Nobody’s Here But Me Cindy Sherman’s Photography and the Negotiation of a Feminine Space

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With thanks to Lone Bertelsen

Nobody’s Here But Me Cindy Sherman’s Photography and the Negotiation of a Feminine Space

Lone Bertelsen

Subjectivity does not only produce itself through the psychogenetic stages of psychoanalysis or the ‘mathemes’ of the Unconscious, but also in large-scale social machines of language and the mass-media – which can not be described as human.

Félix Guattari l

Cindy Sherman has performed jn front of her own camera since the late Seventies and has produced a wide variety of stylised still images – mostly of women – dealing with the issue of female subjectivity. In 1994 she collaborated with Mark Stokes in the production of his documentary Nobody’s here but me – a production as slick, complex and visually impressive as Sherman’s images themselves.

Sherman’s photographs cite, imitate and combine elements from a variety of sources. Her early works comment on the relationship between popular culture and the mass media – Hollywood B-movies and film noir, advertising, fashion and femininity – and draw on the photographic styles used in these. A later series, partly informed by horror movies and fairy tales, present images which are more disturbing and abject. These have a more fluid quality and are. as Rosalind Krauss identifies, often horizontal in composition? Some of the works (such as Untitled #175, 1987) seem to appropriate the techniques of abstract expressionism. In these, Sherman literally changes our perspective, forcing us away from the phallic and vertical, in which sublimation is inscribed, towards a de-sublimatory horizontal field.3 The subjects of these abject photographs are constructed from mucous-like fluids, blood, mould and vomit; half eaten and rotting food; masks of old people; baby dolls; and finally, images of dispersed body parts shattered, or barely visible, hidden beneath the ground.

Another series parodies ‘historical portraits’. In these, Sherman points her camera towards ‘high art’ and its idealisation and fetishisation of the (female) portrait. Sherman’s portraits can be seen as a critique of the supposedly pure form of the historical portrait. As Laura Cottingham has identified, she presents herself in the ‘style of David, Goya, Titian, Ingres, Holbein and others”.4 However, her portraits differ by having huge (fake) noses, dark circles under their eyes, fake breasts and other protheses strapped onto their torsos. 5

Finally, her recent work, on what Rosalind Krauss has called the ‘Sex pictures’, is partly inspired by the 1930s surrealist Hans Bellmer’s series of photographs ‘La puppée’ – which show a victimised (seemingly raped) female doll. 6 While Sherman’s own body no longer appears in this series, the images are very provocative and confrontational. They show dismembered life size dolls7 in graphic and sexually suggestive positions. However, the photographs are such an exaggeration of Bellmer’s ‘originals’ that they appear ironic, and even darkly humorous.

I  CRITIQUE, SUBJECTIVITY AND PRODUCTION

Since Sherman has made few statements about herself and her photography she has left discussion of her work relatively open. This has resulted in the production of a substantial and varied body of writing about her photographic images. Although Stokes operates outside the written genre of art criticism, his documentary extends elements of this discourse.

Nadine Lemmon, a significant critic of Sherman’s, has argued that Sherman’s photographs (and it seems poststructuralist thought and postmodern practises in general) cannot challenge and ‘deconstruct oppressive “ways of seeing “8, or of representing women, but end up simply affirming these. She claims that Sherman’s images can have no critical force. Quoting Mira Schor, Lemmon asserts that Sherman’s photographs, or more precisely, her ‘negative representations’, are:

…disturbingly close to the way men have traditionally experienced or fantasized women… Her images are successful partly because they do not threaten phallocracy, they reiterate and confirm it. 9

Lemmon suggests that even though Sherman’s images depict a multiplicity of identities, her images do not avoid fixing woman in an identity produced by a masculine desire. What further appears to be at stake for Lemmon is that the contemporary concern with theory – combined with a rejection of the notion of the unified, reasoning, subject – serves ‘to foreclose diaJecticaJ reasoning and critical questioning.” 10 Not surprisingly, many considerations of Sherman’s photography have been informed by both traditions of psychoanalytic and post-structuralist considerations of postmodernity. While aspects of some of these can be understood, at the very least, as somewhat problematic for feminism, I cannot agree with Lemmon when she appears to suggest that (cute) ‘wordplays have come to replace the critical’11 in contemporary cultural production; and, similarly, that Sherman’s double mimesis has no critical potential. In short, Lemmon argues that the ‘Sherman Phenomenon is an alarming symbol of our current cultural and critical situation.’12

