The Massive Influence of Cindy Sherman
One of the most intriguing aspects of studying a large group of artists is in watching how one artist influences another. The whole artistic community is constantly feeding upon one another, using what he or she finds of interest and incorporating influential ideas or mannerisms into their own work. In this postmodern world small and large leaps of new thoughts are a constant occurrence, and sharing abounds with in every artist's practice. It is becoming ever more apparent that Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman have had an enormous impact on today's photographers, and in turn today's painters. Cindy Sherman has for a long period of time been held up as a remarkable example of both critical theory as well as artistic achievement. Jeff Wall has explored crafted narrative in a wholly new direction that is layered atop of Sherman's work. The work of Wall's is a bridge between Sherman and younger artists whose current practice is far removed from her initial intent.
Sherman has toiled on an evolving three decade long body of work. Each piece is numbered in chronological order from #1 to somewhere in the 400's today. Looking back, one can now sharply divide her work into two parts with a brief interlude of searching in between. Her earliest pieces were taken using black and white stock while paying tribute to film noir stills. Positioning herself in an evocative situation, she would capture an image by using a shutter release from where she would be standing (in one hand you can usually see her holding the release). What resulted, for its time, was a truly innovative approach to photography. Her images almost beg a viewer to create a pseudo-narrative around the scene. For example, in " Untitled Film Still #8," we see Sherman leaning out of a sliding glass door. She is wearing a black wig, sunglasses, and a slip pulled up around her legs. She might be quite drunk, for she is leaning against the door for support with a hand holding a martini glass. The expression on her face as she stares at the viewer is not one of welcome exactly, but confrontation. Behind her is what might be a bedroom cloaked in darkness. Between the viewer and the artist is what might be a sun hat carefully placed on a deck chair. The chair could be acting as a barrier, creating a feeling of tension between the artist and the viewer. We are asked to interpret what might be occurring here, to build a narrative out of Signifiers and our own past experiences. The viewer has the ability not only to piece together a story over what has occurred in the recent past but also to take some stabs at what might occur in the near future.
Prior to Sherman, photographers did create artistic images, but they were along the lines of Ansel Adams or Robert Frank. The photograph was treated as a documentary device that recorded for posterity actual occurrences. War photography, the dust bowl in the 1930's, Adams' records of Yosemite, these are what you could think of as pre-Sherman art. Man Ray was about as close as you could get to a real artist, but his surrealist images are almost laughably arcane and naïve today. Sherman took what was in retrospect an obvious step forwards in our lexicon, perhaps inspired by two separate quarters of the advertisement industry and documentary photography.
During 1959, Bruce Davidson followed a group of kids around New York, snapping standoffish alienated youths. These photographs feel like they could be straight out of a modern day fashion add and were ahead of their time period. The loosely posed photographs straddled the boundary of fiction and reality, these were actual street toughs, but you can feel the proximity of the camera and read the knowledge of its presence in the actions taken by these kids.
The film studios of the thirties and forties kept photographers on the sets of their larger productions to take stock images of the sets. These photographers would have say Bogart and Peter Lorre pose at a dimly lit table in conversation for the image separate from the actual shooting of footage that would end up in the can. The images would then be developed and sent out to film magazines and newspapers in order to hype the coming release. What made these photos unique was that most of them ended up not having very much to do with the film itself. These photos that captured a momentary narrative played out by one or more actors on a set that existed nowhere outside of the studios. If you were to sit down and watch 'Casablanca,' you would never see a comparable scene caught by the stills taken by the studio photographers on the screen. This entire endeavor was utilitarian.
Secondly, Sherman could have been inspired by magazine advertisements. For example Marlboro and Camel cigarettes placed huge advertising campaigns portraying action scenes caught on camera during the 60's and 70's. Camel used a pre Indiana Jones type and portrayed him making his way down a jungle river, or ruggedly trekking across the plains of Africa. Marlboro on the other hand caught cowboys rustling their way over the American west of the last century. Both of these advertising campaigns were staged, using actors to portray a desired typecast. Both of these campaigns captured a fuzzy narrative where the viewer would be asked to create a situation in order to explain just why these men were where they were.
While Sherman's photos portrayed an idea that advertising had ventured into in the past, her work was new in that no person had previously consciously gone about creating 'art' in such a manner. It is not unlike Duchamp's using a urinal and calling it art. Sherman took something that was part of our everyday lives, and showed it to us in a new light. Only a few years after she found such great success, Sherman revolted against her own previously brilliant work and started to capture images of violently dismembered mannequins, or derogatory and ugly self-portraits.
It's sort of ironic in that Sherman needed to break away with her strong body of early work so that she would not be typecast or stop growing and what she has produced since then would not be heralded or spoken of if it were not for the name of Sherman attached to it. Her work instead of dealing with other artists has been influenced almost exclusively via critical acclaim by seducing theorists. Radical feminists have long and rightly decried the use of a woman in film as an object, one whose purpose is to be ravished by the eye similar to a fetish object. These ivory tower theorists like Dr. Laura Mulvey or Mary Ann Doane held an enormous sway over the art world from the 70's to the late 1990's, using their pulpits as fronts for political correctness. No one knew exactly where the art world was heading during this period and for a time it seemed as though these professor's ideas would were prophetic. Listening to this clatter, Sherman has jumped in and produced what could be the most disastrous body of work by a major artist during our time. As you can see in '#137,' this work is almost un-viewable, without merit except for its revolt against typecast. Sadly, from around 1980 on, this is about all you will get, leading one to wonder if her early work was nothing other than a glorious fluke.
