Adrienne Rivera, Attention Kitchen, 2024
The Cindy Sherman Effect by Phoebe Hoban for ArtNews
1. “Sherman’s paradigm shift was one step ahead of technology. Her kaleidoscopic investigation of the essence of her own—and, by extension, society’s—identity complex has relied on ingenuity, not gigabytes. Thanks to today’s digital hegemony, the notion of fluidity—for Sherman an intellectual and artistic ploy—is now not just de rigueur but de facto. Polymorphously perverse has become pervasive. The implicit has become increasingly explicit. Artistic personae can not only be instantly created but also instantly animated and disseminated. Art via avatar.”
-I enjoy the term art via avatar, especially because during the time she was making art, many people stuck to one identity very much formatted in the traditional expectations of society for the time. She was the counterculture at the time, taking on identities that were near and far to herself. It
2. Says Mayer, “Cindy Sherman opened a lot of the doors. She was the trendsetter in terms of distorted characters within self-portraiture. Originally painters painted self-portraits, and then she kind of blew it open with photographic portraiture, and now there are all these avenues younger artists are taking, which would not have been so easy without her work.”
- Much of her work is almost the new normal for many artists nowadays. If anything, taking pictures of yourself even for portraiture rather than let’s say looking in the mirror has. This is also the way that many people even now find their identities on the internet, being able to switch up the way they present themselves and the stories they tell even about themselves. I think she inspired a whole generation beyond only artists, but in a sense, made this the new normal.
New York Times | The Ugly Beauty of Cindy Sherman
1. “The camera stalks the women, all played by Sherman, as they stand in dark alleys or wait to hitch a ride on a lonely road. We glimpse them through bathroom doors left ajar, absorbed in their mirrors. Each photograph could be captioned: The last time she was seen alive.”
-I feel like so many women specifically can relate to the subjects in her photographs, because this is a reality for us. I feel as though women go to sleep having nightmares about these things that we oftentimes go on to face the very next morning on our very commutes to work and school. It’s almost like an eye or camera following you around, knowing that oftentimes anyone can be watching you as a woman.
2. “These are all photographs of subtle rebellions — the first being the demand, of women of a certain age, to be noticed, admired. Or do I have it backward? The longer I look at these photographs, the less sure I am of them. Are these women insisting on being seen or are they taunting us, mischievously playing on fears of female ugliness, of becoming old and absurd or just invisible? That slipperiness in her work — does she see people clearly out of kinship or cruelty? — becomes complicated here by her ambivalence about aging.”
- I find that it can be both, and oftentimes this is the paradigm Sherman seeks out. She isn’t always asking these questions when she herself is making her pieces, but nonetheless the pieces she makes still ask them as well. Her work is in dialogue with the world around us, and it speaks to different people even within the same person.
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