Cindy Sherman Research Paper

In 1971, Linda Nochlin issued her article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? This idea of aesthetic genius, says Nochlin, is fiction. Art is rarely produced entirely by the artist for the idea of personal expression. Few identifiers in contemporary art have been as fraught as the term feminist art. What does it mean, who defines it, and how does it relate to past accomplishments of the feminist movement?

A review of the world’s great artists conjures familiar images: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel; Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Pablo Picasso’s The Tragedy. There are many more, of course: Monet, Moya, Warhol, Rembrandt, Kandinsky. What is immediately noticeable, however, upon any brief study of art, is the significant absence of women as heralded artists—not only in our ancient pasts, but even today, amongst valiant efforts for gender equality.

Postmodern American artist’s Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker critique and question grand narratives of gender, race and class through their work and art practice. Cindy Sherman, born 1954, is well renowned for her conceptual portraits of female characters and personas that question the representation of women, gender identity and the true (or untrue) nature of photography (Hattenstone 2011). Kara Walker, born 1969, is known for her black silhouettes that dance across gallery walls and most recently her sugar sphinx, A Subtlety, address America’s racist slavery past (Berry 2003). These practitioners differ in their practical application of different mediums, Sherman constructs characters and scenes of stereotypical female personas in her photographs where she operates as the actress, director, wardrobe assistant, set designer and cameraman (Machester 2001). Simone Hatenstone, writer for The Guardian, states “She 's a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse victim, a terrified centrefold, a corpse, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli, a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll, a man in a balaclava, a surgically-enhanced Hamptons type, a cowgirl, a desperate clown, and we 've barely started.” (Hattenstone 2011).Whereas, Walker creates paper silhouettes that are installed into a gallery space, as writer Ian Berry describes,

Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity was written by Griselda Pollock in 1988, and later published in The Expanding Disclosure in 1992. Griselda Pollock is an art historian, and writes this article for fellow art historians. This is an article written to show the different approaches to femininity in the late 19th century, mainly dealing with the field of art. This article shows how during this time period there were women artists, but due to the gendered ruled ideas attached to art history, these women are largely ignored by art historians. Pollock thought that these women artists are primarily overlooked due to the fact that they are judged by the same standards that are affixed to the work of their male counterparts. But she argues

Every girl growing up always use to play dress up in clothes as a childhood past time for fun. Cindy Sherman used that passed time as a way to create art with photography and is known for her talent of this act and taking self-portraits of it. Her ideas come stereotypes of women throughout past and present society. These self-portraits are known to “confront and explore the representations of women in society.” (Jankauskas).

How do the works of Yasumasa Morimura, Julie Rrap and Anne Zahalka challenge conventional ways in which gender has been depicted historically in the visual arts?

Terror and mockery come together in the portraits of Cindy Sherman on display at the Crocker Art Museum. Walking into the large, dimly lit ballroom, one may begin to feel a slight sense of trepidation as the viewer looks around to find nine sets of beady eyes watching one’s every move. Sherman produced her History Portraits during the late eighties and early nineties, nine of which are displayed at the museum. In her portraits she uses lush fabrics, lavish jewelry, and false body parts to decorate herself in these self-portraits. Her portraits have been know to cause discomfort in the viewers who find the general stereotypes, depicted in her portraits, amusing, yet confusing and terrorizing.

In Chapter 3 of his book, “Ways of Seeing”, John Berger argues that in western nude art and present day media, that women are largely shown and treated as objects upon whom power is asserted by men either as figures in the canvas or as spectators. Berger’s purpose is to make readers aware of how the perception of women in the art so that they will recognize the evolution of western cultured art.

In the first example, a painting done by Norman Rockwell, a girl is portrayed as “more kittenish than hoydenish” the girl and her appearance are described as “soft and tentative”. She is with a boy who is awkward, she touches just his hand and that is only to tell his fortune. The girl “looks into his eyes with confidence and no assumption of consequences to her boldness”. The girl described, was the first step away from “Mary Pickford” yet is still far away from “Flapper”. In the cover the next year, the boy and girl are shown again, this time already contrasting from the Mary Pickford type; the boy and girl share a closeness - “he is standing close in an attitude of embrace” where last time there seemed to be a line drawn in-between them. The girl’s appearance is beginning to change as well, “her dress is beginning to be tomboyish” she wears a sweater and a skirt opposed to a one piece dress and it is no longer soft and delicate. The girl has a “glance backward at the young man- awkward boy no longer- is more conscious of possible consequences of this exciting intimacy”. The stark differences in the looks that each girl is giving is enough to show the changing behavior of this new generation

The characters Sherman portrays, lighting, clothing and expressions are cliché of what is present in cinema, so much that viewers of her work have told Sherman that they ‘remember the movie’ that the image is derived from, yet Sherman having no film in mind at all.[iv] Thus showing that her word has a pastiche of past cinematic genres, and how women are portrayed in cinema and photography and how Sherman has manipulated the ‘male gaze’ around her images so they become ironic and cliché.

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

Judy Chicago (artist, author, feminist and educator) has a career that now spans five decades. In the late 1960s, her inquiry into the history of women began a result of her desire to expose the truth of women’s experiences, both past and present. She still continues on a crusade to change the perception of women from our history, “Women’s history and women’s art need to become part of our cultural and intellectual heritage.” (Chicago, 2011) Through our history women - their struggles, accomplishments and contribution to history, have been overlooked, downplayed and even completely written out of a male dominated society and culture. In anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s 1974 essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” she supports this view, writing “…woman is being identified with—or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of—something that every culture devalues,” (Ortner, 1974) Where Mendieta's work primarily came from a striving to belong and an understanding of where she came from, I feel that Chicago's aim was to find a place for all women, past and present in this world, starting with herself in the art world. Chicago did explore her peronal heritage in later works entitled 'Birth Project' and 'Holocaust Project'.

Sherman’s work talks about her own belief that representations itself is pre-coded, and in this case by cinema. In one of the stills in particular, Still Number 6, Sherman poses as a woman who looks as though she is daydreaming. In this photograph she is holding a mirror in one hand, and has a chilling blank stare on her face. The photograph has a disturbing undertone to it, which gives the feeling that she could also

The Guerrilla Girls speak about sexism in art galleries and the non appreciation of women 's art in the most prestigious galleries of New York. “a very big problem is the fact women don 't collect. ... Men buy the art and call the shots museums. Until women support women and collect each things will never change" (Withers 287). Women artists new to the art world were not accepted, men artist bought their art to present as their own. This way women artist do not get the chance to be recognized for their talent. Making the assumption women are only valued as the model but cannot aspire to be artists and create exceptional work as men would. This is of importance because only 1% or none of the art presented was of women artists. “not only in their appeals to principles of equality, but also, say, in their gesture of adopting the names of deceased female artists as aliases, a gambit tacitly

Barbara Kruger, artist and theorist, has directed and informed much of the curatorial project. Kruger’s perspectives on feminism speak to