Do you remember Diane McBain? No? Well, I’ll give you some hints. In the early ’60s, she was Warner Brothers’ answer to Grace Kelly. She had a featured part in the television series, Surf-side Six. Her best movie, Parrish (1961), was set in the tobacco fields of Connecticut where she and Connie Stevens were rivals for the hand of Troy Donahue. She was tall, slim, blue-eyed and blonde; but her features were more pointy than chiseled and she had a flat, unaccented voice utterly lacking in nuance. When her career went down the tubes, it was as though she had never been there. Compared to Diane McBain, Tippi Hedren was a Major Motion Picture Star.
Cindy Sherman photographs remind me of Diane McBain. They all portray forgettable-looking women in ambiguous situations, doing vaguely dramatic things. Their poses are artificial, their mouths are set, their eyes are dead. There is an uneasiness about the way they inhabit their bodies that her camera picks at like a scavenger bird. They are the starlets who’ll never make it. Like Diane McBain, they are forgettable.
Sherman costumes, directs and photographs herself in a variety of mundane settings. The photographs from a year or so ago are black-and-white, 8-by 10-inch glossies. The clothing, props and setups are hackneyed—all have been seen before, promoting girls from Little Rock, Sioux Falls and Topeka. In its heyday, Life magazine was filled with these hopefuls. As in Sherman’s photographs, the women in Life were shown standing on ladders—chests pushed up, bottoms out—reaching for a book from the stacks. Or, wearing straw boaters and prim little suits, they stared wide-eyed at Manhattan skyscrapers. These pictures were usually accompanied by captions like: “Doris never expected New York to be so big!”
Sherman’s more recent photographs are large-format color prints. The color is curiously artificial, almost like old Deluxe Color in 3/4 fade. They are also more triste and refer less to genre than their predecessors. The subject is still Sherman (bewigged and costumed), the setting still implies narrative (holiday resorts and hotel rooms), and the pose is still stiffly artificial. However, there is a difference. By photographing herself in front of rear-projected slides, Sherman introduces the same kind of foreshortening that Syberberg used in his films, Ludwig and Our Hitler. The slide background throws the subject into relief, theatrically heightening the tension of the pose.
Sherman’s new personae are the kind of women you might catch out of the corner of your eye, hovering around the edge of experience; they are not trying to be stars. They are older and less expectant. With one exception (a marvelous Barbara Stanwyck-like meditation), the star-making machinery has run down. These women are caught in moments which suggest vulnerability and, just maybe, fear. They sip drinks in shabby rooms, stand paralyzed in public thoroughfares, and wander aimlessly through vacation spots. It is as if the starlets had been reduced to posing for public service posters with copy that reads: “Nine out of ten American women living in residential hotels are alcoholics,” or “Single women visiting resorts risk losing—everything!” Quiet desperation is the order of the day. Where the black-and-white photographs were of women alone, the color ones are of lonely women.
None of Sherman’s photographs indulge in ridicule or go for cheap shots. There is a dignity in her portrayal of these also-ran heroines. She doesn’t burlesque the women, but she is alert as to how they were used. Like Jean Seberg (the prototypical small town discovery) in Breathless, Sherman’s women are affected, but the affectation is so sincere that it transcends the obviousness of its artifice. The work’s ultimate, touching irony is that these women’s marginality—their apartness—is so ubiquitous.
—Richard Flood
