Cindy Sherman

The American photographer Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) made her international breakthrough with the series Untitled Filmstills (1977-80). In the 69 photographs she lives out B-movie clichés in a series of staged self-portraits. Sherman’s personal identity dissolves in these undefined film roles, and the self-portrait genre becomes problematic and doubtful. Sherman numbers amongst the artists who are often referred to as the Pictures Generation. Richard Prince, also included in Rotations #2, is associated with this group as well. The Picture Generation’s key theme is post-WWII America, seen through the 'lenses' of consumer culture and mass media. Hope and heroes worth emulating are displaced by disillusionment and doubt. Using Postmodern terminology, one could say that everything about art is subjected to re-evaluation, including the techniques, motifs and theory, and the concept emerges as the most important element in an artwork.

In Rotations #2 we find the work Untitled # 87. This is one of ten pictures in the Centerfold Series (1981), which was commissioned by the magazine Artforum but never published in it. The series consists of photographs of various female figures. All are posed, staged and photographed by Sherman herself. The pictorial format recalls Playboy Magazine’s centerfold feature, in which a nude model spreads across two pages with the seam down the middle. In Untitled # 87 Sherman lays on the floor clutching an orange blanket. She looks young and androgynous. The horizontal, almost life-size format confronts us, but Sherman’s gaze does not meet ours. Dramatic lighting emphasizes the ambivalent mood. Has something happened? By treating the centerfold format as problematic, Sherman imbues new meaning into a phenomenon that has sexualized the female body. She fills the pictorial room with other ideas about gender and identity. Rather than a clear answer to the question of how the female role should be played, we encounter a polyphony of voices. Since the artist both controls and poses in this ambiguous setting, she puts herself in the positions of both subject and object.

Sherman is not the only artist in Rotations #2 to ask questions about gender, popular cultural stereotypes and identity. Paul McCarthy’s video Rocky (1976) shows the artist naked, wearing only boxing gear and a mask. McCarthy’s character attacks himself in a kind of destructive auto-erotic battle scene. He is pictured in a private setting, vulnerable and besmeared with grime and blood. The whole thing looks rather like a homemade sadomasochistic video, and McCarthy’s figure contrasts strongly with Rocky Balboa, the referenced masculine film-hero. Yet like Sherman, McCarthy stages himself in the artwork, and he borrows from feminist art and Hollywood productions to create his body-oriented performance. In McCarthy’s tragic boxer and Sherman’s ambiguous pinup, we meet new figures who emerge through a combination of conventionalized pictorial elements.

MRF