Cindy Sherman’s Bawdy Parts

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Cindy Sherman, “Untitled #588,” 2016/18

dye sublimation metal print (courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

When I was a little girl, my twin sister and I spent many happy hours torturing our Barbie dolls, cutting off their hair, drawing over their features with felt pens and dismembering them limb from limb until they resembled monstrous gargoyles.

I remember one doll, in particular. After popping her head off and subsequently losing it, I drew a face on the pink plastic bulb at the end of her neck. We dubbed her “Little Head” and kept playing. After a while, I forgot that she’d once had an entirely different face. 

I started thinking about these memories at American artist Cindy Sherman’s retrospective, organized by the National Portrait Gallery in London, in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery.

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Cindy Sherman, “Untitled Film Still #17,” 1978

silver gelatin print (courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

The Vancouver exhibition, on view until March 8, spans the length of Sherman’s storied career with 170 photographs, including the full series of 70 black-and-white images from the Untitled Film Stills she made between 1977 and 1980, the body of work that arguably catapulted her into the stratosphere of fame and celebrity. The Film Stills show her in various wigs and costumes, morphing into powder-puff sirens that embody the ethos of ’50s and ’60s Hollywood B-movies. 

A sense of play, not unlike childhood Barbie torturing, runs throughout Sherman’s portraiture, from her flappers and fashion plates to her more recent images of aging society women whose disorienting blend of kindness and cruelty leave you staggering between eroticism and repulsion. 

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Cindy Sherman, “Untitled #216,” 1989

chromogenic print (courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

In addition to makeup, wigs and costumes, Sherman began using prosthetics and other bodily implements as a means of disguise and augmentation in the late '80s in her Disasters and Fairy Tales series, as well as her History Portraits. This work not only upended conventional views of the past, both literal and metaphorical, but also cleared the way for an even darker and more disturbing batch of incarnations.  

Created in 1992, Sherman's Sex Pictures are the only photographs in the show that don’t contain representations of the artist, and, for this reason alone, they’re interesting. But they’re also unnerving in their lonely, bleak and occasionally cheerful filthiness. 

As a small warning sign in the gallery indicates, these images “may not be suitable for some visitors.” That’s putting it mildly. 

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Cindy Sherman, “Untitled #466,” 2008

chromogenic print (courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York)

Whereas most of the characters Sherman embodies demand closer inspection, the Sex Pictures send your gaze skittering away, ricocheting like a stray bullet. Looking closely implicates the viewer, the artist and the objects themselves in a ménage à trois that most folks would probably prefer to avoid. 

In an interview with the Journal of Contemporary Art, Sherman explained the work’s genesis, as well as its stranger implications: “I have this juvenile fascination with things that are repulsive. It intrigues me why certain things are repulsive. To think about why something repulses me makes me that much more interested in it.”

Some works, a mixture of prosthetics and mannequins, are posed in postures that resemble a Kama Sutra from hell. One, Untitled #250, merges porn and Halloween crone in a come-hither stance that creates an almost dizzying sense of vertiginous wrong.

Sherman disrupts the mannequins’ pink plastic surfaces with hair, tampons and sexual paraphernalia, speaking not only to airbrushed centrefolds, but also to sanitized depictions of women’s genitalia – discreet, demure, tucked away like shy forest creatures – common throughout much of art history.

Sherman sourced some body parts from anatomical catalogues meant for medical professionals. These disembodied objects were designed for would-be physicians to practise administering injections, suturing wounds or delivering babies.

But beyond the clinical aspects lurks something darker and more primeval, a Brothers Grimm lexicon of strange oddities and malevolent beings. The vaginas and vulvas in the Sex Pictures are the opposite of glass slippers – they are the trolls under the bridge, hairy, scary and apt to devour.

Since Sherman created the Sex Pictures, porn has only gotten more extreme and some images – orifices stuffed with sausages or sporting pubic wigs – have lost their ability to shock. What endures, however, is the strange blend of pathos, vulnerability and playful defiance in the eyes of the dolls. They reflect back our own darker impulses – the desire to desecrate and destroy, but still to find ways to love. ■

Cindy Sherman is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery from Oct. 26, 2019 to March 8, 2020.

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