Cindy Sherman

Why is it that some works of art immediately appeal to you and have and keep a resulting fascination?

I had that right away with (the early) photographs by the American artist Cindy Sherman.   [It took a lot of time before I saw these.  The experience of walking past these early photographs and seeing them in real life happened in 2017, when I visited the exhibition From Selfie to Self-Expression, in the Saatchi Gallery, in London!]

Of course they appealed to my cinephile heart. I saw Antonioni's films in it. Films, which I saw later by the way, I had read about them and seen the stills in books and magazines. Many film directors had actresses like muse, Von Sternberg had Marlene Dietrich, Jean-Luc Godard Anna Karenina, Antonioni Monica Viti. Hitchcock had many, one he lost to a kingdom, another he lost because he intervened in the life of the actress and sexually assaulted. [By the way, Hitchcock also had male muses ].

But with Sherman there is something else  going on. Sherman was intrigued by the stereotyped roles of  women in the 1950s and the 1960s. She featured herself in her work. Each time you saw a different version of Sherman, but you didn’t get to know her.  Sherman  is one of the predecessors of the selfie era. My first muse was my cousin M.. I still remember her beehive, her pink powdery face and the light pink lipstick that matched. I still see her in her sixties skirt suit, with the  knees visible.   When I saw Tippi Hedren in Marnie for the first time, I  saw Marie again. When I came upon this  photo of Joan Collins, I was looking at M..   {Marnie, by the way,  is the film of transformation ]

                 

                                  

In our western culture, this ability to transform yourself is actually mainly reserved for women.  By means of hairstyle, make up and clothing they are able to be different each time, to take on a different appearance each time. I was, when I went to school by bus, in  the late seventies, fascinated by a girl, who got into the bus two stops further, who always surprised with a different look. I envied her and got more and more admiration for the ability to invest in such an experiment. I have never considered the attention to appearance to be superficial.  And that's because I don't have a surface myself. No, I watched women, was a camera that recorded and in this way I could satisfy my desire. In my teens, I was convinced that I was coming down with an incurable disease. I believed in transmigration.   In fact, I always carry death with me, every day I think of suicide or I long that my life comes to a grinding halt.  This dysphoria, this alienation from my body,  has hit me hard, these last two years. It causes sleep deprivation, even physical pain.

In his foreword to the Cindy Sherman book of 1984 Peter Schjeldahl  writes about  the fact that people like to extrapolate stories from her photos, ‘discovering hidden meanings where none were present’, he quotes from an interview Sherman had with Els Barents, and goes on saying : “What is photographed is a face lost in thought- really lost, vacated, abandoned, consciousness drained out of it in invisible deeps. (We are observing a face oblivious not only to being observed but to being at all). Brilliantly, the face is deprived of its usual priority in any picture, becoming an element equivalent to every other. The linoleum floor is as ‘’expressive’’ as the girl’s features- an effect reinforced by Sherman’s increasingly eloquent use of colour”

I haven't changed since the day I met M. I didn't grow, still the person, 10 years old. Meanwhile a storm of thoughts is raging in my head.