Sherman had a noticeable influence on Wall. But it could be said that any artist dealing with the figure and narrative post Sherman could be tied back to her in some way or another if only because of her profound impact on fictionalized narrative. Wall on the other hand took Sherman's ideas a step further by incorporating a meta-narrative. While Sherman focuses in on the figure, often cropping herself, and thus pulling the spectators eye directly towards what she intended to articulate, Wall heads often in the other direction. In many of his works, his figures comprise barely a fraction of the over all composition. This allows for the eye to skip around from one space to another. Early on in his career, Wall toyed with Sherman to a large degree, setting up situations where figures would be interacting with each other such as in 'Mimic.' Here we see another narrative unfolding. An Asian man is walking down the street, perhaps deliberately giving a wide birth to a biker and his woman. The biker is flipping the guy off and the lady seems indifferent. Perhaps she is a lady of the night, just wanting to get this over with. The undertones of this piece are not as complex as what you will find in the best Sherman work, mainly because the narrative does not have very far to evolve either towards the past or into the future. What is different here is the more contemporary and evolved use of composition and light. Also, the narrative is in play with a threesome, forcing the viewer to examine both how the individual characters are reacting to one another, as well as how they are exist with in themselves.
Jeff Wall's first major show was in the 1978, but slowly emerged from Canada in the 1980's as people began to understand his unique perspective. Today one can look at Sherman's dismembered mannequins, compare it with Wall's elaborate narrative compositions and see little in common between them. But they both started in the same place and evolved from that point along two completely different paths. Wall's photographs have evolved considerably from the time of 'Mimic.' His work effuses narrative through ever more complex structures. He continues to pull ever further away from the primary interaction, such as you see above, while contemplating more complex yet unresolved stories.
'A Sudden Gust of Wind' was inspired by the Japanese artist Hokusai's seminal 19th century prints "Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji." One of the thirty-six woodcuts in this series portrays a snaking river making its way through large fields with papers being carried into the sky by a strong breeze. Wall's photograph was created using digital technology over a span of half a year while mixing several shots of actors taken during separate periods of time. What is unique about this photograph, like a large number of his works, is that he is en-capturing such a large-scale panoramic scope. "Gust of Wind" forces the viewer to accept small fragments of the composition in order to read it in its entirety. This is not a picture that deals with the minimalism ideals of 'gestalt,' with the ability to understand every aspect of the work at once and at every moment. Instead, it forces one to engage with the work, to create a narrative out of what the artist has chosen to represent.
The importance of Wall's work straddles two arenas. His contribution to narrative is worthy because he has carried Raymond Carver's minimalist literature style into photography. To understand this relation, Carver spent a career producing short stories that really had no plots. He took prose and turned it into a form of poetry. His work centered on everyday situations rather than events that were plotted from beginning to end. You can see this in Wall's work. Only Wall for the most part has gone in for the over the top Hollywood action moments, his work also reads as a few lines of haiku or a good but mysterious poem. The other arena, as I have stated before, deals with the scope of his panorama. By stepping back so far from any key narrative point, Wall influenced an enormous number of today's practicing photographers. Gursky is probably the best-known artist to use this method, and is indicative compositionally to his peers. I say this in the sense that in '99 cent' you see no figures and no narrative. His work is strictly about place, startling in its frankness. If figures do crop up in this work, they offer no sense of story; they are merely aspects of the composition with neither more nor less importance towards its success than any other object.
In the 1980's a group of Latino artists collaborating with each other and known as ASCO produced several 'No Movies' that re-explored Sherman's studio production-still influence. ASCO was a group project comprised of several Latino artists, and whose story is fascinating unto it's self, though rather complicated for this article. These artists had no education in the art world and thus what they produced could be considered outsider art. But they attempted to be engaged with what was occurring nationally during their time over every aspect of contemporary art by educating themselves. The 'No Movies' comprised only a small aspect of what ASCO was attempting to accomplish. This undertaking produced a short series of photographs that were used partly as a protest against the plight of the United States Chicano Cinema in its day. To put it mildly, there was no representation except for Cheech and Chong, and thus ASCO sought this avenue in which to express their cinematic aspirations. Unlike Sherman, every still that ASCO produced had been carefully thought out inside the context of a film. The photos would be released along with production notes and a script synopsis. So instead of the ambiguity that revolved around Sherman's work, the viewer could lock into a clearly defined and structured narrative.
