Cindy Sherman retrospective at MOMA in New York

If you're trying to figure out what art is about these days, the photographer Cindy Sherman is a good place to start. Her work is deceptively simple, visually strong and accessible in its use of the human face and body, but intricately layered and full of ideas that resonate at every level of contemporary experience.

Sherman deals with the major obsessions of our time: identity, narcissism, physical transformation through will and artifice. Her current spectacular retrospective in New York is a perfect opportunity to consider the extraordinary arc of her work.

The most striking realization for me was that the essence of what she does sprang full-blown from her mind when she was in her early 20s, like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus. The show's earliest works are of particular importance because they present her ideas so clearly, in embryo.

A page of photo strips from 1975 (when Sherman was 21) presents a succinct diagram of her themes. From top left to bottom right Sherman, a gawky schoolgirl in glasses, mutates through stages to become a glamorous, sophisticated woman. The desire for that transformation— from ordinary to beautiful, unremarkable to memorable— is elemental and universal. Sherman's recognition of it within herself, and her commitment to it as a malleable tool for making art, is the rest of her story.

Wild ride into dark places

Near the beginning of the exhibit, a wall of 1975 black-and-white mug shots— a hat, a grimace, a little makeup— contrasts to Sherman's adjacent colorful later work, Untitled #466, in which she plays a stately, jaded woman in heavy jewels and makeup fraught with associations of money, status and judgment. Between them they represent the journey she has taken throughout her career— a wild ride, with her original idea gripped tightly and her imagination and resources expanding without limit, often into darker, more complex places.

The rooms in the show are arranged chronologically for the most part, allowing a procession through iconic series, including the Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), Old Master Art History portraits, Clowns, Disasters, Fashion Victims, Society Women, etc., while displaying changes in technology: black and white to color, and manually projected backgrounds to digitally created environments.

Much of Sherman's later color work conveys eye-candy appeal, but a rich subtext lurks beneath the surface in most of these images. Sherman is a monologist, a gifted storyteller with a canny supply of stereotypes, assumptions and perceptions. Her assets include a fairly ordinary face and body that easily disappear into the story she happens to be telling.

Red eye, blonde wig

In Untitled #122, she is a sleek model in black, but as soon as you see the one red eye peeking out from behind a tousled blonde wig you get it: vanity hand in hand with insecurity, beauty and darkness.

Her "Sex" and "Disgust" pictures, with their emphasis on dismembered body parts and slimy substances, are the toughest to look at— this gallery was notably less crowded than the others— but they're also somewhat gratuitous and the least complex in meaning, in part because they contain less of Sherman's physical presence.

Near the end of the exhibit is a short, jerky film from 1975 called Doll Clothes, in which Sherman is a cutout trying on clothes. Don't miss it— it's a treasure.♦


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