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14 between her assumed female characters and the designer clothes. Gestures, poses, and moods seem divested of their usual function of foregrounding the outfits. Compared to traditional fashion photography, everything here seems excessive, vulgar, strange: inelegant poses, disheveled hair, smudged makeup, wan complexions, and pronounced rings under the eyes (Untitled #122, see fig. on p. 71). One of the photographs shows Sherman wearing a corset by Jean Paul Gaultier and posing in front of a tawdry floral cloth backdrop (Untitled #131, fig. 1). Trying to look pretty and sexy, the character comes across as desperately gauche rather than attractive. Her slight frame fails to fill the outfit, which was obviously designed for a larger bust, and she awkwardly places her hands over her private parts – either to maliciously direct our voyeuristic gaze or chastely hide from it. With sly irony, Sherman alludes to the needy passivity and demureness traditionally expected of female figures – a role that pop star Madonna was to overturn completely a few years later when she wore this very Gaultier corset during her provocative Blond Ambition Tour in 1990 (fig. 2).6 Although Sherman’s ads for Benson had met with mixed reviews, in 1984 the artist received a commission from the French fashion house Dorothée Bis for Vogue Paris.7 Whereas for Benson Sherman had simply wanted to produce “something out of the ordinary,”8 in this new series she set out “to shock.”9 The resulting photographs are indeed more extreme. They show off-putting characters with scars, wrinkles, bruises, and bloodstains (Untitled #133, Untitled #132, see figs. on pp. 77, 80) and conjure an alarming and somber atmosphere. The artist herself explained, “I wanted to make really ugly pictures” and “do something to rip open the French fashion world.”10 The characters seem depressed and suicidal; they look like grotesque caricatures that are suggestive of a wide range of emotions and clinical conditions (Untitled #137, fig. 3, Untitled #138, see fig. on p. 81).11 Not surprisingly, Sherman’s defiantly idiosyncratic images were rejected by the magazine and remained unpublished. The fashion world was evidently not yet ready to break with its longstanding high-gloss conventions. 1 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #131, 1983, 89×41,9 cm, chromogener Farbabzug Cindy Sherman, Untitled #131, 1983, 89x41.9 cm, chromogenic color print

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