BEYOND THE FRAME
As the National Portrait Gallery honours the genre-defying, chameleon-like artist Cindy Sherman, Frances Hedges meets the woman behind the mask
As a retrospective of Cindy Sherman’s work opens at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Frances Hedges talks to the shape-shifting artist about the playful and provocative characters she creates, and how she continues to make art in an age of artifice
Poised at the threshold of her top-floor apartment in New York’s SoHo district, I find myself wondering which of the many versions of Cindy Sherman I am about to meet. From young ingénue to ageing diva, working girl to bored housewife, Renaissance noblewoman to 21st-century street-style star, the photographer has inhabited almost every possible female archetype during a career that has spanned more than 40 years. So it comes as something of a surprise when the woman who opens the door to me turns out to be polite, softly spoken, bare-faced and understated – the polar opposite of the heavily made-up, flamboyantly costumed, larger-than-life characters she portrays in her work.
Sherman, who at 65 will be the subject of a major new retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery this month, has always been clear about the performative nature of her images, none of which she sees as self-portraits. ‘I really don’t think of myself as being in any of the photographs,’ she tells me today, as we sit down together at the large, cluttered table in the centre of her light-filled studio. Evidence of her theatricality is all around us, visible in the masks, wigs, props and other ephemera that are lined up on the bookshelves or piled in corners of the room. ‘Some of these are from the last body of work I was doing, but there are other things I’ve probably had up for 20 years or so,’ she says, gesturing towards the magazine tearsheets tacked on the walls. There are voodoo sculptures, a plastic James Bond figure, a set of painted busts (‘I was collecting heads for a while’) and some crowns she recently picked up in a Parisian flea market. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with them,’ she admits. ‘Who knows – maybe I’ll do a series of queens…’
Clothes and objects have served as a source of inspiration for Sherman ever since she was a little girl playing with the dressing-up box in her family’s Long Island home. ‘It was fun, the idea of transforming into somebody else through make-up or costumes,’ she says, recalling her ambivalent feelings towards the ‘girdles, stockings, weird pointy bras and strange accoutrements’ that many women were still wearing in the 1950s and 1960s. ‘When I was growing up those things weren’t cool. Feminists were supposed to look natural – you didn’t need make-up, you didn’t dye your hair, you didn’t wear a bra – but for me dressing up was this secret pleasure.’ Her interest in fashion has remained a constant throughout her career, though her tastes have evolved along with her sense of self. ‘As a younger artist, I tended to dress more anonymously because I didn’t want to stand out,’ she reflects. ‘I think I was partly feeling
guilty about being successful when a lot of my friends weren’t, but now I’m past that. I love theatrical clothing – sometimes I’ll buy something and then realise I’m never going to wear it, but there’s always the potential to use it for some kind of character down the line.’
Costuming and make-up were crucial to the haunting, cinematic feel of the photographs that first propelled Sherman into the limelight. After graduating from the visual-arts department at Buffalo State College (where, ironically, she had failed one of her freshman photography classes), she moved to New York City in 1977 and began shooting what was to become her seminal ‘Untitled Film Stills’, a series of 70 black and white images inspired by cinema, from the French New Wave and the Italian Golden Age to the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Each enigmatic shot portrays a scene from an imaginary film, its solitary female subject captured in a moment of reflection or transition, whether gazing out of the window, staring at her face in the mirror or standing at the edge of an empty road hoping to hitch a ride. Developed in hot chemicals to give them a grainy texture reminiscent of the stills used in promotional materials, and replete with references to real movies, the photographs are tantalising in their narrative potential. Yet their meaning remains elusive, as does Sherman’s own role within the fictions she creates. ‘I was always losing myself in the work and hiding behind the make-up and under the wigs,’ she says.
Sherman’s commitment to the art of artifice – ensuring that viewers always see her as an actress in a fabricated scenario – drove her to create increasingly eccentric, even grotesque figures. ‘In the beginning, I was always worried about people assuming I was this egotistical, self-obsessed person,’ she says. ‘So when I went to darker periods and uglier characters, I was really trying to make it apparent that it wasn’t about me or getting attention for myself.’ She populated her 1981 ‘Centerfolds’ project – designed to subvert the pornographic traditions of men’s magazines – with vulnerable-looking women, their privacy invaded by the presence of a voyeuristic camera. A few years later, for her ‘Disasters and Fairy Tales’ series (1985–1989), she used substances resembling vomit, blood and faeces, together with mannequins and prosthetic limbs, to convey the fragility of the human body – and, perhaps, to hint at the fissures in the surface of her invented world.
