four-thirty-three

Cindy Sherman, "Untitled Film Still #5" (1977)

One of the many reasons I love Los Angeles: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  People who roll out the tired, “LA has no culture” trope can sit on it, Potsie-style; we’re not New York or Berlin, but there’s excellent stuff going on here.  The newish Broad Contemporary Art Museum (which is on the LACMA campus) is particularly rad, in no small part because they often display work by my favorite photographer, Cindy Sherman.

Sherman is possibly best known for her Untitled Film Stills series.  Between 1977 and 1980, she took self-portraits which evoke films from a number of genres: foreign, noir, B-movies, old Hollywood.  Devoid of context but rich in signifiers, her film stills provide ample space for the viewer to create his or her own narratives.  It’s an amazing body of work, which has often befuddled critics (particularly male ones).  @BH pointed me toward an essay by geographer Doreen Massey (collected in Space, Place and Gender) in which she takes social theorist David Harvey to task for totally missing the point of Sherman’s work, and it’s a good encapsulation of both Sherman’s project and the ways in which it is misunderstood:

Moreover, it is not just a general socio-political point which can be drawn from Sherman’s photographs, but a specifically feminist one. Harvey says that he was shocked to find that all of these images were ‘of the same woman.’ It is an unintended admission, for that is precisely the effect they are supposed to have on the patriarchal viewer. [...] Sherman’s work conveys how socially constructed and how unstable ‘gender’ is, and how, indeed, the last few centuries of western thought has produced a ‘femininity’ which does indeed have a lot to do with self-presentation, in masks, for masquerade.

Finally, Harvey seems to object particularly to the fact that Sherman took these photographs herself (’the self-referential position of the authors to themselves as subjects’). Would it have been less disturbing had a man taken an authoritative picture of this woman? — like Manet painting Olympia, perhaps?  [Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 1994]

Below the cut: more of Sherman’s photographs from the series.

"Untitled Film Still #3" (1977)

"Untitled Film Still #6" (1977)

"Untitled Film Still #15" (1978)

"Untitled Film Still #27" (1979)

"Untitled Film Still #35" (1979)

"Untitled Film Still #50" (1979)

"Untitled Film Still #54" (1980)

"Untitled Film Still #66" (1980)

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