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Sherman’s Mass Appeal

In its August 21, 1997 issue, Rolling Stone published an image of Madonna and Cindy Sherman. This photograph's function was to document the meeting of the pop star and the visual artist at the June opening of Sherman's show at the Museum of Modern Art, which was sponsored by Madonna. Photographer Kevin Mazur, however, seemed to have had a different purpose in mind. Rather than posing in front of the artist's well-known series of images, "Untitled Film Stills" (1977-1980), Madonna and Sherman awkwardly stand side-by-side in one of the museum's back offices. Locked in the glow of each other's grimace, they stand in front of a paneled backdrop and alongside several rows of library shelves. This academic setting transforms the photograph from a "celeb-about-town" shot to a dishy remake of Sherman's Untitled Film Still #13 (1978). In the updated scene, Madonna plays the leading role. She is a trashier version of the young blonde student, seen in the original image. No longer interested in the books, she turns toward the camera and looks across her shoulder at a second figure. Sherman, now in a supporting role, clasps her hands and looks as if she was the blonde's staid older sister. Even in the accompanying caption - "Trashy Hollywood B-movie actress Madonna sponsored photographer Cindy Sherman's exhibit of self-portraits, in which Sherman poses as various trashy Hollywood B-movie actresses" - Sherman receives second billing; Madonna, curiously cast as a B-movie actress, is the "real" thing and Sherman is the fake. The publication of the Mazur photograph in Rolling Stone is just one in a series of events over the last few years that raises questions as to the fate not only of Sherman's work, but of contemporary art's role within, what critics are now calling, media culture. Many have argued that ever since Andy Warhol appeared on The Love Boat, art has suffered an irrevocable set-back. Art, traditionally the arena of cultural dissent, has entered into a partnership with business: historically the realm of corporate self-promotion and calculated capital investment. Art, they argue, has become a type of advertising for large firms and super-star celebrities, such as Madonna. Artists have become nothing more than "media researchers" and "aesthetic technicians." While I agree with these observations, they distort the historical relationship between art and mass culture. Since the beginning of advertising in the nineteenth century, artists and graphic designers have borrowed ideas from one another, both adding important innovations to visual representation. With the growth of mass media in the 1950s, however, business began to put new pressures on graphic design. In retrospect, Warhol's work merely reflects the legacy of the postwar era: a media culture that has overshadowed art's ability to communicate. It is not that art has lost its critical stance and media has taken over, but that the power of criticism to initiate change has become suspect. In addition, many artists often discover that their images either support or are used to support causes they otherwise would not endorse. Sherman's work is most powerful not because she draws from media imagery per se - contributing to a historically ongoing exchange - but because she uses the form of the film still to portray a deeply felt ambivalence toward media itself. Sherman began her first series of photographs in 1977. Initially, "Untitled Film Stills" was to have been a group of pictures based on one blonde actress, playing a variety of cinematic roles. The project, however, quickly grew into a seemingly capricious survey of '50s and '60s postwar feminine stereotypes. In these images, Sherman, as director-photographer, cast herself in a variety of roles; rather than famous stars in recognizable stills, Sherman-as-model plays a host of bit-part actresses: a film-noir extra, a down-trodden housewife, an Italian chamber maid, an off-duty nurse and an old-world matriarch. …