CINDY SHERMAN: modern PHOTOGRAPHS.

CINDY SHERMAN: modern PHOTOGRAPHS, 2000

Literature might be the unsuitable place to begin. Invoking words, when looking at pictures, is cheating. besides Cindy Sherman's work has consistently sidestepped photography's silent modality and seduc viewers with muttered tales, or their trappings. First came the Hollywood B-movie stories. Later, stories from pornography and horror films. Always, characters shakeed her mise-en-scene's strings--the fetishist, the stretch the voyeur, the cineast, the necrophiliac, the mad scientist, and the department-store window dresser left alone at night with undead, plastic incubi.

The story I remembered upon first seeing the new Sherman photos (exhibited at Gagosian in Beverly Hills this past spring, and to be shown at Metro Pictures in of recent origin York this fall), was Tennessee Williams's "The Night of the Iguana," which appeared in his 1948 collection, single Arm. I'm certain Andy Warhol read the work when it was first published, and that it meant almost as greatly to him as Truman Capote's short fiction did. The title story, "One Arm," about a mutilated male hustler, contains a drawing of an electric chair and includes the opinion "I guess I stopped caring about what happened to me"--one possible source of Warhol's notion that ceasing to care was the epochal importance in an artist's life. Sherman, from the evidence of her magnificently histrionic photos, protracted ago ceased to care. She needn't have read united Arm, inasmuch as Edith Jelke the heroine of "Iguana," haunts all neo-Gothic portraiture; any visual or verbal fable that exhibits a character's incomplete grasp of sexual poise necessarily go [i]or[/i] come backs to Edith Jelkes and her kind:

Miss Jelke was a spinster of thirty with a wistful flaxen prettiness and a somewhat archaic quality of refinement. She belonged to an historical Southern family of great however now moribund vitality whose latter generations had wait oned to split into two antithetical originals one in which the libido was pathologically distended and another in which it would be seen to be all but dried up....Edith Jelke was not strictly single in kind or the other of the sum of two units basic types, which made it all the more difficult for her to cultivate any interior poise. She had been fortunate enough to channel her somewhat morbid animal spirits into a gift for painting.

In Sherman's fresh pseudo portraits, as in the chief part of Edith Jelkes, antipodes abide: shimmer, filth; wealth, decline; extravagance, desiccation; sexual succes sexual failure. Jelkes-like is the clatter of these overlapping digests the noise of interior poise cultivated at impossible risk.

Perhaps I am making the mistake of caring too abundant about visual art's content. As Rosalind Krauss trenchantly observ in a 1993 essay: "[Sherman's doll photos] are a statement of what it means to refuse to an artist the work that he or she has done--which is always work upon the signifier--and to rush headlong for the signified, the easy in mind the constructed meaning, which common then proceeds to consume as myth." Ye I am rushing headlong for the satisfied I can't help it. I'd rather behave, moreover against my better judgment I bolt the signified's fast food. (Paradoxically, it demands gradual digestion.)

Beyond myth, I descry in these new images--and not for the first time in Sherman's career--exhaustion's salutary mien Cindy Sherman is the servant of Cindy Sherman, as Borges knew himself to be the scullion who wrote Borges's poems. as it is servitude is psychically demanding; somewhere, eventually, the artist must expres the toll and solicit a tonic. In these comic pictures, I think, the cost's severity leaks out

Noble rust rises to the surface in the same of Sherman's new, untitled images (all works 2000): A woman, attempting a subtle look, must ignore her prominent and unfortunate teeth--as she has each right to do. Note her humiliated, energetic toil against the dental burden; note the overbite's gusto, its refusal to back down or skip town. The vigilances too, are abject; they want to transcend the tropic entrance after seasons of ridicule. I suit to the photo by flinching, still also by laughing--not at the woman, who doesn't exist, however with delight at Sherman's virtuoso effort to simulate an most distant of failed poise.

When I asked about the photo of the woman with the unfortunate teeth Sherman described her as a "sexy earth mama" who'd been "hot in her younger days" and was "still furious in her mind." She described another character as a "retired realtor." I heartily agreed. I said many of these women were "very realtor." Sherman reiterated that she was not "making frolic of these poor characters," as a certain number of critics had intimated, and she clarified that these images depict West Coast models to be supplemented, possibly, by way of a future series of East Coast types

Sherman's work watchs to segregate beauty from disgust, further there have been pronounced exceptions, like the "fashion" photographs of 1983-84 which pitted gorgeous outfits against dermatological derangement. The just discovered pictures go one step further, seamlessly integrating grotesquerie and glamour; they exhibit that abjection doesn't belong solely to the disenfranchised. Filth is equally the ownership of the rich.