Item ID: 588891440 METRO PICTURES Page 1 of 6

King, Darryn. “The Other Side,” The Weekend Australian (May 7-8, 2016).

MAY 7-8 2016

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07 May 2016Weekend Australian, Australia

Author: Darryn King • Section: Review • Article type : News ItemClassification : National • Audience : 225,206 • Page: 1 • Printed Size: 2387.00cm²Market: National • Country: Australia • ASR: AUD 77,953 • Words: 2198Item ID: 588891440

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METRO PICTURES

THE OTHER SIDE

In 1975, in her third year of college, CindySherman created Untitled #479, the pieceshe still regards as her first serious work ofart: 23 stills that, shot by shot, track onecharacter’s gradual transformation from

androgynous mystery to glamorous, beauty-spotted, cigarette-wielding vamp.

In a single class assignment, Shermanannounced and conveyed the themes thatwould preoccupy a lifetime behind and in frontof the camera. In the four decades since, she hasplayed starlets and harlots, centrefold modelsand housewives, fairytale characters and fash-ion victims. She has masqueraded as aMadonna, as Marilyn Monroe and a creaturethat author Karl Ove Knausgaard christened“the Pig-Human”.

Toasting Sherman at a gala at the HammerMuseum in 2012, Steve Martin said: “On Hal-loween, Cindy Sherman goes as herself.”

John Waters has called her a “female femaleimpersonator”.

It’s shocking then, in its way, to see Sherman,62, undisguised — looking purposefully non-descript in a sensible blouse and pants. Ormaybe part of the point of Sherman’s work, ashas been suggested, is that a woman is alwaysin disguise.

“I’m dressed up for this,” Sherman says, smil-ing. “Normally I’d really be a slob.”

Considering her motley creations, it’s prob-ably inevitable that the so-called real CindySherman comes off, as Miranda July has put it,

Photographer Cindy Sherman has built a long career around dressing as other people without ever revealing much of her true self, discovers Darryn King

as more like a “dignified documentarian than acrazy performance artist”.

Sherman acknowledges the reality is often a

let-down for people. “They could also think thatas a result I’m not so interesting and that mywork is where I let loose,” she has said. “That’sprobably true.”

Today, Sherman has been working in herninth-floor studio that occupies a gleamingWinka Dubbeldam building in West SoHo.(She lives in a penthouse apartment upstairs,with a parrot.) There’d be views of the HudsonRiver if you could see them: by the time I arrive,late in the afternoon, she has spent the wholeday indoors, applying finishing touches to anew show.

“I hear it’s very nice outside, right?” she asks.“Warm?”

One of Sherman’s workstations is lined withbald Styrofoam heads. Curling plastic fingerssprout out from the edge of a tabletop. There’sa rack of costumes and wigs, and cheap fakeplastic moustaches and brows in packetsprobably plucked off a rack in Chinatown.Photographs of women — silent movie stars,fashion models, celebrities — adorn every wall.In the centre of the room is the well-lit, green

screen-backed space where Sherman’s charac-ters materialise and mutate.

Sherman is her own model, art director, cos-tume designer and wardrobe stylist, make-upartist and hairstylist. She used to develop herown pictures, too — now she touches them updigitally. She has been a one-woman show formost of her career, having found it strange to bein character with an assistant in the room.Nothing came of attempts to enlist family andfriends as models, and in her one foray as amovie director, in 1997’s Office Killer, she foundherself even less suited to the co-operativeendeavour of filmmaking.

Often she finds herself shooting late into thenight and sometimes entirely abandons a day’swork if a character reminds her too much ofsomething she has done in the past — or of her-self. Where a single contact sheet of hers wasonce crowded by diverse characters, these daysshe takes about 100 images of a new character,taking the time to refine and get properlyacquainted with each one.

“Sometimes it feels like pulling teeth. I keeptrying different wigs, different costumes, chang-ing make-up. Sometimes at 9.30 I’ll be like,forget it, it’s not going to happen, I’m over her!”

