, subjectivity, mass media, new forms of mechanical reproduction, and even trauma, among others. Yet her refusal to acknowledge any of these themes as particular concerns raises questions about the relationships between the meanings projected upon a work of art and those produced by it. Cindy Sherman's art fascinates us in part because of its capacity to suggest--while at the same time slipping away from--so many possible readings. The discussions in these illustrated essays span Sherman's almost three-decade-long career, from her striking debut in the black-and-white Untitled Film Stills through her color photographs using back-projection, prosthetic body parts, and the ever-ingenuous modes of disguise and self-fashioning seen in such later series as Centerfolds, Fairy Tales, and Disasters. The essays--by such well-known critics as Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss--respond not only to Sherman's work but also to the arguments and postulations made about it, becoming part of the ongoing critical conversation about an artist of major significance.
- GenresArtNonfiction
222 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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About the author
Johanna Burton
61 books2 followersJohanna Burton is Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum in New York and the series editor for the Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture.
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January 3, 2015
First of all it's almost naive to discuss color photographs and present them in black and white. Second and most important, the book after all is not about C. Sherman and her work, but mostly about how her work was used by the authors of the essays collected in it to support their arguments, which in many (if not all) cases are extremely theoretical and pseudo-psycological or sociological. After a while one loses track of the real topic … A lot of wasted energy in trying to give complicated interpretations to a body of photographic work which certainly has a deeper meaning and a lot to say about the evolution of modern photography and approach to the image for itself and not some kind of social demonization process of semantics
Displaying 1 of 1 review