Except for a brief phase of sex dolls and mannequins, Cindy Sherman has always got off on herself. An artist of lasting celebrity whose medium is photography, she has made her own image her subject, appearing in disguises of her own devising, achieved with ever more elaborate costumes, make-up, prosthetics and staging.
There’s nothing new about self-portraiture of course. Artists have always scrutinised their own image, sometimes with a Narcissist’s gaze, but more often with revealing candour. From Rembrandt to Khalo, Goya to Freud, their self-portraits leave unflinching records of their psyches, moods, but above all, stages in their ageing. It’s as though the act of sustained scrutiny of their own (mirror) image challenges the artist to new levels of honesty.
Cindy Sherman has morphed herself, down the years; from girls on lost highways to movie stars, crazies to home porn wives, androgens to murderees in what critic Jonathan Jones (Guardian 2001) calls “her self-fictionalizing project”. She has the plasticity to mimic the physical characteristics of the type of woman she is representing, but evinces no interest in their (or her?) psychology. Her expression is always blank and without affect. It’s a conceptual contract with the viewer – watching Cindy dressing-up pretending to be someone who doesn’t exist who is documented as though she did. By disguising herself she plays a curious double game – she is always the sole protagonist in her solipsistic world and yet she evades the central challenge to confront “herself” in the act of looking at herself.
Her first show in four years opened this week in New York at Metro Pictures. As usual it’s just called “Cindy Sherman” and features a series of 14 colour photographs (some as big as 8’x5’) which are all printed on a bombastic scale with ornate frames and all “untitled”. Represented here are older women. The youngest “subject” (let’s call her Liza Lou in cowboy hat) is 50 something; the oldest (we’ll call her Myra Cohen) is 80 or more. They are Palm Beach heiresses, Coney Island emigrees, Vegas performers, Southern authoresses of romantic fiction, ageing divorcees and Prom Queens – and they’ve all commissioned Cindy to take their portraits to hang in their beautiful homes. They wear their most glamorous attire, they’re putting on their best face to the world, the settings are fitting testaments to their status and achievements, and their accessories – a lapdog, a rose, a fan – are specially chosen to add a personal touch, a je ne sais quoi, to their portraits. All these ladies are most definitely looking their best for Cindy!
Let’s look closer. Another Untitled, so let’s call it Leonora by the Palazzo Steps. Leonora is a size zero; she’s wearing a strapless evening gown, large pearls at ears and throat. The hair impeccably auburn, the lips“Flame” by Chanel – her signature. Leonora prefers the over-the shoulder pose, and she never ever smiles. It’s a little tip to look her best she learnt from her beloved grandmother. Leonora worries her eyes look tired (sleep never comes without a bit of help from those little blue pills), but Cindy has assured her she’ll touch-up any imperfections. And as for location, the grand steps was an easy choice – understated, elegant and Roman.
Let’s look closer still. Oh no! Leonora’s make-up is caking and peeling, her pearls are fake, her eyes are red raw, and the steps are not real or Roman at all – just a back-projection like in an old movie. But yet, it’s how Leonora always dreamt it should be – how she wanted her life to turn out, and Cindy understands and has given her a beautiful image of herself to treasure forever.
Each of the photographs in this show invites a little narrative speculation about a woman’s dreams, how she chooses to be seen, and how she tries to hide the undisguisable fact of getting old – of liver spots and veiny hands, of wrinkly necks and hanging tits, of coloured hair and bulging bellies, of fleshy arms and flaccid skin.
But of course Cindy is an actress. These women are all herself in grotesque parodies of the general type. She can make herself dowdy like Mirren made herself Queen. She can make herself “beautiful” like Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. But this savage act of ridicule, this intellectual post-modern game, this oddly misogynistic life project, cannot disguise what is probably Cindy Sherman’s own preoccupation – which is getting older herself and wondering if, after all, she has anything new to say.
Street address: 