It’s a busy time. After her coming New Yorkexhibition at her gallery, Metro Pictures, where

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she’ll show her first body of work since 2012,she has a late-career retrospective at theQueensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbaneon May 28. Next month she will open thefirst special exhibition at the Broad Museumin Los Angeles.

Sherman feels depleted after months ofintense activity such as these. “I get sick of it:sick of make-up, sick of costumes. I need to takesome time off from being in front of a camera.”

Her pictures are elaborate fictions ratherthan self-portraits. For someone who has madeimages of herself continuously for four decades,Sherman has cunningly avoided being the sub-ject of her own work. She mostly hates havingher photo taken by someone else — “I neverknow what to do with myself” — and dislikesthe concept of selfies. “There’s somethingwrong with a culture that’s into that wholething.” When she was dating David Byrne shefound his preoccupation with his fame and his

fans distasteful. “To be perfectly honest, hereally is into his celebrity,” she says.

It was Sherman’s fear of self-exposure thatled her to turn the lens on herself in the firstplace. In college, it was a spring tradition for stu-dents to go on a naked romp through the treesand snap photographs of each other. “It washorrifying to me,” Sherman says with a laugh.“But one of our early projects was to confrontsomething. I thought, OK, maybe I have to con-front that issue.” Sherman took a series ofphotographs of herself in the nude, disfiguringher body with photographic effects.

“That was when I really started taking pic-tures of myself.”

When she enrolled in the art course at theState University College in Buffalo, New York,her intention had been to pursue drawing andpainting, with the vague idea she might be acourtroom illustrator. “Disjointed and all overthe place,” is how she now describes her effortsas a painter. “There was no theme, no passion orvision in what I was painting.”

In her second year, Sherman failed her tech-nically focused introductory photography class.It was her third-year photography professor,Barbara Jo Revelle, who encouraged her towork on the ideas instead.

Sherman had discovered the work of ChrisBurden and Vito Acconci, who used their bodiesas the raw material of their art. At the sametime, Sherman had an intensifying obsessionwith experimenting with make-up, fashion andthe malleability of her own appearance.

As a child, Sherman had kept a trunkbeneath her bed overflowing with dresses andthrift store finds. Playing dress-ups and creatingcharacters was an attention-seeking strategy,she says now. “I think it had to do with being the

youngest of five kids. There was a big gapbetween me and the next one, so they were awhole separate family by the time I camearound. It was kind of like, maybe if you don’tlike me this way … how about this way?”

Sherman guesses that she was about 11 whenshe dressed up as an old lady and strolled theneighbourhood with a friend in geriatric pos-tures. She still remembers the thrill of appar-ently fooling a neighbour. “I’m sure he washumouring us. He was acting like he really

believed we were old ladies. I remember think-ing, ‘Oh my god, he’s really fallen for it!’ ”

She never outgrew that desire to pretend. “Itmust have been this therapeutic thing to go intomy bedroom and, just with make-up, turn intosomebody else,” Sherman says.

It was Sherman’s college boyfriend, RobertLongo, who pointed out her private meta-morphic mirror routines — which she did out ofboredom or escapism but also mainly out ofhabit — were a kind of performance art. “[He]sort of turned me around to say, ‘’Look at your-self, look at what you’re doing. Maybe youshould record this. This is interesting.’ ”

Sherman started turning up to openingsand parties in character and increasinglyeccentric outfits. One time she went as apregnant woman; another time she dressed asLucille Ball.

When she moved to New York with Longoafter college in 1977 and started working as apart-time gallery assistant, she occasionallydressed up in character for work, one timeshowing up as a nurse. “They loved that,” shesays. “They found it very comforting to have anurse around.”

It was a natural extension of her own self-amusement when, that same year, inspired by afriend’s stash of Hollywood-inspired softcorestock photographs, Sherman started creatinggrainy, black-and-white, intentionally trashyre-creations of scenes from imagined movies,starring herself as a collection of cinematicarchetypes.

