Sherman, Cindy

Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichas. Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp. In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.

Cindy Sherman

Since her earliest photographs in the 1970s, Cindy Sherman has built a name as one of the most respected photographers of our day. Famous for posing as the subject of her own photos, Sherman's work addresses the role of the artist, the impact of the media upon the art world and the position of women in society. Organized in a roughly chronological path by theme, Cindy Sherman provides a comprehensive review of the artist's complete works, including her Bus Riders, Murder Mystery, and Untitled Film Stills series, and photographs on topics ranging from surrealist pictures, fairy tales, rear screen projections, the Old Masters, centerfolds, pink robes, clowns, dolls, and Hollywood. Fascinating archival material includes a notebook of personal snapshots that Sherman kept from an early age, on which she would circle herself and label each one: "That's Me." This monograph is the catalogue for an international exhibition that will be held in Paris, Denmark, Austria, and Berlin from 2006 through 2007.

Cindy Sherman: Retrospective

This comprehensive book traces the career of Cindy Sherman, examining her achievements as one of the leading American artists of our time. Provocative and engaging, the vivid physicality of Sherman's photographs is the key to their dramatic power. By exploring the myriad constructions of female identity and the body in our culture, Sherman imitates and confronts assorted representational stereotypes, becoming for many an icon of the contemporary concerns of feminism and postmodernism. Essayists Amanda Cruz, Elizabeth A. T. Smith, and Amelia Jones offer keen insight and observations from several distinct vantage points, demonstrating that Sherman's work is a lens through which to view contemporary art and its ongoing concern with the profound issues of the structures of the self. More than 200 images show the breadth of Sherman's body of work, from the Untitled Film Stills of the 1970s to series such as Centerfolds, Fashion, Disasters, Fairy Tales, and History Portraits, as well as photographs influenced by surrealist artists. Also included are intriguing excerpts from Sherman's notebooks, selections from her contact sheets, and numerous Polaroid studies, all of which shed light on the artist's process. Cindy Sherman: Retrospective was first published to accompany an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 279 photographs, 145 in color.

Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman

Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Cindy Sherman were born in different countries, in different generations--Cahun in France in 1894, Deren in Russia in 1917, and Sherman in the United States in 1954. Yet they share a deeply theatrical obsession that shatters any notion of a unified self. All three try out identities from different social classes and geographic environments, extend their temporal range into the past and future, and transform themselves into heroes and villains, mythological creatures, and sex goddesses. The premise of Inverted Odysseys is that this expanded concept of the self--this playful urge to "try on" other roles-is more than a feminist or psychological issue. It is central to our global culture, to our definition of human identity in a world where the individual exists in a multicultural and multitemporal environment. This book is an "odyssey" through historical, theoretical, critical, and literary perspectives on the three artists viewed in the context of these issues. Contributors include Lynn Gumpert, Lucy Lippard, Jonas Mekas, Ted Mooney, Shelley Rice, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau.

Central to the book is Claude Cahun's "Heroines" manuscript, a series of fifteen stream-of-consciousness monologues written in the voices of major women of literature and history, such as the Virgin Mary, Sappho, Cinderella, Penelope, Delilah, and Helen of Troy. Translated by Norman MacAfee, these perverse and hilarious vignettes make their English-language debut here. This is also the first time that Cahun's text has appeared in its entirety.

The book accompanies an exhibit cocurated by Lynn Gumpert and Shelley Rice at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University.

Published in cooperation with the Grey Art Gallery, New York University.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:

Grey Art Gallery
New York, New York
November 16, 1999 - January 29, 2000

Museum of Contemporary Art
North Miami, Florida
March - May 2000

Juergen Teller, Cindy Sherman, Marc Jacobs

Cindy Sherman: Centerfolds

Described by one critic as "embarrassingly intimate," Cindy Sherman's Centerfolds, a series of twelve 2 x 4 foot images shot in 1981 for an Artforum commission, take the horizontal centerfold as their physical and conceptual framework. Though the images were never run in the magazine--the editor was concerned that they would be misunderstood--they remain some of the most affecting of Sherman's constructed pictures. In them, Sherman's vaguely adolescent female characters fill up the frame with an ambiguous, uncomfortably close presence, their plaid kilts, wet t-shirts, matted hair, disheveled nightgowns, and pretty gingham dresses keeping them in your face but unavailable, emotionally suggestive but ambivalently distanced. This handsome, compact volume, the first to include all twelve of the Centerfold images, is run through with an informative, involved text by Lisa Phillips, Head Curator of the New Museum and a long-time supporter of Sherman's work.

Cindy Sherman (October Files)

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.

Cindy Sherman: A Play of Selves

It was in the mid-70s that Cindy Sherman began making her earliest works, in which she explored various manipulations of her own persona. She began by experimenting with makeup and costumes, getting dressed up for parties and surprising her friends. She then moved on to photograph herself in the various personas she had created, producing highly inventive but somewhat more primitive versions of the seminal work for which she would later become known, the Untitled Film Stills series. It was during this early period that Sherman created A Play of Selves--a visual tale of a young woman overwhelmed by various alter-egos that compete inside of her, and her final conquering of self-doubt. Acted out with 16 separate characters, these 72 photographic assemblages mark Sherman's earliest explorations of herself-as-subject in a series of staged photographs. Published here for the first time, these photographs include hundreds of shots of the artist costumed as various characters in dozens of poses. Organized in a four-act "play" with an elaborate, handwritten script, the individual images were cut by the artist from original black-and-white prints. Preface by Cindy Sherman.

Cindy Sherman: Working Girl (Decade Series 2005)

When curators at Saint Louis's Contemporary Art Museum asked Cindy Sherman whether there was a moment in her career whose resonance might be underappreciated, one around which she might like to develop an exhibit and a book, she selected her earliest adult creative years, beginning while she was still a student at Buffalo State College in the mid-1970s. Working Girl is full of rarely seen pieces, and it features, for the first time, documentation of and stills from Sherman's 1975 animated short Doll Clothes, which is among the pieces that bring Sherman's early exploration of gender and identity into focus. The mostly small-scale work, including many early black-and-white, hand-colored, and sepia-toned photographs, is culled primarily from the artist's family members' collections and her own, and includes the pieces that laid the groundwork for her first major success, the acclaimed Film Stills series. Working Girl is a unique glimpse into the early development of Sherman's artistic practice, and into the genesis of her inimitable substance and style. It illuminates her conceptual approach to photography and foretells the career that would be launched in the late 1970s, positioning her as one of the most significant artists of our time.

Cindy Sherman History portraits: Die Wiedergeburt des Gemaldes nach dem Ende der Malerei