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Outline of the lesson. Revise/discuss important concepts for Sherman's work: stereotypesThe male gazeRepresentationCindy Sherman key characteristicsAnalysis of art works from key series. Stereotypes of women. In 1 minute, write down as many :female stereotypes that exist in Western cultu
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1. Cindy Sherman
2. Outline of the lesson Revise/discuss important concepts for Sherman’s work:
stereotypes
The male gaze
Representation
Cindy Sherman – key characteristics
Analysis of art works from key series
3. Stereotypes of women In 1 minute, write down as many :
female stereotypes that exist in Western culture
as you can. Stereotype: a fixed, or commonly held notion of a person or group based on an oversimplification of an observed or imagined set of behaviours
4. Stereotypes Who created these stereotypes?
What’s the subtext behind…
Lady boss
Old maid
Trophy wife
Yummy mummy
What do they show about how society believes women ought to be?
5. Representation of women What message does TV, films and advertising give us about how we should behave as women or of what traits are valued?
6. The Male Gaze Women “are turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men.
... Women are simply the scenery onto which men project their fantasies.”
(Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’)
Do you agree that films are structured around a male gaze?
Would you say that is true of films today?
7. Case study: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo 1958 Analyse the words / images in the trailer. What assumptions/stereotypes emerge about women?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A91SU8Gj6o
8. What ‘male fantasies’ are present here? “There’s someone inside me and she says I must die…Scotty, don’t let me go.”
A beautiful girl, haunted by the desperate, unexplainable urge to destroy herself.
A love so strong it broke down barriers… between the golden girl in the dark tower and the tawdry red head that he tried to remake in her image.
“If I let you change me, would that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?”.
“Yes”
“Well, then, I’ll do it. I don’t care anymore about me.”
9. Untitled Film Stills 1977-80 1950s images of femininity are often used by Sherman.
Why do you think they appeal?
10. Untitled Film stills Italian neo-realist type images
11. Untitled Film Stills 1970s Untitled Film Still #6, 1977
Untitled Film Still #13. 1978.
12. Untitled Film StillsHow do iconographic motifs convey ideas in these works?''I feel I'm anonymous in my work,'' ''When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.'' Describe the STYLE of Untitled Film StillsConsider Pose, Expression, Gesture, Costume, Composition, Lighting, Shot Types, etc
13. Rear Screen Projections 1980 Switched to colour
Deliberately artificial backgrounds
Set against projected slides
Characters resemble 1970s TV show heroines
Youthful, middle class women in the real world
14. Centrefolds 1981 Analyse the stylistic features and iconographic motifs in these works
Untitled #92, left and Untitled #96, right, both 1981.
15. 1988-1990 History Portraits/ Old Masters Cindy Sherman,Untitled No. 224,(after Caravaggio’s Bacchus),photograph,1990.
16. Cindy Sherman,
Untitled Photograph of the Artist as a Renaissance Portrait, 1990.
“It's my reaction to the portraits I kept seeing. They would make women look so beautiful, and all of them looked the same.”
C. Sherman.
17. History portraits “there was a
convention
of portraying
women that
was not real.
They were
nude or they were
Madonnas.”
Cindy Sherman
18. Whistler’s Mother 1871
19. Untitled #222, 1990 Laura Mulvey has suggested these are “re-representations” of women. What does that mean?
How does the style of these History portraits compare with her earlier work?
What iconography is typical?
Consider: poses, props, costumes…
21. Renaissance women
22. Women in 19th C Art
“there was a convention of portraying women that was not real. They were nude or they were Madonnas.”
Cindy Sherman
23. Fashion 1993-1994 Analyse 4 ways Sherman’s image subverts typical fashion photography like the image below
24. Sherman’s more recent work Right – Cindy Sherman’s work. Below – a possible reference point.
25. Cindy Sherman’s later works Sex pictures – broken plastic dolls, with close ups of plastic genitalia in explicit positions
Horror & Surrealist pictures – using masks, SFX blood and horror makeup
Hollywoods / Hampton types – satire of wealthy all-American socialites
Clowns –grotesque, carnivalesque
26. Hollywood types
27. Internet references Biography:
http://www.cindysherman.com/biography.shtml
Youtube clips:
Brief interview on Ovation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsow0QaKJAM
Gallery tour of a recent show
http://www.5min.com/Video/Cindy-Sherman-at-Metro-Pictures-76687122
Excerpt from a doco which shows a range of Sherman’s works
http://www.youtube.com/user/theyasyasgirl#play/all
NY Times interview with Sherman
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/01/arts/a-portraitist-s-romp-through-art-history.html?pagewanted=2
MoMA Exhibition of Untitled Film stills
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1997/sherman/index.html