Despite the force of such criticism, a careful study of Sherman’s images, and the analyses advanced in Nobody’s here but me, enable us to identify Lemmon’s failure to recognise the possibility that a photographic (mimetic) aesthetic might destabilise the centred humanist (male) subject – a subject which itself relies on the devaluation of its opposite for maintaining its central, stable, reasoning position. This is not to say that a number of postmodern readings of Sherman’s photographs do not ignore the critical aspects of her photography they do – it is rather to suggest that Sherman’s photographs, often described as postmodern themselves, do in fact have a critical force. The critical aspect of Sherman’s work has been recognised. in different ways, by writers ranging from Judith Williamson to Rosalind Krauss. Nobody’s here but me is an extension of that more positive discourse about Sherman’s photography, identifying the critical potential(s) of her images through both spoken statements and the subtler, complementary discourse of its visual style.

II  RE-REPRESENTING CINDY SHERMAN AND HER PHOTOGRAPHS

Nobody’s here but me emphasises the manner in which Sherman refuses to impose any ultimate truth value onto her images of woman. She leaves the interpretation of her own work very open-ended. On a number of occasions in the film she comes close to declaring that she does not really know what her photographs are about. As she states at one point:

I definitely incorporate a lot of ambiguity and ambivalence in the work…it is hard to describe the way I work because I work so intuitively…l often don’t know what I am going after until after it is shot or after I have done several shots…and sometimes I don’t know about what I have done until like I read what somebody has written, so it is hard for me to really analyse the work…

The documentary attempts to escape imposing any fixed value onto Sherman’s images and departs from constructing (the personality of) the artist as the primary’ source of creative expression. It neither presents a single, authoritative account of Sherman’s photographs nor does it attempt to portray the artist herself at the moment of artistic creation or inspiration. While Sherman remains a principal focus for the documentary, the film comprises a rich visual juxtaposition of various visual representations of women: extracts from contemporary and 1950s feature films; sequences from Super-8 home movies; photographic snapshots; and images and impressions of urban life and the cultural politics that have influenced Sherman’s still images. The film also includes images of Sherman dressing up as the subject for her own photography, preparing her studio, and on-screen commentaries by feminist writer Judith Williamson, friend and artist Robert Longo, and actor/performers Eric Bogosian and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Longo provides us with a useful insight into the context of Sherman’s work with his comment that, as a consequence of Reaganism and Thatcherism, there was a return to traditional values in the mid to late 1980s which was symptomatised in the art world by a return to painting. Longo calls these paintings ‘expressionistic garbage’. done by men, and points to the fact that these artworks got the financial and public support. He further suggests that Sherman’s more violent pictures came out of that period as ‘she really wanted to pound the fuck out of somebody’ because a female artist and photographer like herself was not getting the same support as the male painters. However, Longo is also quick to point out that, on the other hand, Sherman’s own photographs have a ‘pictorial quality… in the nature of traditional art history’. The documentary reinforces Longo’s account of the critical aspect of Sherman’s photography by disclosing how Sherman sees her later ‘Sex pictures’ as partly a reaction towards the conservatism of the NEA (the national endowment of the arts). They withdrew funding from a number of ‘controversial art projects’ around 1990. Curtis suggests that Sherman was poking ‘fun at the NEA’ in that she was making ‘pornography out of plastic’13. Williamson, one of the first feminist writers to engage with Sherman’s photographs, also emphasises the value in her work. In the film, she states that while she does not necessarily like ‘all the scenarios which are portrayed in the images’, she does like to get ‘the opportunity to think about them and to see the process by which images of women are produced’.

In amongst all this, almost as part of it, Sherman’s photographs are represented. Her still images most often fiJJ the TV screen. They emerge as part of a series of moving shots of New York, Central Park. night life, a 1950s movie or the film Halloween (starring Curtis). The photographs are also shown juxtaposed between advertisements on the television, shots of the street, the place where her photographs were taken, urban life in general; or Sherman feeding her parrot, walking the street, shopping for props, visiting a video shop or setting up in her studio. On the other hand, sometimes Sherman’s photographs do not fill the entire TV screen. They are sometimes re-presented hanging in galleries or in museums; or reproduced in the pages of books, on the cover of the journal Screen, or as illustrations of articles about Sherman’s work (by Laura Mulvey and Judith Williamson for example). The photographs are also presented circled on a proof sheet together with many other unpublished images and finally shown as slides.

