Untitled #355, 2000.
Yes, I know it’s all been theatre until now, or at least mostly theatre with a smattering of music and comedy. But it’s (mostly) my blog, and I’ve just been given a lovely juicy pile of newly-published books to review, and this is as good a place as any to do it. On my mind right now, though, is the Cindy Sherman exhibition I saw in New York last week, and if we can do books, we can do photos. Can’t we? Good.
I was only peripherally aware of Cindy Sherman before I went, but this show was one of the few personal recommendations I was armed with when I arrived in New York, so along I went and by golly, I’m glad I did, because it was one of the very best exhibitions I have ever seen. Some pieces made me laugh out loud, some made me cry, some frightened me and they nearly all pinned me to the floor in front of them, intently exploring every inch of the canvas for a sign or a message or something that would explain what it was about the picture that was drawing me in and not letting me go. As I moved from room to room my heart actually started to beat faster because I was so excited. It was a more intensely physical experience than I have ever had in a gallery before, not counting the time I walked into the knee-high barrier protecting a Jackson Pollock in Paris.
The exhibition brings together a dozen or so collections, spanning Sherman’s career since the 1970s. Almost every photograph is a portrait of Sherman herself, but there is nothing homogeneous about the collection – as I said to a friend the day after I went, still grappling for adequate words to describe what I’d seen: “All of human life is there”. Sherman uses her face and body as a canvas on which to paint characters, or feelings, or patterns, and shows us something completely new each time. It is an intimately human collection of images, each of which carries layer upon layer of thoughfulness and significance. I honestly think I could have spent as long in any one room as I actually spent at the whole thing, except that I got there with only ninety minutes before the museum closed, so I hurried myself around.
(This was partly deliberate. One of the legacies of my art history studies is an anxiety that accompanies any trip to a gallery; a fear that I’m not paying the art sufficient attention and am therefore not a Proper Art Lover. By arriving late, I can spend as long as they’ll let me looking at the art, whilst still not having to look at it for very long. I commend this approach to all art history students, although in this case it served me poorly.)
The collections which I spent the most time with were the society portraits – shiveringly, heartbreakingly familiar renditions of women trying to paper over the cracks – and the movie stills, which each tell their own little story, or at least provide the jumping-off point for the viewer to create a story of her own. In some portraits Sherman makes herself look startlingly plain; in the movie stills she is stunningly beautiful, and in every single image she gazes out at the viewer: defiant, unblushing, regal, womanly.
I have the catalogue here and it’s wonderful, but even with photos there’s no substitute for seeing the real thing in situ, so if you can possibly make it to MOMA before June 11 then you should, and if you can’t you should buy the catalogue anyway.
Update: via Twitter, Dave has pointed me at this lovely song and video, which are much more eloquent than I can possibly be here.
A long succession of thin evenings 