She says "I want to look like just an average, ordinary person." As a child, often dressed up as old women.ġ976 Studies art at Buffalo State College, at first failing the photography course.ġ977-80 Creates Untitled Film Stills, 69 self-portraits of female movie stereotypes.ġ981 Begins Centrefolds, series parodying soft-core porn magazines. Cindy Sherman: In briefīorn in New Jersey on 19 January 1954. Even a good wig can only take a girl so far.Ī selection of Cindy Sherman's latest work will be on display at the Sprüth Magers gallery in London until. But there's more to art than mere posturing. Sure, she can strike a pose she can give Madonna a run for her money on that score. I think that Sherman longs to provoke, to stir up, to make some kind of grand statement, but that she lacks the skills, technical and intellectual, to pull such a trick off. Some critics insist that this is precisely her point: that modern life is concerned only with surfaces and thus is entirely ephemeral. They push you away, charmlessly, and even if this is deliberate - and I am not convinced that it is - the effect is such that no sooner have you left the gallery than you have quite forgotten what it was that you were staring at. There's something flat about them, too: it's the way they're lit and the way they're composed. It's not only that her portraits are phony, the result only of her own solipsistic adventures in the dressing-up box. There is nothing to draw you back: no mystery, no transformation, no beauty. In the gallery, I noticed all the small things - the tea stains that gathered, like rust, between a set of protruding teeth the thick moustache of foundation on an upper lip the toe peeking out from beneath an embroidered kaftan, sheathed in nylon and an ugly pink mule, and thought, not for the first time, how beady she is at her best, Sherman has an almost novelistic eye for the way such things can betray a personality.īut once you've noted all this effort, your eyes flick away, disdainfully. ![]() Though there is no doubting Sherman's industry, I cannot subscribe to the view (of ARTnews magazine and others) that she is one of the world's 10 greatest living artists. Perhaps this is also why they bore me half to death. You could flick your finger against them and they'd crumble to dust. They share a common artifice, one that makes them seem, in spite of their Technicolor pluck and gargantuan proportions, precarious. Do the wealthy cling more desperately to their youth? Are they more deluded than those who cannot afford to listen to the blandishments of the cosmetic surgeon as he makes his pitch? According to Sherman, it would seem so. So the story she is telling is in fact about what happens when past-it skin and cash collide. Sherman found most of their outfits - gaudy yet oddly girlish - in an Upper East Side charity store much favoured by bony-shouldered New York matriarchs. The women she is playing, however, are rich: at one glance, we can tell that they are exactly the kind of females who might have sunk just a little too much of someone else's money into a now infamous Ponzi scheme. Ostensibly, then, these images, for which she has painted latex on to her skin to replicate lines more dramatic than her own, and then covered it with orange pancake and cherry rouge, are a meditation on ageing. The artist is now 55 and thinking - or so she has said in interviews - about wrinkles: how they can be disguised how they grow and multiply all the same. But their make-up, close to, belongs to the mad old lady you saw waiting at the bus stop: clown-like, childish, effortful and terribly sad.Īs usual, Sherman has acted as her own model. These tragic creatures, with their lacquered foreheads and their fussy evening wear, have all the trappings of a certain kind of wealth. Then again, the secret of these studies - such as it is - lies in their detail, so the more clogged Max Factor and crayoned kohl you can see on the women's faces, the more, in theory, their horror and pathos will work on you. The nature of her work means that it reproduces well in magazines and catalogues, so all you are really getting when you see it hanging on a gallery wall is a sense of its scale, though admittedly this is immense: the largest of the London works is 254cm high by 174cm wide. ![]() Is this very select sample worth the effort of a visit? I'm not sure. You can see five photographs from Sherman's latest series the rest of the new portraits are to be found at Sprüth Magers Berlin. At Sprüth Magers London, a bijou gallery just off Bond Street, you can see Cindy Sherman's first UK show since 2007.
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