33 Artists in 3 Acts (22 page)

Sherman’s studio is a teenage girl’s fantasy. The main room is a large rectangle with ninth-floor views on three sides, featuring mannequin heads wearing wigs, racks of glittery clothes, and an orange plastic cosmetics cabinet crowned with a magnifying mirror. It is dress-up heaven with a professional twist. “I am always really happy in this space,” says Sherman, whose face is a charmingly choreographed dance of upward glances, subtle eyebrow lifts, and gentle lip curls. Pinned to the walls are magazine cuttings and computer printouts of women in what the artist calls “preposterous” positions, including a society lady in a ball gown making breakfast and a naked actress with a designer handbag in one hand and an albino parrot on the other. Images of
dowdy businesswomen by a photographer from Boise, Idaho, who is also named Cindy Sherman, are on display nearby.

Sherman keeps her props in a large number of methodically arranged cupboards, which she invites me to open. For an aficionado of her work, doing so offers a gleeful sense of déjà vu, revealing rows of masks, false boobs, prosthetic noses, fake hands, rubber fingers, and plastic babies; multiple color-segregated boxes of wigs, facial hair, clothes, and fabric; and finally, cameras in their cases next to neatly wound cords.

Sherman so loathes delegating that she doesn’t even allow her part-time assistant to help her organize her cupboards. Needless to say, she does all her own makeup and lighting. When she takes photographs, she places a freestanding oval mirror next to the camera so she knows exactly what she looks like, then clicks on a remote. Sherman once tried hiring models, but it didn’t work.

The youngest of five children (her closest sibling is nine years her senior), Sherman grew up feeling estranged from what she perceived to be an already complete family. She was married for sixteen years to Michel Auder, a video diarist whose first wife, Viva, was a Warhol “superstar.” Her list of illustrious ex-boyfriends includes David Byrne, Steve Martin, and artists Robert Longo and Richard Prince. “I’ve never really had anybody that I talk about my work with,” says Sherman. “Whatever my gallery or close friends tell me, I can only really trust myself.”

Almost all of Sherman’s photographs portray lone characters. The artist broke into the art world at the age of twenty-three with “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of sixty-nine black-and-white images taken between 1977 and 1980. Hitting a critical nerve, the work consisted of a fictional archive of photos in which Sherman poses as starlets in movies that might have been made by Alfred Hitchcock or Michelangelo Antonioni. Its satire of female stereotypes took Pop art into a new, subtly feminist realm at a time when the representation of women was a hot topic in the art world. For some senior feminists, Sherman’s politics were too discreet. “One told me that I should include text to bring out the irony,” says the artist, rolling her eyes.

Ambiguity comes naturally to Sherman because she often feels
genuinely “conflicted.” One is never quite sure where she stands in relation to her characters, and they, in turn, are often difficult to define. The “Centerfold” series (1981) of twelve color photos, in which the artist shot herself in a variety of submissive poses, added anxiety to the ambivalence. Although the title conjures up images from
Playboy
magazine, the works are not obviously sexy. Instead, Sherman presents a range of reclining muses on their bad days, unready for the camera, lost in thought, fearful, or depressed, and fully clothed.

I scan the room, overwhelmed by the amount of stuff. “I leave things out to remind me to think about them,” says Sherman, who walks over to a large Canon video camera, putting her hand on its tripod support. “I keep moving it around. It’s a nagging reminder to myself to please make a film and start thinking in terms of movement,” she explains. “Another goal is more men,” says the artist, who laments that it is hard to obtain convincing male wigs. “And I want to do more double and multiple figures,” she says, with a wave at some magazine clippings of twins.

