Feminist Art Review of Cindy Sherman Self-Portrait Essay

Feminist Art Review of Cindy Sherman Self-Portrait - Essay ExamplePerhaps the just about seminal artist operating in this cultural milieu is Cindy Sherman. Shermans art presents a pot of perspectives on the self, interrogating individuality, experience, and femininity in the postmodern world. This essay examines Shermans self- depiction Untitled pick out Still 53 arguing that it presents a comprehensive response to mainstream perspectives on identity and actively resists the male stare. Analysis go Cindy Shermans work almost exclusively explores conceptual portraits, her most notable collection is the Untitled Film Stills, 19771980. inwardly the context of this collection critics have divided the portraits into a variety of themes, still its soak up that are a number of concerns that underline all these modes of type. single of the most emblematic portraits of this collection is Shermans Untitled Film Still 53. From a strictly literal perspective, this work is a photographi c portrait of Sherman wearing a blonde wig. Her eyes are slanted indifferently to the left. She is standing in strawman of a concrete wall that is blurred from view by the brightness of a light and photographic development techniques. While this portraiture presentation is ostensibly simplistic in nub, further analysis reveals a number of deeper meanings. In deconstructing traditional representations of identity Shermans Untitled Film Still 53 resorts to one(a) of the most pervasive constructors of identity the cinema. Indeed, its been noted that in the, early work by Cindy Shermanshe reconstructs the codes of the representation of femininity in cinema (Jones, pg. 90). Within the context of this portrait one witnesses the co-optation of many elements of exposure noir cinema. In these regards, the low-key lighting and blurred focus are much in-line with this genre. While the photograph represents a recreation of this 1940s and 1950s aesthetic, the record of it being a second-ord er representation is such that it leads individuals to question the nature of these early and mid-20th century forms of gender and identity construction. Its noted that, The intellectual woman looks and analyzes, and in usurping the gaze she poses a threat to an entire system of representation (Jones, pg. 67). Such an understanding reveals perhaps the central meaning behind this specific portrait and Shermans larger body of work, namely that the artist has implemented conceptual portraits in a post-modern paradigm to interrogate previously held notions of truth and reality. Another prominent investigation of identity in this portrait is through interrogation of the male gaze. Feminist theory contains a strong tenseness on the representation of women in television and film, with Laura Mulveys the gaze a prominent area of consideration. Within Shermans portrait its clear she is exploring this feminist concern in a variety of ways. One prominent understanding, as is characteristic of Shermans Untitled Film Stills, is that, Sherman has posed herself as embodied object, photographically frozen within gendered positions of vulnerability (Jones, pg. 323). When one examines this within the outward representation of the photographic image, one of the study considerations is the mid-20th century costume and body language. Sherman