“Cindy Sherman” at The Museum of Modern Art

Mural from Cindy Sherman at The Museum of Modern Art; courtesy MOMA

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What would art be without fiction—that is to say, without the allusive sweep of metaphor?

Literature, music, painting, poetry, dance, film—you name it, every medium thrives when it embodies something beyond its material means. “Art that conceals art” is old news, of course, but that’s not to say it isn’t desirable or, in fact, an ongoing necessity. The human animal has craved the stuff since Day One.

Nowadays, you know, we’re more advanced than that. Fiction—it’s so passé. At least, that’s the lesson of Cindy Sherman, an eponymous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

Devotees of the postmodernist pioneer would argue otherwise. Hasn’t Sherman been devoted to fiction or, at least, its attendant limitations since the first time she planted herself in front of a camera? She’s made a substantial career assuming an array of divergent identities, among them B-movie ingénue, corpse, biker chick, fashionista, fairy tale princess, Upper East Side dowager, pinup girl and, in a recent work, an Icelandic Norma Desmond.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #359 (2000); courtesy MOMA

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Sherman’s photographs are purposefully ersatz in costume and affect. Caked-on makeup, thrift shop wigs, garish mood lighting, cut-rate stage sets, desultory photographic technique and thank God for the advent of Photoshop—artifice is Sherman’s all. Arrant contrivance is a tool for investigating “the construction of contemporary identity,” “the nature of representation” and “the tyranny…of images.”

Reasonable avenues of inquiry, I suppose, but there’s a difference between inhabiting an invented persona and, as one wit had it, pretending to pretend. Novelty tits and a blank stare don’t prompt much in the way of sociological insight, let alone create a compelling fiction. The purpose they serve is to let us know that Cindy Sherman—front, center and oddly puritanical—is calling the shots. Here is an artist who doesn’t—or can’t—venture beyond the strictures of self. No amount of irony can redeem her cold, callow art.

© 2012 Mario Naves

Originally published in the March 7, 2012 edition of City Arts.