Trigger

Sherman’s work emerged in the 1970s, amidst the visual culture explosion of magazines, films, and advertising. From the start of her career, she had expressed a desire to create something with a mass-produced look, deliberately avoiding association with complex art theory. Her aim was to produce easily understandable images. This clever use of aspirational appearance aligns with social theorist Theodor Adorno’s concept of the covering up of the ‘real’ situation through phantasmagoria.^{Melanie Swalwell, ‘Aesthetics and Hyper/aesthetics: Rethinking the Senses in Contemporary Media Contexts’, PhD thesis, 2002, p. 17.} Adorno believed the media’s visual communication techniques were developed to induce subjection and to control the masses.^{Swalwell, p. 86} However, Sherman employs this technique not to manipulate but to prompt critical reflection from her audience.

Fashion, on the other hand, uses phantasmagoria in the way described by Adorno.It possesses a unique imaginative capacity to transcend the reality of the mundane by constructing dreamscapes that depict alternative life scenarios revolving around beauty, youth, and happiness. In these scenarios, spectators are invited to mentally insert themselves, and the phantasmagorical expressions, propelled by technology, offer boundless possibilities to achieve this. Within this fantastical message, the narrative is stable, whereas the garments vary each time. Subsequently, fashion is not conveyed through clothing but rather through the image itself. Capitalism utilises garments as mere tools to propagate an idealised self-image. This strategy aids in convincing people that purchasing the product is a step towards the presented phantasmagorical.

Fashion advertisements aim to spark desire and simultaneously often induce spectators to repent by triggering a complex of emotions: feelings of inadequacy and alienation and a perceived lack of competence. This underscores mass media’s influence in reshaping subjectivity towards others and oneself – a dangerous side effect Adorno warned of – using mass culture as a tool for the manipulation of behaviour and beliefs.

Nowadays, we consume content on an unprecedented scale, and I cannot deny its personal impact on me. Throughout my teenage years, I acquired the habit of viewing my body not as a whole but as individual parts, meticulously examining each one with specific goals in mind and monitoring its progress toward them. Unfortunately, this process of conditioning my body to conform to these checklists continues today, executed pragmatically and almost mechanically. I catch myself occasionally perceiving my body as an object, or a modular system designed for correction, adjustment, enlargement, or minimisation of separate parts – all having to conform to various parameters and measurements. Compassion is absent, imperfections are not easily overlooked, and strict standards are rigorously imposed and enforced. However, these examinations seem trivial, as happiness and true fulfilment supposedly lie in eventually meeting these standards, just as fashion has always promised me. But will fashion betray me again?

At this juncture, the conversation delves into a realm where beauty standards manifest as a form of self-alienation. The act of enlarging, minimising, and concealing certain body parts has not only become commonplace but also widely accepted as the norm. Sherman’s work from the late 2000s exemplifies this trend, her characters appearing more grotesque and outlandish than they did in her earlier work. The makeup, wigs, costumes, and prosthetics intentionally lack realism; their artificiality hits harder than any realism ever could.

For these series, Sherman once again taps into popular culture for inspiration, but this time she shifts the emphasis towards collective beliefs about aging and the class dynamics associated with it. For Untitled #466, she depicts herself in a long, elegant green gown, with her hair neatly pinned back and her face adorned with heavy makeup, embodying a woman who emanates a sense of sophistication but also seemingly struggles with herself, desperately aiming to perceive her youth in subdued ways. Eva Respini, curator at MoMA, notes of this work that it “is very timely and very much speaks to our current condition. It also reflects our current culture of sort of YouTube fame, celebrity makeovers, the Real Housewives TV franchise. All those things that are part of our cultural language today.^{The Museum of Modern Art. “How To See Cindy Sherman - With Eva Respini”, January 19, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?....}

Trends in celebrity plastic surgery permeate unavoidably into the public, influencing people’s actions and the ever-shifting Overton window. Fashion imagery is recognized as a potent tool in this distortion of judgement. When encountering an image once or twice, many can suppress their self-critical voices. However, repeated exposure to similar features can make people start to believe that they’re different and should take action to alter themselves to fit the ‘dominant’ picture. This phenomenon highlights a lack of meaningful and critical engagement with the real world and illustrates Adorno’s concept of passive acceptance of the status quo. It also leads people to spend significant amounts of money to permanently change themselves, demolishing unique features to better align with the prevailing idea of beauty and losing touch with reality.

At this point of my introspection, I’ve come to realize how strongly my thoughts are manipulated by mass culture, just as Adorno articulated in his critical theory. I painfully but fully grasp the essence of his well-known statement: ‘The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.’ As frustrating as it is to acknowledge, I’ve fallen victim to manufactured images and cultural products prevalent in fashion advertisements. Is it not within my power to resist buying into these beauty standards?

