Cindy Sherman: Long live the Red Queen!

What is a legend to you? To us, legends transcend their time and place, leaving a lasting influence on our culture, society, or their field of work. Cindy Sherman certainly counts among them. As one of the most influential figures in contemporary art, known for her innovative works of art, she challenges our ideas of identity, gender and female archetypes again and again. In 2024, Cindy Sherman turned 70. It’s time we dedicate a tribute to her.

What is a legend to you? To us, legends transcend their time and place, leaving a lasting influence on our culture, society, or their field of work. Cindy Sherman certainly counts among them. As one of the most influential figures in contemporary art, known for her innovative works of art, she challenges our ideas of identity, gender and female archetypes again and again. In 2024, Cindy Sherman turned 70. It’s time we dedicate a tribute to her.

In evolutionary biology, Leigh Van Valen proposed a hypothesis in 1973 according to which biological species must constantly produce new adaptive efforts and further developments due to ongoing competitive pressure in order to avoid extinction. Inspired by a quote from the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Behind The Mirrors (the sequel to Alice in Wonderland), Van Valen called his theoretical approach the Red Queen hypothesis.

In his work, Van Valen compared the lifespan of different groups of organisms. Some versions of the theory of evolution state that a long-standing group is much less likely to become extinct because it had much more time to optimally adapt to the environment. Van Valen noted that the actual environmental conditions for each group obviously change (usually: deteriorate) at an almost constant rate, so that a long history of successful adaptations is of no use to the group in the future. They must constantly change in order to maintain the position they have achieved.

In Lewis Carroll’s children’s book, Alice Behind The Mirrors, the Red Queen bends down to the curious Alice and explains the nature of Looking-Glass Land to her: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”^[1]

It was exactly one year earlier, in 1972, that Cynthia Morris Sherman embarked on her visual arts studies at Buffalo State University and initially devoted herself to painting. She soon realized that she had reached the limits of the medium and wanted, needed, to break new ground. The young female artists of the time felt the need to break free from encumbered media, as impressively demonstrated in 2015 by the exhibition “Feminist Avant-Garde. Art of the 1970s from the Verbund Collection” at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna. The Austrian art critic and curator Gabriele Schor, for example, described photography as a “historically unencumbered medium,” which was to become the means of expression of choice “because it allowed them to work carefree, spontaneously and directly.”^[2]

It was around this time that Cindy Sherman met the artist Robert Longo, with whom she would be linked for many years to come. In search of the right means of expression for her artistic concerns, Longo recommended that she would document the process of “dolling up for parties.” This was the birth of the “Untitled Film Stills” series, which soon heralded Cindy Sherman’s international breakthrough.

Mass media as playground and amphitheater for socially critical poses

The following two decades have gone down in recent art history as “the amazing decades.”^[3] Alongside Robert Longo, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman is one of the most important artists of the “Pictures Generation,” named after the five-person group exhibition Pictures from 1977, organized by the art historian and AIDS activist Douglas Crimp. These years were characterized by the aftermath of the 1968 movements, the AIDS crisis, and processes of social change through new media, new theories and new realities of life.

In the field of photography, chroniclers such as Nan Goldin and Katharina Sieverding emerged from this period. In the oeuvre of both artists, the (self-)portrait plays a special role, as it appears in the spectral light of its past present.

The auto-aggressive actions of Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović also fall into this period – visualizations of structures of violence to which women, especially the female body, must constantly expose themselves. Likewise, the metaphorical and explicit works of Ana Mendieta, Valie Export and Rebecca Horn.

And Cindy Sherman? The “artist of a thousand faces,” as she was coined for the cover of Art Magazine in 2020, artistically balances between worlds. The “Pictures Generation” artist has appropriated images from advertising, film, television and magazines and used the mass media landscape as a playground and amphitheater for her socially critical poses. After her “Untitled Film Stills,” Sherman produced the next role models with “Centerfolds” and “History Portraits” (1988-1990), the latter, some of which were entirely invented, others with specific historical references, for example to Old Master paintings. As a Madonna, courtesan or aristocratic youth, she stares out into the world from her consecutively numbered portraits. Although she has taken on every role she has ever portrayed and works in isolation in her studio, Sherman refuses to be associated with selfies and is also extremely reluctant to talk about her artistic work. Cindy Sherman, one of the world’s most famous photographic artists, puts her own ego in the background in order to hold up a mirror to an omnipresent mirrored present full of self-promoting narcissists.

Her penetrating gaze makes her an artistic omnipresence of our present

In the “Disasters” series (1986-1989), with grouped prostheses and earth as a reaction to the AIDS crisis, and in “Sex Pictures” (1992), with mannequins and prostheses arranged for sex games, bodies as objects increasingly became the focus of Sherman’s artistic exploration. With this preliminary work, she once again anticipated developments that would only be given a name in public discourse a short time later. These two series in particular manifest the New Feminist Materialism, which has since been established as an essential direction of feminist art and has been articulated in the theories of Donna Harraway, Karen Barad and Elizabeth Grosz since the 2000s. The criticism that was formulated of ecofeminist ways of thinking in the 1970s and 80s is reflected in these approaches of the new feminist materialism and, as it were, names the evolution that Cindy Sherman’s work has undergone during this time. In one of her most recent series, Sherman “dared” to consistently stage men for the first time, using pieces from the men’s and women’s collections of friend and fan Stella McCartney.

Jenny Schrödl has divided the more recent trends in the bifurcation of the history of feminism and art from the 1970s to the present day into four central focal points,^[4] in the scope of which she places new forms of cyber feminism and the exploration of new media and technologies in the tradition of Sherman’s use of unencumbered media (photography and camera). Media that are not rooted in patriarchal hegemonies, that are not in the tradition of “old masters” and can be occupied by new ideas that we now call queer feminist and intersectional. Then as now, the formula with which Sherman summarizes the impact of her experimental art applies: “We felt free to experiment because we didn’t expect to make money with our work.”

To stay with the metaphor of technical aids, Cindy Sherman’s artistic practice could probably best be compared to an electron microscope. While on the one hand she magnifies (literally puts something under the magnifying glass) and inspects it on the surface, she simultaneously dissects what she is examining and penetrates it to its core. It is this penetrating gaze that makes her an artistic omnipresence of our present.

^[1] Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll: “Alice im Spiegelland”, Hrsg.: World Public Library Association. Sesam-Verlag, Wien / Leipzig / New York 1923, II. Kapitel: Der Garten der lebenden Blumen, S. 26 (englisch: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. London 1871. Übersetzt von Helen Scheu-Riesz).

^[2] Gabriele Schor: “Die feministische Avantgarde. Eine radikale Umwertung der Werte” In: dies. (Hg.): Feministische Avantgarde. Kunst der 1970er Jahre aus der Sammlung Verbund, Wien. München et al. 2015, S. 17-67, hier S. 31.

^[3] Moira Roth: “The Amazing Decade. Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980”, Los Angeles 1983.

^[4]  Jenny Schrödl: “Feministische Kunst der Gegenwart. Zentrale Schwerpunkte, Wandlungen und Kontinuitäten” in: Kunstforum International, Bd. 292, S. 88-99, hier S. 97