These goals may be delayed by the effort of overseeing her forthcoming retrospective, which starts at New York’s Museum of Modern Art then travels to San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Dallas. A small-scale model of eight rooms on the sixth floor of MoMA rests on its own table near the spot where Sherman would normally shoot pictures of herself. When she began having museum shows, she was, in her words, “totally naïve.” She would let the curator install and just show up for the opening. Nowadays, she likes to be more involved because most museum curators want to arrange the work in discrete series, whereas the artist is keen to mix it up. Sherman loathes it when similar types of work—“blondes, brunettes, long hair, short hair, closeups, more distant shots,” as she puts it—are placed too close to one another, because she is intent on making her characters look as “unrelated” as possible.

On a strip of wall between two windows are images of Brenda Dickson, a blonde bombshell (and occasional redhead) who played a villainess on the daytime soap opera
The Young and the Restless
in the 1970s and 1980s. Dickson is notorious for a much-spoofed vanity video called
Welcome to my Home
in which she gives tips on fashion and
interior décor. Sherman has shots of the actress at many ages, including one where Dickson reclines on a couch under a photograph of herself. Sherman marvels at the “kind of ego,” as she puts it, “that needs to put a picture of herself on the wall in her own house.”

Back in the 1970s, few would have predicted that Sherman could make so many compelling series through depicting herself. The only specific celebrity Sherman has impersonated is Lucille Ball (a picture taken in a photo booth in 1975 that was blown up and issued as an unlimited edition in 2001). Otherwise, her characters are the kinds of people who seem to be famous for fifteen minutes or loom large in their own lunchtime. The art critic Rosalind Krauss once praised Sherman’s early work for being “copies without originals.” Almost thirty years later, Sherman’s characters position the artist herself as the original.

In the art world, Sherman has become a celebrity brand, not unlike Hollywood actresses who are billed above the movie’s title. She has made a few bodies of work from which she is absent, but they do not sell easily or for high prices. Collectors of her photographs want her within the frame. “It’s an interesting phenomenon,” admits Sherman, then, mimicking a male voice, says, “Is she behind that mask? I only want it if she is in there!” One of Sherman’s “Centerfolds” recently sold for $3.9 million, a record for a photograph at auction and particularly remarkable given that the work was made in an edition of ten.

Unlike many of her peers, Sherman has stayed loyal to her dealers: Metro Pictures, the New York gallery that presented her first solo show in 1979, and Sprüth Magers, which has represented her in Europe since 1984. She thinks that artists compromise their reputations when they are obviously motivated by financial gain. “I have grown fond of Larry Gagosian,” she says, “but artists damage their credibility when they leave their gallery and go to Larry for more money.”

For a woman artist, physical beauty can also disrupt the process of being taken seriously. “I like experimenting with being as ugly as possible,” explains Sherman. She goes over to her desk and picks up a stylus, which she moves over a giant track pad while staring at one of two large screens. Here is the hub of her studio, where she spends hours making post-production digital adjustments. She brings up a photograph that
she made for MAC cosmetics of a girly clown in bright makeup, wearing a pink Afro and a blue feather boa. For this picture, MAC used a photo lab that services the fashion industry; later, Sherman used the same lab for a piece from another series and got into a long tussle. “The guy at the lab thought he was fixing it. He got rid of the bags under my eyes and straightened out the mouth even though I had purposely made it crooked,” she says. “We kept redoing it and redoing it. It didn’t work. It looked boring . . . like a beauty shot.”

According to Sherman, being an artist is “a state of mind.” She scrolls through the MAC photos, settling on one of a woman in a fake fur coat and purple lipstick—what my mother would call mutton dressed as lamb—and says, “You have to be really focused and constantly make sure that you have faith in yourself.” After a show, Sherman usually feels “spent” and wonders, “What else can I do now?” Her most difficult period was in the late 1980s, when she struggled to figure out how to refrain from appearing in her own pictures. These slumps have happened enough that she knows she will get through them. Nowadays, she doesn’t feel “bummed out,” as she puts it, like she used to.

