Style Imitating Art: Untitled Film Stills by Cindy Sherman

About Style Imitating Art

Style Imitating Art is hosted by Salazar of 14 Shades of Grey, Terri of MeadowTree Style, and Shelbee of Shelbee on the Edge. Style Imitating Art challenges us to draw style inspiration from pieces of art. Every other Monday, one of the hosts, acting as curator, selects an inspiration image that they will each post on their blogs. The following Monday, each host shares her art inspired outfit. Participants are invited to submit their art inspired outfits to the curator by 10:00 p.m. EST on the Tuesday following the hosts’ art inspired outfit posts. The following day, Wednesday, the curator will share all of the submissions on her blog.

You don’t have to be a blogger to join! You are invited to share your images on Instagram or other social media platforms. Just be sure to tag Salazar, Terri, and Shelbee or use #TeamLOTSStyle and #StyleImitatingArt so the hosts know you have joined. Go have some fun in your closets and join the SIA challenge next week!

The Inspiration Artwork

The inspiration artwork was curated by me. You can read why I chose this work here.

The Artwork

Untitled Film Still #43 by Cindy Sherman (Gelatin Silver Print, 1979)

About the Artist: Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American artist who was born on January 19, 1954, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. She is the youngest of five children born to Charles (an engineer) and Dorothy (a special needs teacher) Sherman. As an infant, Sherman’s family moved to Huntington, Long Island, where she was raised.

She enrolled in the visual arts program at Buffalo State College in 1972 where she began painting. It was during this time that she began to explore the ideas which would eventually become the hallmark of her most notable works, dressing herself up in thrift shop clothing to portray a variety of different characters. She soon became frustrated with what she perceived as limitations to the medium of painting and she quickly abandoned it in favor of photography.

In partnership with a group of artists, Sherman created Hallwalls in 1974, a creative center in Buffalo, New York, intended to accommodate artists from different backgrounds. While her Untiled Film Stills from 1977-1980 is her most famous body of work, Sherman has created other equally provocative and controversial art including a number of other visual forms like the centerfold, fashion photography, historical portraiture, and soft-core sex imagery. In 1992, she used prosthetic limbs and mannequins to create her Sex Pictures series. Commentator Greg Fallis of Utata Tribal Photography describes this series and Sherman’s work as a whole:

“[t]he progression of her work reflects more than a progression of ideology. It also demonstrates a progression in approach. Sherman’s initial photographs used relatively few props—just clothing. As her photographs became more sophisticated, so did her props. During her Centerfold series, she began to incorporate prosthetic body part culled from the pages of medical educational catalogs. Each new series tended to utilize more prosthetics and less of Sherman herself. By the time she began the Sex Pictures series, the photographs were exclusively of prosthetic body parts. Often close-up shots of prosthetic male/female genitalia, this series of photos were shot exclusively in color. With her Sex Pictures, Sherman posed medical prostheses in sexualized positions, recreating—and strangely modifying—pornography. An example of this can be seen in her work entitled, Untitled #264. Sherman displays herself with a body made of prosthetic. Her face is the only part of her that shows but is covered by a gas mask meant to emphasize the parts of the female body that tend to be over sexualized. They are a comment on the intersection of art and taste, they are a comment on pornography and the way porn objectifies the men and women who pose for it, they are a comment on social discomfort with overt sexuality, and they are a comment on the relationship between sex and violence. Yet the emphasis is still on creating a striking image that seems simultaneously familiar and strange.”

Utata’s Sunday Salon (Source)

In the early 2000s, she created her Clowns cycle and Society Portraits in which she used digital photography to create chromatically garish backdrops and montages of numerous characters which makes a statement about the struggle with beauty standards that prevail in a youth and status obsessed culture. In 2017, she was criticized for a selfie project on Instagram where she used various filters and photo correction apps to create her self portraits. She has also collaborated in several fashion series with designers Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, and Marc Jacobs and has worked in film and music as well.

She has received numerous prestigious art awards since the early 1980s and continues to be an inspiring representative of feminism. Her photography is often credited as a major influence for many contemporary portrait photographers with her influence expanding to artists who work in mediums other than photography.

Sherman has been romantically linked to various artists and creatives and owns multiple properties all around New York State where she currently resides and maintains her art studios. She has two stepdaughters but no children of her own.

