Cornered Pictures: Laurie Simmons’s "Kigurumi, Dollers, and How We See" at Salon 94 Bowery (original) (raw)

Illuminating Sex: Cindy Sherman’s Lighting Techniques and the Sex Pictures

Cindy Sherman's prolific career had small beginnings at SUNY Buffalo, New York in the late 70s, where the artist gravitated towards film and photography, while playing with make-up and clothes in the privacy of her dorm room at an alternative art space. Recognized at first for her series of pictures called Untitled Film Stills (1977-88), Sherman continues to work in present day, showing and selling her images all over the world. The most recognizable theme in her work is the deconstruction of and play on female identity 'types' that inundate contemporary mass media such as film and advertising. Beginning with the Untitled Film Stills, and continuing throughout her oeuvre, Sherman used herself in almost every image, dressed as another 'type' of woman, no one in particular, but someone we all recognize. Although the majority of the portraits are of the artist dressed as these characters, the images are not to be misconstrued as self-portraits. These pictures are not solely about Cindy, but about women in general, their given roles in society and how that is represented in film, mass-media and the arts. Her work is a play on identity, and the constant flux of Cindy as someone else is a part of this play; she is a woman compartmentalized between roles, the viewer is unable to permanently define this woman as any one 'type.' In the series Sex Pictures, Sherman uses medical dolls and prostheses as models, removing, adding, mixing and matching parts to create images of horrific yet fascinating sexuality. Created partially in response to the late eighties/early nineties bout of censorship in the arts, Sherman asks the viewer to look if they dare and consider what is pornographic, what is dirty, what is sexy, what is real. The grotesque and visceral, fetishization, and objectification of sex and sexuality are clearly evident in Sherman's Sex Pictures. Using medical dolls as opposed to real people, choosing silks, furs and props that reference advertising and pornography, and cutting up and reorganizing doll parts are pieces of this evidence. But what is not often discussed in all of Sherman's work is her use of lighting to express different concerns or concepts; in fact the artist has never been forced to discuss her lighting in depth and no one has written extensively of it.9 Light is integral to photography, without it the medium would not exist, and so it is paramount always to consider the use of light. Perhaps in Sherman's other projects light was incidental, however if Sex Pictures is referential in any way to pornography and advertising, it is important to examine the light since these forms of media depend so heavily on lighting to imbue a message.

Doll Parts, or, the Subject Reconfigured from the Point of View of the Mannequin (2004)

European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) conference Public Proofs: Science, Technology, Democracy, Paris, 25-28 August 2004.

A flâneur of contemporary arcades-or their virtual counterparts-might be forgiven for concluding that the wealth of the capitalist mode of production presents itself as an immense procession of mannequins, parading their charms at the dangerous intersection of commerce and desire. Fetish? Spectacle? Simulacrum? The commanding figure of the mannequin has been a recurring fascination for twentieth-century artists from Eugène Atget, Hans Bellmer, and the participants in the 1938 Exposition internationale du Surréalisme in Paris to Helmut Newton, Cindy Sherman, and David LaChapelle. Yet she has been shamefully neglected by social theorists. This essay is a modest plea for putting this most quotidian inhabitant of modern streets and imaginations, a creature who abounds in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties, back where she belongs-front and center in the ontics, as well as the optics, of the subject. * Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God … 1

Female Self-Portraiture: Imprisoned Spaces and Minds

Eviterna, Revista de Humanidades, Arte y Cultura Independiente - ISSN: 2530-6014, 2019

This article examines Francesca Woodman and Rebecca Horn's oeuvre, establishing connections between their work, their work and their biographies, their artworks and their selves. In their art practices, they create prison-like and claustrophobic environments that reflect their inner selves, their traumas and their anxieties. Through the embodiment of space, they portray themselves, thus blurring the limits between inner self and outer world, between body and space. By closely analysing their work and their lives, this article sets forth the idea that their work can be read as a dynamic and visual autobiography, as kinetic and psychological self-portraits of these two female artists.

Dial "P" for Panties: Narrative Photography in the 1990s

Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, 2000

This essay was originally published in 1999, at the height of the art world's interest in photographs of adolescent girls. In it, Soutter provides one of the few accounts that took this work seriously, offering conceptual frameworks within the history of art photography as well as attempting to understand its seductive quality via the context of fashion and pornographic photography. Soutter argues for the importance of understanding the narrative ambiguity of these staged photographs, and traces the possible routes for reading these images of girls as critical of or complicit with the sexualised imagery of girlhood found in popular culture. Whilst Soutter concludes that these practices manipulated an appearance of criticality, she presciently points to many of the routes that have since been pursued in other essays in this collection, which situate representations of girlhood within a more complex critical framework. Her comments on nudity and the parthenogenic nature of celebrity indicate some of the ways in which these photographs of girls can be read as delicately balanced postfeminist representations, a possibility which Soutter more fully acknowledges in her afterword, written a decade after this article was first published. As a photographer, an art historian and a feminist, I have been bothered for some time by a particular strand of contemporary photography. It started as a joke: I had seen so many quasinarrative art photographs of half-dressed young women that I began referring to them as their own genre, 'panty photography'. As with many inside jokes, once I had coined the term, I began to find validation for it everywhere. Panties seemed to be proliferating in art galleries and magazines. The New York Times ran an article about the current cross-over between art, fashion and pornography, and shortly thereafter an article about hot young female artists and their hot new work. 1 The phenomenon came to a well-publicised head in a spring 1999 exhibition at Lawrence Rubin-Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in New York City. Another Girl, Another Planet, curated by Gregory Crewdson and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, included images by thirteen photographers, twelve of them women. The work was mostly colour and primarily figurative and the majority of the photographs depicted women or girls caught in evocative,