Entrevista: dialogando con León

Cindy Sherman is simultaneously the subject and the object of her work, for she both photographs herself and acts the role of subject. Amada Cruz (2003) describes Sherman’s

Untitled Film Stills of 1977–1980 (Fig. B2) as photographic records of performative accounts of filmic images:16 _{they are “simultaneously and inseparably photographs and} performances.”17 _{While using techniques of realism, it is obvious that the scenes are staged} and “unreal”. Sherman is role-playing.

She reverses the relationship between subjectivity and representation in the portrait, when what is referred to in the portrayal is a representation and not a person portrayed by the portrait: “We see a photograph of a subject that is constructed in the image of representation.”18 _{In the History Pictures, 1989–1990, Sherman has shifted her role-playing to} “high” art. The series of thirty-five photographs mimics the look of “Old Master” portraits, and is mostly not direct reproductions. Untitled #204 (Fig. B3) is, according to Rosalind Krauss (1993), a composite projection of three ofIngre’s most celebrated sitters.19 Sherman’s depictions, then, are of types from the genre of history portraiture. She role-plays the sitter, assuming characters of nobility, mythological heroes, and madonnas that were the subjects of court painters of the past.20

15 _{Van Alphen, Art in Mind, p. 30.}

16 _{Amada Cruz, “Movies, Monstrosities, and Masks: Twenty Years of Cindy Sherman” in Amada Cruz, Elizabeth AT}

Smith and Amelia Jones, Cindy Sherman: Retrospective, Thames & Hudson, New York and London, 2003 (1997), p. 4.

17 _{Arthur Danto, Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills, Rizzoli, New York, 1990, p. 9.} 18 _{Van Alphen, Art in Mind, pp. 28-29.}

19 _{Rosalind Krauss, Cindy Sherman 1975–1993, Rizzoli, New York, 1993, p. 174.} 20 _{Amada Cruz, p. 10.}

Figure B2

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still #56, 1980 Black-and-white photograph 20.3 x 25.4 cm Edition of 10.

Figure B3

With much irony, she transforms herself with the aid of elaborate costumes, wigs, and artificial body parts that at first look opulent, but on closer inspection often project the tackiness of old costumes and fake hair and prostheses, including a number of comic and at times grotesque details. In this way, Sherman creates images that seem familiar, yet are disturbingly strange.

Sherman has taken quintessential portraits – the Old Masters portraits – that are recognisable more for being representations rather than for the people they represent, and she re-enacts them not in a re-telling, not as an interpretation, not only in parody. They are a given, taken out of their historical context and interacted with or performed in the present, and Sherman invites us to enter their framing through her play. Amelia Jones (2003) proposes that it is the modes of production, the exaggerated textures of the “subject” of the History Pictures, that absorb the viewer into the picture in a performative relationship with the subject:

Like the body/self of the depicted subject, the viewer becomes both fully embodied and fragmented, artificial. Far from being a “façade” with a “formless” interior, our embodied subjectivities become dissolved in relation to each other (the History Pictures’ subjects are opened to the subjects of viewing: we constitute one another). That is, moving away from the structures that explore or confirm an external gaze that defines the (female) subject as object, here, the pictures, with their almost sculptural but artificial “deep space,” propose subjects that point to the fact that we are never coherent in ourselves but always take meaning from the others whose significance we in turn project.21

The history that has been formative is here being unsettled. Sherman is not making a “cut” with history, but integrates her subject through difference as well as sameness. This is about difference in the sense of Derrida’s différance, that is, not pure “otherness”, but, as Stuart Hall explains, a marker setting up “a disturbance in our settled understanding or

21 _{Amelia Jones, “Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman” in Amada Cruz, Elizabeth AT Smith and Amelia Jones, Cindy}

translation of the word/concept. It sets the word in motion to new meanings without erasing the trace of its other meanings.”22

Orlan

Orlan has transformed her image in a performative portrayal of self. It is the process of her transformation and its afterlife that is the work, the portrait. In the series of nine performances (1990–1993) which are part of her ongoing self-portrait Carnal Art (Figs B4, B5), Orlan underwent surgery as an act of recreating and re-presenting her “likeness”; or, in her words, to modify the body and engage in public debate.23 _{The intent behind her} surgery was to transform herself by adopting the features of idealised representations of women from art history; the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the eyes of Gerome’s Psyche, the forehead of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the mouth of Boucher’s Europa, and the nose of a School of Fontainebleu Diana.

Orlan directed a process aimed at constructing an identity of self, made up of concurrent multiple identities, none of which is identifiable as her original self. These identities were chosen not only for their idealised beauty, but for their mythological content.24 _{Thereby, a negotiated space was created as a new identity of self; a hybrid, or} what Homi Bhabha calls an opening of “something new” that is an effect of a dialectic between “oppositional principles”, something that cannot be returned to them. That “something” becomes a different space, in which we make different presumptions and mobilise emergent, unanticipated forms of historical agency.25 _{This kind of hybridity can} further be likened to diaspora communities and individuals as cultural identities that may have similar points of historical reference or character both amongst themselves and to

22 _{Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (eds), Theorising Diaspora,}

Blackwell Publishing,UK, 2003 (1990), p. 239.

23 _{Orlan’s website, viewed 12 February, 2007, <http://www.orlan.net/>.}

24 _{Barbara Rose, “Orlan: Is it Art? Orlan and the Transgressive Act”, in Art in America, vol. 81, no. 2, February 1993, pp.}

83-125, viewed 12 February, 2007, <http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Orlan/Orlan2.html>.

Figure B4

Orlan: Carnal Art, 2002 Directed by Stephan Oriach Image from the film

35 mm, 75 mins.

Figure B5

Orlan: Carnal Art, 2002 Directed by Stephan Oriach Image from the film

their home of origin, but whose existence is also significantly defined by points of difference that are constantly negotiated and transformed.26

Orlan links the performances of her transformations to the tradition of portraiture:

“Carnal art is self-portraiture in the classical sense.”27 _{She defines them as self-portraiture in} the classical sense, where the body is being used as the canvas of twentieth century technology. By positioning herself within the genre of portraiture, by claiming her work as authentic portraiture, she challenges both the terms and the function of the genre. She is questioning whether our self-representations are about capturing an essence, any essence, interior or exterior, or whether they are contrived fabrications for marketing purposes in the media and society.28 _{She provokes her audience to question what is real and what is} fake in self-representation.