Cindy Sherman at the MoMA

It’s a party up on MoMA’s sixth floor, and all of Cindy Sherman’s old friends are invited (well, many of them anyway). The photographer's much-anticipated retrospective finally opened to the public yesterday, and the cast of characters on display is over-the-top to be sure. There are the sultry vixens, ingénues, 9-to-5 girls, women gone mad, and fading starlets from her Untitled Film Stills series (1977-1980) of small black-and-white photographs cataloguing mid-20th-century filmic clichés of women. There are the disheveled, hollow-eyed, frightened girls from her Centerfolds (1981) pictures, which feature captives of male fantasies of rape and rescue. (Fun guests to have at any gathering, am I right?) And then there are the clowns, the fashion victims, the vaguely historical figures, the heroin-chic models, the aging society women flaunting their pearls, furs, and contrived sophistication… The list goes on.

Of course, Sherman plays all of these roles herself. She takes the female “types” circulated by our image-driven culture and cuts into them with the precision of an knife-happy plastic surgeon, leaving scars that mark their artificiality but also their disturbing tenacity. It is these apects of Sherman's pictures—their ambition and their incisiveness (among other things)—that has made her work so captivating to the art world over the last 35 years. Here’s to 35 more, Cindy!

Go and see these iconic images while you can. The show continues through June 11, 2012.

MoMA
11 W. 53rd St.
New York, NY 10019
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