The display of Sherman’s images is accompanied by various sounds. The words and the music from a crime scene in a B-movie or horror film at times serve to make Sherman’s more disturbing stills less distressing. At other times we hear the noise from a helicopter or the seductive male voice accompanying a 1950s advertisement. We also hear sounds from television programs and music ranging from a relaxed trumpet piece to a ‘grunge’ rock track. During one sequence, Bogosian reads extracts from the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale ‘Fitcher’s bird’ that Sherman was asked to illustrate for Vanity Fair. The tale is about an evil wizard who steals children – in this case little girls, and dismembers their bodies. However, the heroine of the story – the youngest of three sisters (the two oldest are cut up by Fitcher) assembles all the body parts, burns down Fitcher’s house, with him in it, and brings the children back to life. Immediately before and during the voice-over narration, the film shows images of Sherman putting an anatomical doll together. The suggestion is that Sherman fills the same role as the youngest sister in the Grimms’ tale and brings things to life from dismembered parts.

Nobody’s here but me exemplifies an approach which was advocated by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin called for the producer of aesthetic works to think about and reflect on her or his ‘position in the production process’14 and argued that once this occurs ‘the mind which believes only in its own magic strength will disappear’.15 While Stokes’ film places a great deal of importance on the artist herself, it succeeds in reflecting on Sherman’s position in the process of production, through the inter-discursive play and juxtaposition mentioned above, and focuses on the ‘speaking positions’ of a woman photographer in contemporary America. The film shows Sherman placing herself, as a model, within ‘the representational crisis”16 she is documenting. Priscilla Pitts argues that Sherman’s photographs ‘actively focus on how notions of selfhood are constructed through the visual order, particularly in the case of women’17 and contends that ‘Sherman’s gender is in every way crucial to her project.’ 18 It is this that is the aspect of her photography which is made most prominent in Stokes’ documentary. Although Sherman states that ‘as a person’ she is not ‘overtly political’ or a ‘heavy duty feminist’, she also stresses that political and feminist concerns come out in her photographs.
III COPIES OF COPIES OF…

In one sequence in the film, Sherman is shown flicking through a magazine, with the television on. She tells us that she grew up in America in the 1950s, as one of the first generations who spent large portions of their childhood watching television, and comments that ‘l would say my inspiration comes from a lot of the media related influences around me…’ She goes on to state that her motivation for the Untitled Film Stills comes out of her frustration with the stereotypical role models from her childhood, arguing that:

any woman from that period was some kind of… role model not really in any kind of positive way that inspired me but that probably frustrated me ultimately in terms of what was expected of me as a young girl turning into a woman…Hollywood actresses were part of that just because they were on the television set.

The female figures she portrays in her early work resemble female actors from various Hollywood films, yet, as Laura Cottingham points out, The Untitled Film Stills do not refer to any film in particular. 19 Sherman concurs, stating that,

I don’t really think in terms of a full narrative… What I am trying to do in that series – what I was trying to do – was to make people make up stories about the character.

Sherman adds that while many of the women in the film stills look ‘almost expressionless’ upon closer scrutiny we realise that ‘they have either just experienced something or are about to experience something’. The images do not in themselves provide a full narrative. Sherman states that it is ‘sort of left up in the air what is going to happen’. This is perhaps appropriate since, as Barthes has written: ‘the photograph itself is in no way animated (l do not believe in “lifelike” photographs), but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure’.20 The photographs themselves invite the viewer to enter the image, and to construct a story about what is happening. Stokes’ documentary constantly plays at this itself, setting up various scenarios by showing fragments from a number of visual genres featuring women.

Krauss argues that in the Film Stills of women reflected in the mirror, the viewer is almost included in the photograph. (This inclusion is particularly obvious in Untitled Film Still 1977 and ’81, 1978). There is a certain depth to these mirror photographs and ‘continuity established by the focaJ Jength of the lens creates an unimpeachable sense that her look at herself in the mirror reaches past her reflection to include the viewer as well’.21 In a sense this makes the viewer self-conscious and uncomfortable. There is no space for a distant, neutrally observing spectator. In contrast to the popular images that inspired the Untitled Film Stills, we can not passively consume Sherman’s photographs. We realise that even though her Untitled Film Stills are formed by the signifiers of mass and popular culture they also resist these signifiers. By miming, quoting and combining from various cultural texts, which are often phallocentric, Sherman’s mimesis, like a number of feminists texts (such as Irigaray’s for example22), comments on and intervenes in these discourses and produces new meaning; her photo-images change what they appropriate.

