Cindy Sherman 1975-1993 - Hardcover

Krauss, Rosalind

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0847817563 ISBN 13: 9780847817566

Publisher: Rizzoli, 1993

Synopsis

In this first presentation of the artist's complete work, leading contemporary art historian Rosalind Krauss reviews Cindy Sherman's remarkable series of photographic works - in which the artist has notoriously assumed various roles, from B-movie starlet to Old Master model - and the enormous influence these works have had on feminist thinking and on current dialogues about the strategies of contemporary art in general. Almost perversely, Krauss argues, Sherman's unsettling attempts to dissect the formation and perception of images have turned her artworks - and herself - into icons for feminists' and others' agendas. Krauss explores in depth the various approaches to Sherman's work taken by philosophers and art historians and asks if they have not often lost sight of the imagery itself - or, more specifically, the way the images are constructed.
In a further essay, Norman Bryson, internationally known for his pioneering theories on the semiotics of looking, explores Sherman's most recent, horror-show images of mannequins (known as the Sex Pictures) and identifies their place in her continued out-of-body investigations. Along with a bibliography and chronology, more than 200 illustrations (140 in color), including numerous unpublished works, represent Sherman's complete career to date.

About this title

About the Author:

Rosalind Krauss is Professor of Art History at Columbia University.

From Library Journal:

Krauss provides a provocative study of Sherman's impact as an artist and the pervasiveness of photography itself. The reproductions, many in color, are abundant, splendidly executed, and often as potent and startling as the originals. Sherman, one of the true masters of contemporary photography, is best known for photographing herself in various incarnations. The subject, however, is not the artist as much as the concept of woman-as-spectacle. Columbia professor Krauss, the author of several important books and essays on art in photography and editor of October magazine, suggests that by unveiling the offhanded, everyday grotesqueness in artistic depictions of females, Sherman effectively subverts the accepted convention of woman as generic, nonmale object to be gazed upon. The artist examines and expresses her disgust by utilizing the very thing that is disgusting, exemplifying tradition as protest. Each period of Sherman's work, from the early Untitled Film Stills to the more recent History Portraits and Sex Pictures, is discussed here in detail through a rubric of theories by Lacan, Freud, and Derrida; nonetheless, the text is surprisingly accessible, lucid, and free of technical jargon. This first sagacious and comprehensive book on this significant artist is recommended for all contemporary art and photography collections. --Douglas McClemont, New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rizzoli
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0847817563
• ISBN 13: 9780847817566
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240