CONTEMPORARY ART AND GENDER

Cindy Sherman Untitled #112 1982

Many artists respond to the feminist movement of the 1970s, by creating artworks that question stereotypes and traditional gender roles that pervade the media. They challenge ideas of equality in a public forum based on personal experiences.

The act of role-playing is central to the highly successful series Untitled Film Stills made by Cindy Sherman during the late 1970s and very early 1980s. These still images investigate the stereotype of women in film, television and magazines, though they have no basis in any actual film.

Cindy Sherman questions reality in her staged photographs. Her photographs are neither portraits nor self portraits. While the viewer understands that Cindy Sherman acts as both model and photographer in Untitled #112 1982, the character depicted is neither about Sherman or any real character Sherman saw.  Rather, she is role-playing. Her figures are fictional, based on B-movie characters; Sherman transforms herself to become these characters.

The images often question the stereotypes of women in the media. The blond bombshell, the reserved tomboy, the femme fatale…The viewer engages with the image asking, who is this person?  Why is she depicted in this way? Where have I seen such a figure? Are they real? They reveal more about ourselves; our shortcomings, our inability to look beyond a façade, or our preoccupation with perceptions of beauty and identity. They question society’s overall reliance on the media to define our lives and our place in the world.  

Cindy Sherman purposefully plays with the stereotypes of women and also men to confront her audience with the ways we see and interact with images. The media is an important reference point for Sherman as her characters are often caricatured perceptions that are fed by the media.

Fredric Jameson is a post modern theorist, who observed:

…the face becoming an impenetrable façade revealing nothing of the self and the skin becomes a plastic wrapping.
Post modernism now, Sherman’s Meditation of Subjectivity by Claire Todd-Miller, 30th October 2006, page 3

Text from

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/guggenheim/education/09.html