As mentioned earlier, many of Sherman’s images are re-presented by Stokes as framed by the television set itself. Stokes in a sense turns Sherman’s photographs into television, and runs the risk of perhaps exploiting the artist and her work for the sake of making ‘TV Art’ (a term Philip Hayward uses in the introduction to this volume). However, what happens when Sherman’s photographs are re-represented by the medium that she has turned into art23 is that the subversive aspects of her photographs sometimes become even more obvious. As an example, in filmed shots of two of the mirror photographs (Untitled Film Still #14, 1978 and ’56, 1980) Sherman’s look at herself in the mirror is extended to further include the viewer by clever movement of the film camera. As mentioned, Sherman’s photographs transform various visual representations while she is appropriating them. Likewise reproduction by television changes Sherman’s still photographs. Yet this change does not necessarily contradict or exploit the photographs themselves but can in fact further ‘mobilise’ their critical force and productive potential.

By showing such a variety of stereotyped filmed shots of women, Stokes’ documentary supports Krauss’ argument that Sherman’s photographs are not addressing ‘real life’ women but stereotyped film stills, which are themselves already a reproduction. Krauss rightly refers to Sherman’s photographs as copies of copies, as simulacra. But Sherman’s copies are, in a sense, such ‘bad’ copies that we can not recognise an original film on which they could be based. We might therefore comprehend that the ‘original’ or ‘ideal’ – the (supposedly) signified – does not exist. However, although Sherman’s photographs work on the level of the signifier, her images are not simply a celebration of ‘the free flow of the signifier’ where anything goes. Rather, the whole process of representation (and the artist herself) cannot be seen as separate from that which is represented. As Krauss emphasises:

that Sherman is both subject and object of these images is important to their conceptual coherence. For the play of stereotype in her work is a revelation of the artist herself as stereotypical. It functions as a refusal to understand the artist as the source of originality, a fount of subjective response, a condition of critical distance from a world which it confronts but of which it is not a part.a

IV MULTIPLICITY AND DIFFERENCE

‘I am not ‘I’, I am not, I am not one. As for woman, try and find out…’

Luce Irrigaray25

In Nobody’s here but me Sherman says that her images should not be understood as self-portraiture nor as the manifestation of her own unconscious desires. She never sees herself in her photographs. Barthes, in his essay on photography wrote:

once I feel myself observed by the Jens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing’, I instantaneously make another body for myself. I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice. (my emphasis)26

The same physical material – Sherman’s own body – until very recently recurs in all the photographs. Yet, the evidence of Sherman’s body in each photograph reveals the immense possibility of a multiplicity of possible feminine differences. Sherman never appears the same. We find no normative referent to the ‘real woman’ in her art. The figure in Sherman’s still images can not be pinned down. She changes from still to still. The ‘subject’ as centre is absent in her work. I suggest that Sherman is a maker of difference. Her photographs exemplify the multiple possibilities of a female (bodily) becoming. As Rosi Braidotti. following Deleuze might put it: this is the creation of the self as a nomadic subject.27

Nobody’s here but me re-presents us with a large number of Sherman’s photographs over a very short period of time. As a result it is made obvious that Sherman’s photographic image (mostly of women) changes from still to still. The photographs, as the title Nobody’s here but me itself suggests, can be perceived as an example of the ‘recurrence of difference in repetition! The documentary title draws our attention to the fact that only Sherman is here yet we are presented with a rich variety of ‘Shermans’ recurring in different images. It follows that Sherman’s photographs work against setting up an ideal of the female self. The photographs do not represent the subject as a stable point of reference and reject the notion that there is an essential or original femininity or authentic self which can be uncovered, represented or created. There is no feminine absolute signified. As the documentary illustrates, Sherman can only rearrange the relations between the existing, often misogynist, fetishised signifiers to set up a new aesthetic horizon which makes possible women’s multiple possible differences, becomings or recurrences. The multiple cannot simply be discovered but must be produced. As Deleuze and Guattari assert: ‘In truth it is not enough to say ‘long live the multiple’, the multiple.. must be made’.28