Sherman, on the other hand, found her methodology for doing so decades ago and has recently introduced social media to her arsenal of tools. In 2017, she made her profile public and has been sharing a lot of her work through this online platform. Here, she has found a space to further experiment with altering the body through filters and other means of digital manipulation. Rather than using AI to conform to conventional ideals of attractiveness, Sherman employs it to explore the intricate relationship between the artificial and the human. In one of her recent self-portraits, ‘Untitled #648’, she utilises a digital collaging technique that blends black and white with colour photographs to reconstruct her facial features in slightly unconventional positions, creating a visually unsettling effect that induces a sense of unease. Together, the disproportionately enlarged lips and unnaturally taut skin bear a striking resemblance to what is often stigmatised in popular culture as a botched result, the unfortunate consequences of plastic surgery gone awry.

These provocative and discomforting works are akin to that of multimedia artist Orlan’s controversial work The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990–1995), in which she underwent a series of plastic surgery procedures, each inspired by iconic images of beauty and femininity from art history, religious iconography, and popular culture. Orlan’s surgeries were performed under local anaesthesia and broadcast live to audiences in galleries and museums around the world, blurring the boundaries between performance art, body modification, and medical intervention. While both Sherman and Orlan explore themes of identity and gender through their own bodies, Orlan is herself in her work, whereas Cindy never portraits herself as Cindy but always rather as one of her personas. These personas are temporal, or digitally created, unlike Orlan’s alterations to her body, which are permanent and real. Moreover, Orlan’s style is highly confrontational and performative, rooted in the world of contemporary art and often secluded from mainstream audiences. By contrast, Sherman’s style is cinematic and theatrical, situated at the intersection of fashion and performance, blurring the lines between art and advertisement. Consequently, she speaks to a broad public, enabling many to participate in debates about beauty.

At the same time, I find this advertisement somewhat problematic. While Sherman is known for her witty and reflective comments on society, it appears that she’s simultaneously leveraging these qualities for a capitalistic agenda. Regardless of her reputation for being critical, explorative, and artistic, I can’t help but think that Jacobs is using Sherman’s critical and cultural capital as a smokescreen, masking the true intention of the ad, which is to promote the sale of the bag. As Adorno would say, the photo covers up the ‘real’ situation through phantasmagoria.^{Swalwell, p. 17.} On the other hand, perhaps Sherman is making yet another incisive commentary here, one that operates on a meta level, prompting contemplation about the essence of an artist’s identity. The thought compels me to reflect on myself and ponder, who am I to judge?

Sherman’s work, with its numerous references to popular and mass culture, stereotypes, and gender roles, is immediately comprehensible. In mere seconds, we recognize what Sherman aims to display, yet she never fully reaches complete representation of the characters she presents – not because she’s incapable, but because she wants her work to exist on the border of reality and imagination. In both her body of work and her body as a work, Sherman embodies a practice that protests dominant societal expectations related to gender roles and beauty. The body is not a fleeting fashion trend; it’s a celebration of identity, and it should actively protest distorted beauty standards rooted in patriarchal and heteronormative frameworks.

I’d like to end with a quote from an interview with the Wolf Foundation, in which Sherman states, ‘ I have used pretty much myself in almost all of my work, although I am in disguise so that you hopefully would not even recognize me.’^{The Wolf Foundation. “Cindy Sherman, Wolf Prize Laureate in Art 2020”, 14 April 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?....}This statement leaves me with a somewhat bittersweet aftertaste. What does Sherman mean by this? Does she not want to be seen for who she really is, without the makeup, fake noses, wigs, and personas? Is Sherman – the human, not the photographer – hesitant to fully confront her true self, stripped of disguises and roles? I would feel nothing but sympathy if she were. Being a woman has always been fraught with challenges, akin to navigating a minefield with few safe paths. Perhaps, in the end, what we seek is not for Sherman to reveal herself as she truly is. Maybe we prefer her to remain fictitious. Let her keep her whimsical essence, akin to that of fashion. Perhaps this is how Sherman continues to elude fashion’s manipulative grip. Out of the many roles she embodies, the one in which she deceives fashion is my absolute favourite.

Editor's note. This essay is published in the context of the Cindy Sherman exhibition at FOMU, the first major solo of the American artist in Belgium, running from 28 September 2024 till 2 February 2025. Spanning five decades of work divided over multiple floors, the exhibition exists of two parts, Cindy Sherman – Early Works 1975-1980 and Cindy Sherman – Anti-Fashion. The latter dives deeper into Sherman’s fascination for fashion and the nexus between her independent work and commissions in the fashion industry. More info here.