Feminist Art Review of Cindy Sherman Self-Portrait Essay

Feminist Art Review of Cindy Sherman Self-Portrait - Essay Example by chance the most seminal artist operating in this cultural milieu is Cindy Sherman. Shermans art presents a multitude of perspectives on the self, interrogating identity operator, experience, and femininity in the postmodernist world. This essay examines Shermans self-portrait Untitled Film Still 53 arguing that it presents a comprehensive response to mainstream perspectives on identity and actively resists the male gaze. abstract While Cindy Shermans work almost exclusively explores conceptual portraits, her most notable accumulation is the Untitled Film Stills, 19771980. Within the context of this collection critics imbibe divided the portraits into a variety of themes, still its clear that are a number of concerns that underline all these modes of representation. One of the most emblematic portraits of this collection is Shermans Untitled Film Still 53. From a strictly literal perspective, this work is a phot ographic portrait of Sherman wearing a blonde wig. Her eyeball are slanted indifferently to the left. She is standing in front of a concrete wall that is fogged from view by the brightness of a comfortable and photographic development techniques. While this portraiture presentation is ostensibly simplistic in meaning, 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 film 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 nature of it being a second-order representation is such that it leads individuals to query 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 organization 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 utilize 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 dubiousness of the male gaze. Feminist theory contains a strong emphasis on the representation of women in television and film, with Laura Mulveys the gaze a prominent land of consideration. Within Shermans portrait its clear she is exploring this feminist concern in a variety of ways. One prominent understanding, as is charact eristic 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 major considerations is the mid-20th century costume and body language. Sherman