Irigaray, amongst others, argues that women’s multiplicity of differences has been negated by mass culture’s (often phallocentric), objectifying, representations and constructions of women in terms of a masculine imagination, fear and morphology.29 Yet Sherman through miming, in a style not dissimilar to Irigaray, interrupts, and is able to produce a space for difference in, what she appropriates. This is the central focus of the documentary, which largely portrays Sherman as a woman negotiating a culture which initially offers her little space. Thus her fear of, and means of coping with, the New York street is dealt with at length, even in the way she is framed by the movie camera tentatively looking out from her doorway. The documentary also dwells upon her love of horror films, her anger at the NEA, the male domination of the art world, and so on. It could be contended, in fact, that the way in which Sherman negotiates this lack of cultural space becomes the core issue of the documentary. It could also be seen to be the core issue of her work.

V IMAGINATION AND WONDER

Sherman stresses at the very start of Nobody’s here but me that from the beginning of her photographic career she was never that interested in photography itself nor interested in capturing the world as we see it. Sherman points out that her interests lie more in the area of capturing what we imagine and can not see through the camera. She says that she is trying to show ‘what you may perhaps never see’ in order to capture ‘what is in somebody’s imagination’. This is an important point because according to Irigaray, our, primarily, visual framework for formulating the self is especially important to the manner in which women have been symbolised, objectified and stereotyped in very negative terms. Irigaray writes ‘imagine that woman imagines and the object loses its fixed, obsessional character’.30 This possible female imagination is precisely what Sherman’s photographs make the viewer aware of through their manipulation of stereotypes. As she says, she is interested in capturing what is not simply visual nor representable.

In order to emphasise the importance of Sherman’s creation of feminine ‘imaginings’ it is useful to refer to Irigaray’s considerations of the cultural space allowed for a feminine expression of both wonder and anxiety. Irigaray has argued that in our Oedipal, visual economy we need to replace envy and lack with wonder. In her early writings Irigaray draws our attention towards recognising the dominance of the look (vision) and of separation in Freud’s theory and she argues that his theory is to a large extent symptomatic of our whole culture. Irigaray attempts to create a space for touch, nearness and a recognition of the other. In a later reading of Descartes, Irigaray reconceptualises Descartes’ notion of wonder and suggests that wonder must signify (sexual) difference and be faithful ‘to becoming… without letting go the support of bodily inscription’.31

Freud (and later psychoanalytic theory) has argued that the first passion is not based on wonder but on drives which lead to (penis) envy in the case of the female and fear (of castration) in the case of the male – and thus the ‘Oedipus complex… is the keystone of his system’.32 Irigaray asserts that, within a psychoanalytic discourse based on castration and envy, it is never easy for woman to come to terms with her lack and therefore it is virtually impossible for women to sublimate their excessive libidinal drives into other areas of life, such as artistic production. (Indeed, it is questionable if they have any at all since Freud argues that the libido is always masculine.) As Irigaray asserts, ‘everything he has told us about becoming a woman explains why ‘femininity,’ even successfully achieved, cannot sublimate’.33

A large number of the various facial expressions of the woman in Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series and early colour photographs are of wonder rather than of envy (see Untitled Film Still, 21, 1978 for instance). This replacement creates a space which allows woman her own imagination, one that is not constituted through envy, separation and lack, but rather through wonder itself. Such photographs resist the sublimation of ‘masculine castration anxiety’ onto women. The photographs thereby motivate the production of desires and imaginations appropriate to women themselves and further make possible their subsequent sublimation. As mentioned previously, if we scrutinise Sherman’s Untitled photographs collectively, as Stokes’ film does, we can see that Sherman’s photographic images present the female self as a ‘nomadic subject’. However, it is not satisfactory simply to celebrate difference and multiplicity because, even as a ‘nomadic subject’, woman can still serve a masculine desire and end. The notion of wonder is therefore crucial. The expression of wonder in these photographs is a recognition of the different spaces occupied by the ‘subject in wonder’. Wonder recognises rather than negates the desire and alterity of the other. Furthermore, without a recognition of difference (both within the self and between self and other), wonder would simply not exist.

It now becomes obvious how the emergence of the expression of wonder on the faces of the female figures in Sherman’s photographs which themselves derive from stereotypical images of women – have a powerful effect. The subtle appearances of wonder in Sherman’s appropriations opens up a space for participation.

