Sensitive Work of Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman: Empathetic Artist

Should Cindy Sherman be viewed an artist poking fun at society and the disenfranchised people or as a photographer encouraging society to re-examine its obsession with youth and status?

Cindy Sherman has been described as one of the most celebrated artists of our time. Sherman in many respects has mastered the art of reinvention: she has proven herself adept at constantly turning herself into something else and consistently mastering the art of transformation. As one journalist has summarized, "Over the course of her remarkable 35-year career she has transformed herself into hundreds of different personas: the movie star, the valley girl, the angry housewife, the frustrated socialite, the Renaissance courtesan, the menacing clown, even the Roman god Bacchus. Some are closely cropped images; in others she is set against a backdrop that, as Ms. Sherman describes it, 'are clues that tell a story'" (Vogel, 2012). Given this apt summation of the work of Sherman, this paper intends to discuss how Sherman's work is not a callous act of poking fun at some of the most vulnerable members of society, but it actually a ballad or poem which tells the story of their own personal tragedies. In telling these stories of personal tragedies, Sherman encourages society to re-examine its obsession with youth and status. This paper will examine how pushing the spectator to re-evaluate this pre-occupation with youth and status manifests in the majority of her images; even though Sherman is a master at transformation, this common thread is one of the cords that binds her different works together. In fact, it is the wild distinction and separateness of so much of her work that functions collectively to highlight this over-arching theme.

A dark, macabre quality is inherent in the bulk of Sherman's work: this darkness is the ballad of pain which helps to showcase the pain of the individual. In showcasing this pain, Sherman pushes society to back off from its obsession with beauty, youth and our outer-shells. As one critic describes Sherman's photograph, "You think you may know them… But in fact the more you look at them, the more complex and darker they seem" (Vogel, 2012). If one examines Cindy Sherman's "Society Portraits" of 2008, it becomes very clear that they are pointing to a more melancholy perspective of the privileged woman. These portraits include a series of women who are clearly Botoxed with lip injections who all appear to be over the age of 40. There is a pervasive strain of unhappiness throughout these photographs. It appears as though Sherman is showing the artificiality that these women have embraced, as a means of retaining a sense of youth and beauty, and that the artificiality is actually making them more unhappy. The women that Sherman embodies are regal: they all have almost a divine or royal air to them. However, in accepting facelifts and Botox, there seems to be a case that Sherman is making for the fact that they have sacrificed some things which shouldn't have been sacrificed at all: and those things were their sense of self and their right to the dignity of ageing.

These portraits demonstrate women who have compromised their integrity and their values in an attempt to acquiesce to what society deems as important. In doing so, there has been something sacrificed -- something precious and elusive about the self, and that thing may never be recovered. Sherman depicts these women after this element of loss has occurred. With the loss comes the pain, and essentially Sherman is urging the spectator to give up on the eternal quest and the eternal hunt for all that is inaccessible to most: both beauty and youth are fleeting.

The darkness and pain riddled throughout this series of photographs most succinctly demonstrates this scathing indictment of society's valuations on youth, beauty and our outer shells. As one journalist describes, "Her 2008 'society portraits' were disparaging, tragic, vulgar, and quite empathic. These were women of a certain age, from the top echelons of polite society -- they could be politicians' wives, art patrons, reality-show housewives. The works are monumental portraits of women who are struggling with a culture that has these ridiculous standards for youth, for beauty, and for wealth and status" (Sischy, 2008). In this series of photographs, Sherman is able to very aptly capture the struggle and the resignation that these women feel about it. As one journalist explains, what Sherman captures is the inherent loneliness of these women, and that the images palpitate with it (Bittencourt, 2012). The loneliness that is conveyed is able to best rage against these impossible standards, and in that raging essentially beg the spectator to question, to re-evaluate and to look at how they contribute or acquiesce to such impossible valuations of what is desirable and not desirable.