Even Sherman’s most monstrous creations are not, however, without a touch of humour. ‘It’s like horror films – they’re sometimes really scary, but to me it’s a titillating sort of scariness,’ she says. ‘I always want my work to be kind of funny.’ Unlike method actors, she is sufficiently aware of the distance between herself and her fictional subjects to enjoy the shooting process for its own sake. ‘Some people assume I get all worked up,’ she says, ‘but the value of making still images is that I can go through a range of feelings within a split second. I’m constantly experimenting with which direction to take.’ This isn’t to say she is entirely emotionally removed from her characters: ‘I definitely have an attachment to all of them – I’m actually rather fond of some of the weirder ones.’
While most of Sherman’s subjects are figments of her imagination, in rare cases they are modelled on specific women, as with her
‘When I was growing up, feminists were supposed to look natural but for me dressing up was a secret pleasure’
playful parody of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ portrait of Madame Moitessier, shot in 1989 as part of the ‘History Portraits’ series. Here, Sherman appropriates the visual language of French neoclassical painting, using prominent prosthetics to draw attention to the illusion inherent in the act of portraiture – and, often, the vanity of the sitters. This is a theme she has revisited in some of her more recent work, including her 2016 collaboration with the US edition of Harper’s Bazaar, for which she produced a set of images satirising the so-called street-style stars who parade around at fashion shows in head-to-toe designer outfits. ‘Some of them get out of their limo, like, two blocks away just so they can walk through this gamut of photographers to have their picture taken,’ she says, laughing.
How, I wonder, does Sherman herself feel about the fashion world, given that these days she is more in demand than most of the fame-hungry poseurs who have been the subject of her gentle mockery? ‘I can take it in small doses,’ she says. ‘I mean, sometimes it’s fun, but those shows can be brutal – it’s insane, the level of celebrity and paparazzi.’ She recently went to her friend Marc Jacobs’ wedding, but says that she hardly saw him amid the crowds. ‘I felt like I was more of a fly on the wall and wished afterwards that I’d been taking pictures. That’s the funny thing about my phone – I never think of using it as a camera.’
She may not have the snap-happy instincts of a digital native, but Sherman has more than proved her mastery of social media. Always quick to embrace the potential of new technology, she moved away from film in the late 1990s, enjoying the freedom that a digital camera gave her to change backgrounds or make other subtle adjustments, but her enthusiastic foray into Instagram came as a surprise to everyone. Since 2017, she has delighted her followers (now 250,000 and counting) with a series of bizarre and imaginative Insta-portraits in which she uses apps such as Facetune to distort her features beyond recognition: in one shot, she appears in a hospital setting with oxygen tubes up her nostrils; in another, her lips, eyes and brows are turned a ghoulish black. Though Sherman herself dismisses these images as ‘ just a bit of fun’, it is hard not to grant them some significance in the context of her back catalogue, which effectively prophesied our modern obsession with self-representation, and all the deception that entails. As for the phenomenon of the selfie, Sherman professes to be mystified by its popularity – ‘I don’t think the cell phone is actually very flattering for the face’ – and has concerns about the impact of facial filtering on women growing up today. ‘I’ve read about young people getting plastic surgery to try to look more like the selfies they post,’ she says. ‘That’s a little scary.’
This is about as close as Sherman will come to spelling out the social critique that is implicit in her so much of her photography. ‘I mean, I’m not working just blindly – I’m definitely aware of the things I’m addressing,’ she says. ‘But I prefer to let the work be the advocate that I’m not, because I don’t feel I’m that articulate when it comes to standing up and making declarations, or writing things on Instagram.’ The same goes for her brand of feminism, which is very much about showing rather than telling. ‘I’d rather express how I feel in this subtle, sneaking-in-from-behind way than by hammering a message over someone’s head,’ she explains.
Like most women artists, Sherman has experienced the frustration of commanding lower prices than her male counterparts (‘I’m very well respected now, and yet I still notice that in auctions the guys are selling more’), but has no intention of giving up the fight. For her latest project, a collaboration with Stella McCartney, she has deliberately blurred the lines between genders by dressing up in a fluid combination of pieces from the fashion designer’s menswear and womenswear collections, selected from across multiple seasons to create a sense of timelessness. ‘The works that she’s produced are astonishing,’ says McCartney. ‘They feel fresh, modern and a new direction for her.’
As for which direction Sherman will take next, the possibilities are endless. She is currently pondering a project that would see her transform her Instagram photos into a physical tapestry (‘I love the idea of the weave as its own kind of pixellation’), as well as exploring the idea of returning to film-making – something she hasn’t done since she directed the comedy-horror flick Office Killer in 1997. ‘At a certain point I tend to get bored because I feel like I’m just repeating the same old things,’ she says, ‘but then I’ll discover something different to try, which is always fun.’ More than that she won’t reveal, which perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, if there’s one thing Cindy Sherman is good at, it’s keeping us guessing…
‘Cindy Sherman’ is at the National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk) from 27 June to 15 September.