In the 1990's a group of young female photographers from Yale graduate school created quite a stir with their work. Anna Gaskell, Justine Kurland, and Jenny Gage were among these artists and have produced some startling images over the last decade. Anna Gaskell has created a fictionalized place, filled with young girls just past the age of puberty. This is not an ideal world or a place of serenity. Instead, the viewer might take away a feeling of abject horror over the almost mindless group thought portrayed here. This is a place of heartless reaction and indifferent exploration, almost as if the girls were living without any outside supervision or adults. "A number of these narratives explore the concept that children are not innocent beings and, when left alone without the guidance and love of adults or the governance of society, they can become savage". Adding to the effect of mindlessness is the manner in which Gaskell is photographing her subjects. Every frame is shot at an angle to thoroughly maximize an uncomfortable wall between the viewer and the girls being documented. "Unusual viewing angles and close ups violent cropping and stark contrasts of shadow and light result in a set of menacing claustrophobic spaces that intimate not only anxiety about ones coming of age but a general psychological unease. Gaskell's work does not posses specific narrative but rests rather on a series of suggestive 'actions'. In fact her whole oeuvre is based on implication rather than description; it is this ambiguity hovering as it does between what is imagined and what one sees between reality and fiction that reinforces the sense of malaise and intrigue for the viewer."
The link between Gaskell and Sherman is tenuous if only because Gaskell is removed several fold via two decades and countless evolutional steps between the two artists. We can however trace Sherman's influence directly to Gaskell's work by looking at the psudo-documentary aspect of her images. Instead of Sherman posing in an ambiguous scene based on generic remembered film references, we have here a hoard of little girls whose activities are being produced and portrayed as a false reality. The staging and slight of hand used by both artists along with an unresolved narrative reveals Sherman's strong influence upon Gaskell.
Justine Kurland started down a road similar to Gaskell, using groups of actors (females of various ages), positioning them in curious landscapes, and using the figures almost like Barnett Newman would use a vertical line in one of his paintings. If you look at Kurland's photograph 'cyclone,' one aspect that slowly imposes itself upon the viewers consciousness is that their really is very little narrative occurring in this scene. This work on one level deals with the body of work by Vanessa Beecroft who does nothing but take photograph's of grouped naked young women standing in a gallery space while ignoring everything going on around them. The figures in 'Cyclone' are all looking off into the distance in one direction, yet they seem hardly interested. It is as if they are all experiencing the same mild passing fancy in their semi-exhausted and disheveled states to gaze in what coincedentaly happens to be the same direction. Instead of the deep narrative that claws the underside of Gaskell's better work, Kurland seems to be more interested in concerning herself with the more traditional compositional elements found in portraiture. You can see signs of Kurland struggling to find the surreal narrative that Gaskell has mastered in her early photographs, such as with 'Raft Expedition.' But most of Kurland's work in these early bodies of work center around her subjects being caught in a choriographed activity. In many ways Kurland is still exploring who she is as a photographer, playing with what it is she will bring into the art world as herself. Whereas Gaskell has created such a vivid and imaginary world of her own, Kurland is aware of the
Jenny Gage could be seen as a crass manipulator of Cindy Sherman's work. Or if not a manipulator, she could be read as nothing more than your average fashion photography hack. So far she has not produced the greatest body of work, but she is still young. What is invigorating is her potential, and the ideas that she is attempting to deal with. Gage left Yale grad school and found a job as a photographer with Vogue magazine, which has completely influenced her practice. She spent her time during these years taking the ideas of Sherman and placing them back into the fashion pages. "Woman in a Red Diner," entirely alludes to one of Sherman's early works. On the surface, we can read this image in two quickly different initial directions depending on how it is presented. Between the covers of Vogue, this will read entirely as a fashion shot, some stiff model dressed to the nines hawking some clothing. As a photograph by itself, this can be read as a candid shot by some family member of a bored girl looking sort of pissed off. With a little information, we know that this is Gage herself, portraying a young woman caught in a situation that becomes more unclear the longer one studies it. This is one of Gages first mature works and epitomizes her body of work for the most part thus far. What is apparent is that she is starting directly in the shadow of Sherman, only instead of being influenced by advertising; she is pulling Sherman back into the sphere of product hawking.
Gages one and only triumph is a short but remarkable film that she produced in 2000. This film "Drift," works so well because of how it uses her Sherman inspired photography and her corporate ideals while melding them into film. There is little in the way of speaking, the entire film is just one lush panoramic scene straight out of Vogue after another. The narrative is choppy and the viewer has little idea of what is going on. Instead, this film reads as separate short stories without plots, only highly strung emotional outpourings by fashion models with their typical zombied out expressions. This short film could have been a disaster, but instead it thrives as it brings Sherman's fictionalized film stills back into film. A 360-degree turn back to its original medium while taking along all of the sensibilities it has garnered along the way.
Sherman's situational, narrative, and fictional photography was a startling new development, ramifications of which are still being felt. Her influence was not only on the photographic community, but on narrative painting as well. Like the ramifications of Duchamp's ready-made's on the conceptual movement or Greenberg's tight fisted control over the abstract expressionists, the huge swell of narrative painters since the mid-1990's, as well as the photographers discussed here in this article, all can trace at least some line of influence to Sherman.