a Mark B Mark I'm Ava raspini associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art and I'm a curator of the Cindy Sherman exhibition there's one in particular that has stood out for me and that's a recent work from 2008 Untitled number 466 it's from a series that Cindy did of women of a certain age from the top echelons of polite Society it's presented in this opulent gilded frame you can imagine that maybe the picture is hanging even in her own home in the sort of grand foyer as you enter and I sort of think of
her as a Grandam she's wearing this elegant blue calfan she has fabulous gold earrings her makeup is perfect she's wearing these great Rings If you look very closely you see that this glossy Perfection unravels she's wearing these pink plastic slippers the kind that you would buy at the dollar store and she's wearing thick hose the kind that you would wear if you had varicose veins and I think Cindy is so brilliant in all of her pictures where there's this kind of juxtaposition between what we first see and then this other narrative this darker narrative often
and there's a truth that's lurking underneath she looks to be in this fabulous setting Cindy made the picture in her Studio she photographed herself in costume against a green screen and then digitally inserted a backdrop which in fact Cindy photographed at the cloysters here in New York the background certainly projects this Aura of wealth and St status Cindy has this uncanny ability to sort of have her finger on the pulse at any given moment and to really reflect what's happening in culture at large for example with this work Untitled number 466 she made it in
2008 and in a way these works just the sheer size of the works they are8 nine 10t tall and the fact that this work is talking about wealth about status about an aspiration to a certain circle is something that 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 of those things that are part of our cultural language today I think are very much embedded in not only this picture but but this body of work work
the woman in this picture and the women in this body of work in many ways are tragic and because they are presented in uh larger than life size you can really see every detail it speaks to this contemporary way of being and the and the fact that photography is very complicit in the way in which identity is manufactured today the artist uses herself as a model only because it's practical when she first started working in the 1970s she didn't have money to hire models and she became quite Adept at working alone in the studio she
does all her own makeup she buys all her own costumes uh she poses herself she doesn't have an assistant uh with her in the studio in fact it's it's kind of a private performance to a certain extent it's not important that it's the artist posing uh using herself as the as her own model because it's really about the kind of multiplicity of identity today it's about the fact that we're all kind of blank canvases it's about the fact that we all project identities different identities constantly that we put on different faces throughout our lives even
throughout the day this is my professional phase this is my Good Wife phase this is my perfect mother phase Cindy Sherman is one of the most important and influential artists of Contemporary Art and I would say of the 20th and 21st century I really don't know a world without Cindy Sherman my understanding of art my understanding of Photography my understanding about identity and feminine roles and feminine stereotypes I think is very much molded and seen through the lens of Cindy Sherman this picture I think is really successful and my favorite because it sort of keeps
me looking keeps me guessing keeps me wanting to understand the story behind this woman
