At Christie's auction on May 11, 2011,
A photograph sold for $3.8905 million,
It set a record for the highest number of photographic transactions that year.
Untitled No. 96, 1981
The photograph is called "Untitled 96".
The author is a female photographer from New Jersey,
Her name is Cindy Sherman,
Born in 1954,
The model in the photo is herself.
Cindy Sherman
In 1977, at the age of 23, Cindy Sherman came to New York. She began taking pictures of herself dressed in the 1950s costumes of the 1950s, and she also photographed other costumes and scenes. She explains: "These are photos that show personal emotions. "Although all of her work is modeled on herself, none of these photographs are what we usually mean by personal portraits.
Untitled film stills No. 19, 1978
In fact, she created fictional narratives that she interpreted through her forms, and with confidence in the objective authenticity of the photographic medium itself, she began to explore more characters. She often plays the stereotypical female figures that people think of, but she refers more to the female figures that appear in movies and the media than to the women we see in our daily lives. This kind of secondary appropriation is particularly attractive to the audience, and because her works are particularly able to arouse that emotional resonance.
Untitled film stills No. 7, 1978
With the Untitled Film Stills series (1977-1980), Sherman became an early exponent of postmodern parody and the art of acting. What she wants to mock is Hollywood's male chauvinism. Over the course of three years, she produced 69 still-style black-and-white portraits, typically produced by film studios to market their main cast. Sherman has always been a star in her Untitled Film Stills, but they are still a little different from self-portraits.
Untitled film stills No. 13, 1978
In typical postmodern fashion, ambiguity dominates. The artist scoured her makeup case and created a group of fictional female characters conceived and widely marketed in second-rate films, including beautiful sluts, prostitutes, sexy women, housewives, and snake and scorpion beauties. Sherman's treatment of the photographs is straightforward, and all the photographs mimic the style of the image she is imitating.
Untitled film stills No. 13, 1979
The characters she created in her photographs were so familiar that it was said that even film critics could "recognize" the films they alluded to, even though none of them were actually directly related to any of them. She said she stopped working on the series only because she had "exhausted the old subject matter."
Untitled film stills No. 21, 1978
In Stills of untitled film, written in 1978, Sherman looks anxiously ahead beyond the frame, as if threatened by something invisible and sinister. As with all her works, here the photograph gains meaning by differentiating itself from other works in the series, revealing its falsity through her repeated use of the same prop equipment.
Untitled film stills series
In addition, the viewer also knows that all the people in the photographs are Sherman himself, so the differences in these images are equivalent to some kind of labeling, indicating that they are all fake and counterfeit.
The identity of the character depicted in the image has only the referential meaning given by its contextual background, and it does not seem to have any close and real connection with Sherman himself.
Sherman is a typical postmodern artist. Like those with a penchant for collecting bits and pieces, she searched for valuable material in other people's work, played with the concept of identity, and at the same time had the postmodern habit of absorbing the methods of other art movements.
In Sherman's case, her work is largely in the field of performance art and conceptual art. Throughout Untitled Film Stills, Sherman turns herself into a medium of her own ideas, as conceptual artist Bruce Naumann did a decade ago in his Dancing or Exercising Around the Square (Square Dance).
The strength of Naumann's work is that it looks superficial and frivolous at first glance, but it becomes deep and timeless on closer inspection. The same is true in Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, which explore the gray area between illusion and manipulation like Andy Warhol's.
Sherman's film promotional stills depict fictional characters from movies that never existed, and even if there were those people, they would be fictional because the studios would have designed them to be "pretty" female stars in order to draw us to the cinema.
Through her photographs, Sherman makes extensive comments on the nature of contemporary culture.
In this culture, the trend of constantly tampering with images in order to manipulate consumers has led to society no longer being able to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and lies, truth and falsehood.
Sherman also uses a diffuse fragment narrative in her work, thus creating a multi-layered, open-ended, synchronic reading text.
She completes these creations in a postmodern language, including subtle hints and casual hints, in order to try to avoid the modernist traps of "explicit meaning" and "directness".
Untitled Movie Stills depicts a total of 69 different characters of Cindy Sherman, but do we know who Cindy Sherman is? For this work about identity, she doesn't leak much about herself. She is the star in all the images, but she doesn't exist.
This is the kind of existential contradiction that postmodernists love. This can be traced back to the surrealist mind games and the symbolist philosophies of the 1960s comedy novels, such as Kurt Vonnegut (The Fifth Slaughterhouse) and Joseph Heller (Catch-22).
Discussing a photograph, Sherman said: "I was thinking, a young girl cleaning her mother's kitchen, tearing a piece of paper from a newspaper that said, 'Are you lonely?'" ''Do you want friends?'' Or' Want to go on vacation?' She was cleaning the floor while thinking about these questions. ”
Sherman breaks the limits of identity through so many disguises. And now, these special images are also telling people that the artist has completely integrated himself into each role.
In the 1970s, Sherman was simply making small black-and-white photographs that were directly influenced by movies or TV shows, but did not refer to a particular movie or show.
In the late 1980s, she began to create with larger photographs and richer colors. Subsequently, the themes of strangeness and horror increasingly appeared in her works, and she constantly tried to broaden the themes and emotions of her works.
Sherman removed all traces of personal identity from photographs, a practice similar to the minimalist artist's reluctance to reveal himself in his work. Judd and his companions were motivated to focus the viewer's attention entirely on their work, without being distracted by worrying about the artist's character.
Sherman had a different idea. Because by keeping herself out of the way, she can disguise any character she likes: play any role. This gives her the freedom to change roles at will, as the audience has no preconceived notions and understanding of her.
Sherman's chameleon art is a reflection on the fictitious and manipulative public image of the media and celebrities, which is not based on the authenticity of an individual, but on the needs of the market.
Sherman's work has had a huge impact on young artists, and her work encourages them to adopt a personalized, separate narrative and create with photography.
Like Robert Arneson's self-portrait in the seventies and eighties, the exploration of narcissistic images of the self shows the interplay of ordinary people in the cultural sphere (the way the world changes people and makes them reshape themselves again).
Through self-portrait photography created through media media, Sherman allows the audience to see the world in which we live through her work.
In the assumptions of an image that already exists in popular culture, each of her photographs—whether her early photographs of Hollywood celebrities or the horror films of the late 1980s—Sherman's photography is both a thrill of erotic nudity and the pleasure of a short play, but also an open window into an empty, narcissistic culture.
When she talks about her photographs, she says, "They're not autobiographical at all,...... But they trigger your memories and make you feel like you've seen them before. ”
Indeed, the reason for this familiarity is not because these images come from a particular movie or advertisement (which they absolutely are not), but because they are so ubiquitous in our absurd, materialistic consumer culture. Sherman's work evokes the sense of individual dissolution and the anxiety of existence that floats in the contemporary mass consumer market.