A PIECE OF THE ACTION: IMAGES OF "WOMAN" INTHE PHOTOGRAPHY OF CINDY SHERMAN
After reading this article I can't help asking myself what femininity really is. Judith Williamson recognizes femininity as an identity, and something that has many faces, but she also mentions that Sherman's settings in her photos are part of what makes a character "feminine". So if it's the setting that makes the picture itself feminine, is the person behind the mask of the photo feminine? Or is femininity nothing more than a culture created manipulation of the female form? Is it now simply something to put on, like the author discusses putting on clothing in the morning? Is it nothing more than a face, a facade, an act? If we had never started using propaganda, television, or movies, would femininity as we know it still exist? Scientifically, we know that men are attracted by looks, and women are attracted by relationship and connection. Somewhere along the line I think someone decided to capitalize on this to make money through media, and once this happened women were made more and more into an object, until art pieces like Shermans were created to critique it. She is putting herself into these feminine settings, and acting the part of the woman as object, but showing through her series that there are many ways to act out the role of the woman in society. I like how she brings in the boyish poses as well as the sexy ones, because it seems to be a critique of the propaganda's manipulation of societal thinking, recreating the woman as a person acting out roles, not simply a sexual object for people to look at. She is saying there is more to the woman than the media represents. One quote I'd like to discuss from Williamson says that "what we construct from the surface of each picture is an interior, a mixture of emotions. Each setting, pose, and facial expression seems literally to express an almost immeasurable interior which is at once mysteriously deep, and totally impenetrable: a feminine identity. Obviously this is what acting is about, but the still images are like frozen moments of performance and so the sense of personality seems more trapped in the image itself."
"Obviously this is what acting is all about." How can Williamson toss this comment aside so flippantly? I wish she had gone into more detail, because I think this is key to discussing Sherman's work. In all of these roles, a part is being acted out, and that role is the role mapped out for us by the media. In addition, the photos are carefully constructed as the media would do, to make the woman seem feminine, when really she is just a person like any other person, acting a cultural role. When Williamson says "personality seems...trapped in the image" she is touching on how the idea of femininity as we have been shown is a facade found only in media, and only in art. I think what she was trying to follow was the idea that femininity is complex and unreachable, but what she was getting at was deeper than even she knew when she wrote the quote.
"Obviously this is what acting is all about." How can Williamson toss this comment aside so flippantly? I wish she had gone into more detail, because I think this is key to discussing Sherman's work. In all of these roles, a part is being acted out, and that role is the role mapped out for us by the media. In addition, the photos are carefully constructed as the media would do, to make the woman seem feminine, when really she is just a person like any other person, acting a cultural role. When Williamson says "personality seems...trapped in the image" she is touching on how the idea of femininity as we have been shown is a facade found only in media, and only in art. I think what she was trying to follow was the idea that femininity is complex and unreachable, but what she was getting at was deeper than even she knew when she wrote the quote.
CINDY SHERMAN:UNTITLED
This article went much deeper into the exact reasons why women are objects, going into Freudian concepts and pschycological explanations, but ultimately, it all comes down to the same idea as what I already mentioned above. One quote that Rosalind Krauss included from Arthur Danto goes along with what I was saying in the other response: "Another form of myth consumption is to buy into the finished signified of the role, the 'character' but to see the multiplicity of these various forms of what [he] likes to call The Girl.....The Girl is an allegory for something deeper and darker, in the mythic unconscious of everyone, regardless of sex...Each of the stills is about the Girl In Trouble, but in the aggragate they touch the myth we carry out of childhood, of danger, love, and the security that defines the human condition."
Essentially, Danto is saying that the piece is using the idea, or rather, the cultural object of women as object, to facilitate a message that actually applies to all humans, not just women. The "woman as object" is, in fact, nothing more than a cultural facade.
Later in the article, this idea once again comes up, this time mentioned by Krauss herself: "Rather stereotype-itself rebaptized as "masquerade," and here understood as a psychoanalytic term-is thought of as the phenomenon to which all women are submitted both inside and outside the representation, so that as far as femininity goes, there is nothing but costume. Representation itself-films, advertisements, novels, and so forth-would thus be part of a far more absolute set of mechanisms by which characters are constructed: constructed equally in life as in film, or rather, equally in film as in life. And in this logic woman is nothing but masquerade, nothing but image."
Here Krauss is recognizing a shift in culture; a shift that shows how women have become the object they were made in media. No longer are woman free to be people, because they have been made into a cultural object of femininity, which has been twisted into woman as the sexual object, or even, as is mentioned later in the article, the woman as lacking, or rather, the Freudian concept of the castrated, or unwhole unless seen as a fetish, which makes them whole again. Culture has so manipulated the idea of the woman, that we are continually put into roles every day, stuck acting out who we are instead of being who we are. We are either helpless and lost, or flaunting our bodies for attention. No longer are we seen as people with normal human thoughts and emotions. It is this cultural shift, I feel, that has so stripped women of confidence, making them desperate to be liked, and to be the perfect shape that they see in magazines, and makes men want women to be what they see in magazines and television, no longer accepting women as they are unless they become the fetish to them that they have come to accept as real.
Below is a picture I found illustrating the woman as nothing more than a cultural creation to sell in advertising:
Essentially, Danto is saying that the piece is using the idea, or rather, the cultural object of women as object, to facilitate a message that actually applies to all humans, not just women. The "woman as object" is, in fact, nothing more than a cultural facade.
Later in the article, this idea once again comes up, this time mentioned by Krauss herself: "Rather stereotype-itself rebaptized as "masquerade," and here understood as a psychoanalytic term-is thought of as the phenomenon to which all women are submitted both inside and outside the representation, so that as far as femininity goes, there is nothing but costume. Representation itself-films, advertisements, novels, and so forth-would thus be part of a far more absolute set of mechanisms by which characters are constructed: constructed equally in life as in film, or rather, equally in film as in life. And in this logic woman is nothing but masquerade, nothing but image."
Here Krauss is recognizing a shift in culture; a shift that shows how women have become the object they were made in media. No longer are woman free to be people, because they have been made into a cultural object of femininity, which has been twisted into woman as the sexual object, or even, as is mentioned later in the article, the woman as lacking, or rather, the Freudian concept of the castrated, or unwhole unless seen as a fetish, which makes them whole again. Culture has so manipulated the idea of the woman, that we are continually put into roles every day, stuck acting out who we are instead of being who we are. We are either helpless and lost, or flaunting our bodies for attention. No longer are we seen as people with normal human thoughts and emotions. It is this cultural shift, I feel, that has so stripped women of confidence, making them desperate to be liked, and to be the perfect shape that they see in magazines, and makes men want women to be what they see in magazines and television, no longer accepting women as they are unless they become the fetish to them that they have come to accept as real.
Below is a picture I found illustrating the woman as nothing more than a cultural creation to sell in advertising:
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