About the Art: Untitled Film Stills

Untitled Film Stills is a series of 70 black and white photographs created between 1977 and 1980 in which the artist dresses herself up and portrays herself in various stereotypical roles that were dominant in 1950s and 1960s film. She curated her outfits from thrift shops and shot almost all of the photographs in or near her New York City apartment. The stereotypes she portrayed were meant to represent the feminine cliches “that are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination.”

Sherman has cast herself in each of the roles that she has photographed with her character always gazing away from the camera towards the outside of the frame. By putting herself into the character she wants to represent, Sherman has become both the artist and the subject of her work. However, she is considered the author of this body of work and not the subject, preventing these photos from being classified as self portraits. Art historian Rosalind Krauss has described this series of photographs as “copies without originals.”

All of the images are untitled because Sherman wanted to maintain the ambiguity of her characters. The number system was assigned by her gallery as a way to catalog all of the photographs. Each photo is a black and white gelatin silver print, measuring 8½ × 11 inches, displayed in identical, simple black frames. The glossy finish and small scale are meant to represent publicity or promotion film stills.

In December 1995, the Museum of Modern Art acquired the first 69 photographs with Sherman later adding one more image to make the collection complete at 70 photos. When these images are on exhibition at the MoMA, they are displayed at random. They are not hung chronologically or grouped together according to theme, location, or content. In 2014, Christie’s sold a series of 21 Untitled images for $6,773,000.

In an essay written by Sherman herself, The Making of Untitled, she has reflected on the beginnings of this powerful body of work.

“I suppose unconsciously, or semiconsciously at best, I was wrestling with some sort of turmoil of my own about understanding women. The characters weren’t dummies; they weren’t just airhead actresses. They were women struggling with something but I didn’t know what. The clothes make them seem a certain way, but then you look at their expression, however slight it may be, and wonder if maybe ‘they’ are not what the clothes are communicating. I wasn’t working with a raised “awareness,” but I definitely felt that the characters are questioning something-perhaps being forced into a certain role. At the same time, those roles are in film: the women aren’t being lifelike, they’re acting. There are so many levels of artifice. I like that whole jumble of ambiguity.”

Cindy Sherman

Art curator Eva Respini has called Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, “arguably one of the most significant bodies of work made in the twentieth century and thoroughly canonized by art historians, curators, and critics.”

Resources/References:

• Cindy Sherman: Wikipedia
• Untitled Film Stills: Wikipedia
• MoMA Collection
• MoMA: Complete Untitled Film Stills of Cindy Sherman
• Artland Magazine: Portraits of America: Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills
• Artlead: Modern Classics: Cindy Sherman-Untitled Film Stills, 1977-1980
• Cindy Sherman Instagram
• Hallwalls: Wikipedia

About My Outfit Inspired by Untitled Film Still #43

For my photoshoot, I chose Untitled Film Still #43 from 1979 as my inspiration. The two things that really grabbed my attention were the white dress and the tree. The tree immediately reminded me of a favorite tree on the Black River where I often take photos. And I do have a special affection for little white dresses that has led to the accumulation of a small LWD collection.

With those two things in mind, I had to account for the obvious difference in the weather between Untitled Film Still #43 in a hot sandy desert location and October on a river in the North Country. If it were warmer, I would have probably kept my look as minimal as the photograph with nothing but the dress. But it is getting colder, so I decided to also challenge myself to autumnize a little white dress.

I chose a white linen midi dress from a few years ago and layered a light tannish turtleneck underneath. The color of the turtleneck sort of dictated the rest of the color palette in browns and rusts which then led to black making its way into the outfit as well.

If I stripped off everything but the dress, this look would be totally spot on for imitating the photograph. But I don’t really want to be Cindy Sherman or a marginalized female stereotype, so I am really very pleased with my interpretation of this work. Each accessory adds a little something special and more personal…a blanket scarf, a belt, a statement necklace and earrings, a cloche hat, and over the knee boots.

What do you think? How did I do?

Be sure to check out Salazar’s interpretation of the painting as well as Terri’s take on it. If you want to join us and be featured in my gallery post on Wednesday, October 19, 2022, please send me your photos by Tuesday, October 18, 2022, at 10:00 p.m. EST and then check back for the group gallery of art inspired looks.

Keeping it on the edge,

Shelbee

Linking up with these Fabulous Link Parties.

Outfit Details: Dress-Old Navy / Turtleneck and Hat-Target / Boots-ShoeDazzle / Scarf-Wona Trading / Belt-Torrid / Necklace-Chico’s / Earrings-Old