103 CLOWNS Clownish and carnivalesque elements had already featured in many of Sherman’s early works. But it was not until 2003 that she turned her attention more closely to the ambiguous and paradoxical figure of the clown. As an entertainer, the clown embodies a variety of characters that can amuse but also shock and frighten. At the same time, their appearance, facial expressions, gestures and language repeatedly break with prevailing conventions, pushing them into the role of social outsiders. It is probably precisely this inconsistency and unpredictability of the clown that appealed to Sherman and prompted her to create eighteen works that probe the complex characters hidden beneath the makeup. Clowns marks Sherman’s transition from analog to digital. While the characters are still photographed in her usual analog manner, the gaudy, near-psychedelic backgrounds are reworked with the help of digital editing software. This allowed Sherman to swap the backgrounds of four clowns dressed entirely in designer clothes, which were published in British Vogue in June 2003: While the magazine featured a version of Untitled #414 with blue and turquoise butterflies, the large-format C-print work shows the same clown set against a bright orange background. She is cocooned in an oversized, sequined jacket by John Galliano, which was worn by a model sporting a similarly voluminous wig when the garment was first shown as part of the spring 2003 collection. Parallels such as this attest to Sherman’s close engagement with fashion, but also to her ambivalent relationship to it: Fashion becomes a means of critiquing fashion itself, by being perceived not so much as clothing but as costume-like disguise. Like makeup, fashion veils the body, costumes or conceals it, and keeps the subject at one remove: a degree of separation between costumed subject and viewer, but also between performer and the nascent identities and personas she wishes to assume.
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