Closing out a calendar year in which every artist featured at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University is a woman, Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life — on view through the end of the year — surveys the internationally acclaimed photographer’s career-long interest in movie culture.
The show, which features more than 100 images by Sherman, is curated by Philipp Kaiser and organized by The Broad museum in Los Angeles. It is arranged mostly chronologically, beginning with her Untitled Film Stills series from the late 1970s.
The exhibition title is a reference to filmmaker Douglas Sirk’s 1959 melodrama, which deals with highly emotional struggles of identity. The title also signals the importance of cinema in Sherman’s own image making.
Throughout her career, Sherman has underscored the concept that the male gaze is responsible for much of cinema’s objectification of women. When seen in the context of current revelations about some of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters being abusers of women, her work is still wholly contemporary. Her manipulation, mimesis, aping and reflection of the film industry’s particular visual language are evidence of its ongoing sexual brutality, which we are now uncovering as women in the industry (and out of it) continue to step forward to name their abusers.
In a recent essay on “Hollywood’s Canon of Creeps,” the co-chief film critic for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis, wrote, “The history of cinema is also a history of the exploitation of women.” Sherman’s many loaded images and series on view at the Wexner mine this historical legacy.
Sherman has made her career on both sides of the camera, simultaneously photographing herself and posing as her own model since she was in college. The conceptual photographer (and film director) made her name initially with the aforementioned Untitled Film Stills (16 out of 69 are on view in this exhibition), which showcase Sherman posing in black-and-white and performing a kind of raw vulnerability that suggests the potential for violence and implicates the viewer as a complicit voyeur.
Throughout her work, Sherman has subverted the objectification inherent in centerfolds, replaced advertising materials with her own face, experimented with green screen as a film cliché, used her own aging as a way to develop new characters and investigated historical portrait painting.
Just one of many pieces in Imitation of Life that illustrates Sherman’s willingness to engage the male gaze, “Untitled Film Still #34” features the model awkwardly reclining on a bed, wearing only a loosely buttoned white dress-shirt and visible underwear, ostensibly lost in thought. Sherman’s unnatural pose and the contrived scene look more like manifestations of a male fantasy than the behavior of a self-possessed woman in the privacy of her room.
Though she is her own model, the pieces are never portraits of Sherman herself — although the artist routinely acknowledges her connection to the genre. Instead, they read like visual character studies. Using her own body as a canvas to communicate emotionally charged narratives, the artist uses wigs, makeup, prosthetics, props, background and costume — all of them trappings of the performance of femininity — to create flesh-and-blood portraits of clichéd feminine typologies.
The show does offer some of her lesser-known pieces, such as the series Untitled #499-510, made in 1977 as a tribute to curator Linda L. Cathcart. These 12 simple black-and-white portraits resemble riffs on the work of the French photographer Claude Cahun, who was doing much the same thing as Sherman but at a time when few probably understood or had the appropriate words to explain the work.
For example, all of Cahun’s photos (made from the late 1920s into the 1950s) that feature the artist as model are titled as self portraits, despite the fact that Cahun is clearly imitating characters — from a muscled and tattooed weightlifter in 1927’s “Self Portrait” to similarly titled image from 1932 in which the photographer convincingly poses as a little girl fast asleep in her wardrobe.
But whereas the conceptually based photographs of Cahun feature the artist embodying diverse personae, so many of Sherman’s characters seem like a one-track story. Conventionally attractive (or at least attempting to be) and posed for easy consumption, her characters rarely challenge our expectations of women and overwhelmingly invite the viewer to pass judgment about their age, wealth and morality.
“Untitled #92” from the Centerfolds series is a perfect example. In this horizontal chromogenic color print, Sherman looks wild-eyed and panicked. Full-color and larger in scale than many of the other pieces in the show, “Untitled #92” demonstrates why many speculate that the subjects of the Centerfolds series all look like victims of violence, because the women in them appear to be reeling from recent trauma. (Sherman refuses to explain much of the work.)
Sherman’s theatrically contrived scenes from Film Stills seem specific in their references to an archetypal character in film. But her dozen photos in Untitled #499-510 resist being classified that way. One is drawn to these images perhaps because they are neither slick nor polished.
And this is where Sherman’s work gets most interesting — not when she is regurgitating the explicitly vulnerable women of the film industry, but rather when she is alluding to the fact that there are real people involved in making us believe in the magical mystery world of the movies.
The New York Times’ Dargis says in her essay, “Cinema has long served as a vehicle for male onanism, a space in which male fantasies about sexual power over women are expressed on screen and enacted behind the camera.” Sherman’s work reveals in sharp detail the many manifestations of that abuse upon the backs of women. That’s important, if not by now overly familiar. But she also hints in Untitled #499-510 that she knows there are more nuanced stories begging to be told.
Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life is on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the Ohio State University campus in Columbus through Dec. 31. More info: wexarts.org.