VI DEATH AS HORIZON

The Sherman image we are first presented with in Nobody’s here but me (Untitled #153, 1985) occurs on a number of occasions. It shows a moist, almost plastic-like figure of a dead woman lying on the ground. The recurrence of the photograph supports Sherman’s own ideas about the connection between her work and death, which are also the last ideas presented in the documentary.

Throughout Nobody’s here but me we glimpse many fragments from various horror films. Towards the end of the film Sherman says that they are her favourite movies. She further discusses how living in Manhattan and reading the paper makes you think about death every day. She informs us that when a student, who was writing a thesis on her photographs, suggested that a lot of her work was about death, Sherman thought that the student ‘was totally off the wall’ (although she also says that she was producing some of the more disturbing images at that time). However, now Sherman thinks that perhaps the student was right. She says that horror makes ‘you prepare to deal with potential violence and potential death’ and ‘I…try to come to terms with that in the work somehow’.

According to Irigaray, men have projected their own desires and their own fears about death onto women and have, through this projection, attempted to control the most uncontrollable and unrepresentable – which is death. Man has constructed woman as representative of his own fears. Because the representation of woman repeatedly has come to serve the male ‘libido’ and the male ‘death drive’, women have been cut off from experiencing their own fears about death. The ‘death drives can be worked out only by man’.34 Woman comes to function as place ‘for the sublimation and, if possible, mastery of the work of death’.36 In arguing this, Irigaray is connecting the Freudian understanding of the castration complex with his theory of the death drives.

I have already discussed how a replacement of envy with wonder allows for a female imagination to be conceived of. However, a symbolisation of their own specific fears would further enable women to come to terms with this darker side of life. Irigaray writes on numerous occasions that woman in our culture is cut of from her beginning and end. By experiencing their own horror, abjection and potential death women would be able to pose death as horizon and end of life and be able to ‘sublimate’ their own fears about death onto a horizon. This would allow women to come to terms with their own fears and horrors so as to live life.

In the aesthetic/photographic production of difference we can not simply create positive images of women, as the abject can not be avoided. It too has been denied to women and needs to be imagined and represented.37 In a sense Sherman’s photographs recover the abject for the feminine rather than making the feminine the abject for the masculine. Sherman’s photographs begin to construct the possibility of a feminine ‘death drive’. Her abject images work against the representation of woman as fetish. They also challenge the distinction between the inside and the outside of the body. The photographs have become fluid, slimy and mucous-like,38 in short – disgusting. These grotesque horizontal images de-sublimate in order to disrupt the sublimation of a masculine abjection and fear onto woman.

The representation of woman’s death has often been in the hands of the voyeur. By making death the final issue in the documentary, Nobody’s here but me acknowledges that, by giving woman access to her own end, Sherman’s images take that power away. Furthermore, by opening the film with Sherman’s statement of her concern to capture what we imagine and cannot see – ie what is in somebody’s imagination – the documentary asserts that Sherman’s images are not uncritical and they do not fix woman in a male desire.

Throughout Nobody’s here but me Stokes remains a shadowy authorial presence. In all but one instance Stokes’ gender (and gender position) remains submerged. This moment is a troublesome one however, one when his discourse slips. Although Stokes remains invisible throughout the film, his voice intrudes on to the soundtrack when he interrupts Robert Longo to ask a question. This is the only time his voice is heard. Unfortunately perhaps, his engagement with Longo, rather than with any of the female interviewees, can be read as an identification between two males involved in Sherman’s advocacy – a ‘tuned-in’ communication between two subjects similarly positioned with regard to Sherman’s discourse(s). Although Longo makes some interesting points about her work, he also is the only commentator to discuss aspects of her personal life and he takes on an almost paternalistic attitude to Sherman herself. The film does not simply pass over these aspects, Stokes’ intrusion at this point se es to emphasise the authority of the masculine voice and masculine ad ocacy of Sherman’s work. The irony is that the (otherwise) carefully constructed documentary – and Sherman’s photographs themselves — do not need any such intervention to make their point. As I have argued, the documentary succeeds in foregrounding the critical force of Sherman’s images and avoids using them simply as illustrations to support a biography and/or critical thesis. The film’s success resides in its presentation of Sherman’s images as agents of discursive production which intervene in representational traditions and standard subject-object relations. Presented in this manner, Sherman’s images can be understood to demonstrate how the subject is addressed and can be altered, even changed within, and by, mimetic artistic production. This makes it explicit that Sherman’s photographs do not reinforce stereotypical representations but are in fact productive of new subjective possibilities for women.

