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| Cindy Sherman- Untitled (Bus Riders), 1976-2000 |
Quote 1: “Cindy Sherman opened a lot of the doors. She was the trendsetter in terms of distorted characters within self-portraiture. Originally painters painted self-portraits, and then she kind of blew it open with photographic portraiture, and now there are all these avenues younger artists are taking, which would not have been so easy without her work.”
It is incredible that Cindy was able to create what she did with her own hands and not having digital tools like we do today. It is definitely inspiring to see how she was able to portray so many different personas and what her process was like. Now that we have easy access to tools like photoshop it is definitely so much easier to be able to create new amazing things.
Quote 2: “ We live in the era of YouTube fame and reality-TV shows and makeovers, where you can be anything you want to be any minute of the day, and artists are responding to that. Cindy was one of the first to explore the idea of the malleability or fluidity of identity.”
Cindy inspired so many artists and continues to do so. I feel like through her work I can see that there are no limits when it comes to being anything you want to be and what you can do with your imagination. In the media age today we can see that so many people pretend to be someone they’re not and have a media persona where they can pretend to have the best lifestyle.
New York Times: "The Ugly Beauty of Cindy Sherman"
Quote 1: “I think it has made me realize that we’ve all chosen who we are in terms of how we want the world to see us”.
This quote really stood out to me because through Cindy's work we see how she was in control of how she wanted her viewers to perceive her. We are in control of how we want others to perceive us and Cindy was someone who in this sense is very admirable. She is someone who has no boundaries when it comes to transforming into different personas and is even called the chameleon of our time. Reading about her instagram posts were interesting as well, since she was able to post her work as these different personas many people created their own stories or assumptions about this persona they were perceiving.
Quote 2: “I was really shocked at how I was treated just walking down the street,” she recalled in a 1994 documentary. "She wore men’s clothes when she left the apartment, when she managed to leave at all".
This stood out to me because this was a big part of how Cindy was able to create, by staying home and basically playing dress up. Being shocked and uncomfortable as how men treated women and having the need to dress in men’s clothes to be able to feel safe. Although Cindy wanted her work to be seen as it is and not have a deeper meaning, she did not want to explain what any of her work meant. Many people still see her as an iconic feminist artist. I agree with this because she was able to contradict the “male gaze” with her work. As we talked about in class she was able to create photographs of things/situations we would never see photographed. Many of her works included vulnerability and pain in the women she portrayed, the viewers are able to see the emotions.
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