Many of them were taken around Sherman’sstudio, with others taken, hit-and-run style, onthe streets of New York. Sherman, Longo andMetro Pictures Gallery co-founder HeleneWiner would drive around Manhattan with acase of costumes in the back. When they spot-ted a suitable location they would leap out ofthe car to take a few shots — usually no morethan a half-dozen. Sherman would get changedin alleyways and behind dumpsters.

These were the humble, scrappy beginningsof Untitled Film Stills, the series of 69 images thatwould go down as Sherman’s most importantand influential work. Part of the instant appealand enduring power of the series was that its ba-nally numbered titles and Sherman’s blank star-

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es evoke in the viewer a multiplicity ofinterpretations, even conflicting ones. Shermanintended it to be a “jumble of ambiguity” andcompletely accessible.

“I want the viewer to tell their own storyabout a picture,” says Sherman, who describesher relationship with art theory at the time asnonexistent.

“And even if it’s not the story that I wouldwant, even if it’s the opposite of what I intended,

I’m OK with that. I don’t want to go forcing amessage on to somebody. If they don’t get whatI’m trying to say, that’s too bad.”

Sherman’s reluctance to explain her workalso may have something to do with an early-career appearance at the School of Visual Arts,where she endured the animus of students a fewyears younger than her who perceived her workto be salacious and anti-feminist. It was one of

her last public appearances, if not the last. “Ithink I’ve blocked it out.” For the most part,anyway, Sherman has been flattered by thecritical praise and attention, if sometimes be-mused by it: academic Laura Mulvey musing onthe male gaze; Arthur Danto detecting “an alle-gory for something deeper and darker, in themythic unconscious of everyone”. Sherman’swork was compared with that of the Countess of

Castiglione, a 19th-century Italian aristocrat shehad never heard of but who became a useful in-fluence later on. “It was always informative tome,” Sherman says. “Though there were timeswhen I thought, this is ridiculous, I can barelyunderstand what they’re saying.”

A few years after Untitled Film Stills, Sherman

kohl around eyes, bow lips and sharp fingernails— suggest a return to more humane characteri-sations. They’re a clear spiritual sequel to thefilm stills. “They’re totally not cartoony. They’renot caricatures. They’re like real women.”

And, for the first time, Sherman admits thatsomething of herself has crept into the frame.

“I think that my recent body of work is kindof closest to where I am right now, emotionally,mentally, age-wise. The characters are olderwomen who are trying not to look so old andtrying to hold on to something of their youthand beauty. There’s something kind of tragicin their eyes but they’re proud of whatthey’ve accomplished.”

Among the curios on display in Sherman’sstudio are a few photos by another Cindy Sher-man, from Boise, Idaho. That Cindy Shermanspecialises in sentimental portrait photographyof couples, children, babies and baby bellies andpets. It’s not surprising that the existence of aname-twin amuses the Cindy Sherman who hasspent most of her life conjuring alter-egos andwarped realities.

Sherman’s pictures will never brighten a liv-ing room wall in quite the same way as thesunny work of Sherman from Idaho. But Sher-man cherishes her cast of over-the-top crea-tions like her own loved ones. She dismisses theidea that she feels anything but warmth and af-fection for the whole crazy lot of them.

“I know that some of them are really funny-looking. They’re flawed in different ways. But tome they’re adorable. I’m really fond of them all.”

Cindy Sherman opens at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art on May 27.

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retaliated against the notion that she was “theflavour of the month”. Through the years, hermenagerie of characters became steadily moregrotesque and outrageous, when they weren’toutright nightmare fuel (clowns, corpses). Afterher 2000-02 series of desperate looking Holly-wood/Hamptons housewives, Sherman wasaccused of mean-spiritedness.

The new pictures she shows me — evokingthe aesthetics of the silent movie era, with black

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Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #462 (2007-08) at the Queensland Art Gallery, left; the artist at work in New York, below

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Clockwise from top left, Untitled (2007-08); Untitled (2007-08); Untitled (2000); Untitled #414 (2003)

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