The Power of Pretense

Cindy Sherman has been making major art since 1981, and to no shortage of public attention or critical acclaim. So there’s really no reason the retrospective exhibition of her work that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, however beautiful and moving it certainly is, should feel like a striking revelation. But it does anyhow. That’s the thing about major art: Every time you see it, you feel you’re at ground zero all over again.

Organized jointly by MOCA’s Elizabeth A.T. Smith and by Amada Cruz of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where it travels in February before commencing an international tour, the show includes 156 photographs made during the past 20 years. To call her work “photographs” always sounds wrong, though; Sherman not only isn’t a photographer in the familiar sense of the term, her singular stature as an artist hinges on the difference. More than any other artist she’s responsible for demolishing the peripheral status of photographs within contemporary art discourse.

Sherman graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1976, and the exhibition opens with five black-and-white self-portraits--each depicting the New Jersey-born artist as a kind of goofy clown--that were made while she was still a student. Right off the bat you can see that she’s not interested in established photographic traditions, like those having to do with social documentation or the precise quality of the individual print.

Instead, the gleeful mixture of obsessive self-regard and frisky posturing with makeup, costuming and poses suggests an artist who is simply using the camera as a convenient tool, one with which to record a private performance. Conceptual art, not photography, is the legacy from which her work arose.

A year later Sherman began the series of “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-1980) that first generated widespread interest in her work. Sixty-nine are on view in the show, each in the expected 8-by-10 inch, black-and-white format and printed with varying degrees of skill. Of course, these nostalgia-minded pictures are “stills” from films that don’t exist, further elaborating the performance aspect of her art. Looking at the languor of the blond in a slip sprawled out on a rumpled bed, or at the barely contained anxiety of the housewife at the stove, or the tear-stained face of the dame with a cigarette, you instantly recognize the iconic scenario, making up your own before-and-after narrative.

Also, if you look closely at the film stills you’ll sometimes spot a telltale black cord snaking out from beneath Sherman’s coat or her closed fist. It’s the shutter-release cord hooked up to the camera with which she took the picture. Rather than breaking the seamless illusion of a movie still, the sight of the cord heightens the theatricality of the image. Witnessing a kind of closed-circuit production, you glimpse Sherman as actress, director, scenarist and camera operator.

Ever since the early 1980s her big color pictures have been commercially printed. Photographic traditions of fine printing, which derive from the value attributed to an artist’s personal touch in painting, are here tossed overboard. Instead, what’s valorized is imaginative work.

The retrospective then goes on to sample from each series Sherman has made to date. The cultural sources from which she chooses to enact her art are manifold, ranging from movies and magazines to picture books and paintings. Although the photographs are individually untitled, each series can be informally characterized according to image-type: rear-screen projections, centerfolds, fashion, fairy tales, disasters, history portraits, sex pictures, masks.

Amazingly, the level of accomplishment rarely flags. The consistency of her achievement remains extraordinary, series after series, year after year.

What keeps me coming back for more, though, is that they all look like so much flat-out fun to have made. Imagine it: gathering the props and costumes, trying out wildly different characters (including representatives of pure evil), merging into the panoply of images. The photographs are replete with the evident pleasures of solitary work in the studio.

Wonderfully enigmatic details abound. The barest whisper of a mustache shades the upper lip of a brown-haired youth dressed in a work shirt. The pointy tips of a one-piece gold satin bustier-jumpsuit are inexplicably caved in. The mirrored sunglasses strewn among the debris of a binge-and-purge scene at the beach reflect the sickened face of a prostrate woman beyond the picture’s frame. With meticulously rendered passages like these (have actual Pop Tarts and Ding Dongs ever before been used to make major art?), Sherman always keeps you slightly off-balance and wondering.

When you look at her pictures you’re never expected not to see the make-believe. The theatricality is always blunt enough to let you know that artifice is hard at work here.

The backdrops in the rear-projections immediately reveal themselves as hazy slides projected on a screen, in front of which the artist cavorts. Wigs and putty noses invariably declare their phoniness. In the history portraits makeup is frankly painted on, turning the sitter’s skin into an equivalent of the canvas daubed by the Old Master painters being referenced. Prosthetic limbs, plastic body parts and blow-up dolls populate the sex pictures, often as apparent surrogates for the absent artist.

In other words, when you look at Sherman’s pictures you see her playing dress up. Behind the wickedly insightful, semiotically informed analyses of social codes obviously evident in her work is something touching and vulnerable: the inescapable echo of a little girl alone at home in front of her dressing table mirror. She’s trying on Mommy’s wigs, smearing on some lipstick, clomping around in over-sized shoes. Pathos and poignancy are everywhere in this work, no matter if it maintains a look of raucous good humor (as in many of the zany fashion pictures), numbed distraction (the centerfolds) or stomach-knotting nausea (as in certain of the sex pictures).

Kids dress up for kicks, in an imaginative effort to disappear by trying to fit in. As an artist, though, Sherman dresses up to be free, harnessing a seemingly limitless range of possibilities to become who and what she may or may not be. Now that’s power. In her unfailingly generous work, its inescapable aura is liberating to see.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Feb. 1. Closed Mondays.