NOTES

I Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis;An ethico-aesthetic paradigm (trans Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis), Sydney. Power Publications, 1995, p 9.

  • For a discussion of the importance of the horizontal composition in some of Sherman’s photographs see Rosalind Krauss’s text to Cindy Sherman 1975-93, New York. Rizzoli, 1993.
  • See Krauss ibid for a discussion of the operation of de-sublimation in Sherman’s photographs.
  • Laura Cottingham, ‘Cindy Sherman’ Contemporaneo May 1990, vol 3, no 5, p 93.
  • For an interesting discussion of how the ‘horizontal axis’ imposed by the fake body parts desublimates ‘the facade of the vertical’ see Rosalind Krauss, 1993, opcit, pp173-174.
  • See Krauss, ibidfor further discussion.
  • In the documentary Sherman informs us that she obtained these dolls from an educational medical supplies centre.
  • Nadine Lemmon, ‘The Sherman Phenomenon: A Foreclosure of Dialectical Reasoning’ Discourse Winter 1993-94, vol 16 no 2. p 104.Mira Schor quoted in Lemmon ibid, pp 104-105.
  • ibid, p 100. Lemmon is not explicitly arguing that we need to maintain the humanist conception of the subject but it is implied in her call for dialectical reasoning.
  • ibid, p 113.
  • ibid, p 115.
  • Sherman further informs us that she wanted to address the issues of sexuality and consequently AIDS in these photographs.
  • Walter Benjamin The Author as Producer’ in Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography, London, Macmillan Education, 1982, p 29.

15      ibid, p 31.

  • Cathy N. Davidson. ‘Photographs of the dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorn’ South Atlantic Quarterly Fall, 1990 vol 89 no 4, Fall 1990, p 675.
  • Priscilla Pitts, ‘Cindy Sherman and Others’ in Cindy Sherman

(catalogue), Auckland, National Art Gallery New Zealand, 1989.

  • Laura Cottingham, op cit, p 93.
  • Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Trans Richard Howard), London, Fontana 1984. p 20.
  • Rosalind Krauss 1993, op cit, p 56.
  • See particularly Luce Irigaray This Sex which is Not One, (trans Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke). New York. Cornell University Press, 1985(a).
  • NB This is not to suggest that television cannot be art.
  • Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Note on Photography and the Simulacral’, October 1978, n31, p 59.
  • Luce Irigaray, 1985 (a) op cit p 120.
  • Roland Barthes, op cit pp 10-11.
  • Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994.
  • Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux (trans Brian Massumi) Minneapolis: University of Minnestota Press, 1987, p 6.
  • See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of The Other Woman (trans. Gillian C. Gill), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985(b) and Irigaray 1985(a) op cit
  • Luce Irigaray, 1985(b) op cit, p 133.
  • Luce Irigaray, An Ethics ofSexual Difference (trans Carolyn Burke and Gillian C Gill), London, The Athlone Press, 1993. p 82.
  • Luce Irigaray, ‘Luce IrigaraV(interview) in Elaine Hoffman Baruch and Lucienne J. Serrano, eds. Woman analyze Woman: In England, France and The United States, New York. New York University Press,
  • Irigaray, 1985 (b) op cit, p 123.
  • ibid, p 53.
  • ibid, pp 54-55.
  • Margaret Whitford, ilrigaray’s Body Symbolic’ in Hypatia Fall 1991 vol 6, no 3. p 105.
  • Margaret Whitford (ibid) argues that Irigaray’s abject image of the ‘mucous’ resists the Oedipal economy which links the •pleasure principle’ as well as the ‘death drives’ to the castration complex. The mucous can be interpreted as transgressive of fixed form; it is neither solid nor fluid, and it can not be seen as an object separate from the body. It blurs the distinctions between inside and outside and thus deconstructs dichotomies. The mucous is more accessible to touch than to sight as it can not be seen in Lacan’s flat mirror. Whitford suggests that Irigaray’s symbolisation of the mucous can connect women to their end and liberate them from the position of place for men’s representation of their own abjection and fear. 39 Rosalind Krauss, 1993, opcit, p193.