Sherman is adamant that none of her works is a self-portrait, but I know of at least one photograph that surely represents an artist. Part of her “History Portraits/Old Masters” series,
Untitled #224
(1990) is a careful photographic reenactment of Caravaggio’s
Sick Bacchus
, a painting commonly called
Self-Portrait as Bacchus
(c. 1593–94). Curious to understand her thoughts about a female artist pretending to be a male artist who is, in turn, playacting the part of the pagan god of wine, my question starts with the straightforward statement:
Sick Bacchus
is a self-portrait of Caravaggio. Before I can say anything further, Sherman says, “I didn’t know that.” That’s impossible, I think to myself. I explain that I’m reading a biography of Caravaggio by Andrew Graham-Dixon, who argues that Bacchus is a relevant alter ego for an artist because the Greco-Roman god is associated with passion, unruly behavior, and divine inspiration.

“I didn’t know that,” she repeats.

I opt for another tack. The catalogue that accompanied her four-stop European solo show suggested that Sherman’s “Clowns” (2003–04)
were representatives of artists in general and of Sherman in particular. It argued that the clowns’ way of transforming themselves mirrored Sherman’s own process. Covered in thick makeup and facial prostheses, Sherman’s face is at its most painterly and sculptural in these brightly colored, large-scale pictures with psychedelic backgrounds. The “Clowns” are an important body of work, I venture cautiously.

“They are one of my favorite series,” admits Sherman warmly. “It was such a multilayered project—learning about the history and system of clown makeup.” She was captivated by the idea that clowns wear masks to conceal dark secrets. “Are they hiding pedophilia or alcoholism or a neediness for people to love them? I was fascinated with imagining the personalities underneath the makeup.” These sentiments echo those of Sherman’s viewers, who often wonder about the real woman behind the characters in her photographs. I suggest that the clown could be seen as a stand-in for the artist.

“I never thought of that,” she says matter-of-factly.

Puzzled, I flick through her clown pictures in my head. Two are most memorable.
Untitled #420
is a diptych, portraying a clown couple. The male clown holds a balloon dog with a long phallic tail. The female clown, who has closed eyes and huge wet lips, wears a balloon flower on her dress and several more in her hat. The diptych nods at Jeff Koons.
Untitled #413
, by contrast, portrays a lone clown in tighter closeup. One of the ugliest and saddest in the series, this clown has downturned lips, swollen brown cheeks, and drab, bed-head hair. Most importantly, this clown wears a black satin jacket with the name “Cindy” embroidered in pink on the left breast. If there is a covert self-portrait in your oeuvre, I hazard to say, I assume this “Cindy” clown is it.

“No!” she declares with a twinkle in her eye that acknowledges the in-joke. “Laurie Simmons gave me that jacket years ago. I’ve always wanted to use it for something.”

According to Sherman, she has never depicted an artist in a finished artwork, although she once made images of a couple of artists—one male, one female—for T-shirts for the nonprofit organization Artists Space. “Maybe I have the contact sheet,” she says, getting up from the table and going into another room. She returns with two glossy
black-and-white 11 × 14-inch contact sheets that are labeled “1983” in orange grease pencil. The vertical images are closely cropped around Sherman’s body. In both cases, she is kneeling in front of a plain paper backdrop. The male artist is a painter who looks at the viewer through his wire-rimmed glasses, brandishing a foot-long paintbrush. The female artist is a photographer with her lips ajar whose eyes are focused on a clear plastic sleeve of slides. “I should do something with the images,” says Sherman. “Maybe I’ll turn them into an edition.”

Sherman has always insisted that her photographs are fictional. “I try to keep everything about myself out of the work,” she explains. “I have never been interested in revealing any of my fantasies, personality traits, desires, or disappointments.” Indeed, the pictures she edits out of her oeuvre are those she finds “scary” because they resemble her too much. Her favorites, by contrast, tend to be those photographs in which she does not recognize herself at all.

Why are you not interested in revealing yourself? I ask.

“I am sure there are a lot of psychological reasons,” she says. “Ah, well, maybe I don’t want to be called a narcissist.” Strangely enough, when Narcissus became infatuated with his own reflection in the water, he did not realize that he was looking at himself.