Untitled #424 (2004), by Cindy Sherman
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For a 10-year period that started around 1985, Sherman's work took a turn into realms of pure disgust. In those pictures, she often turns up only at the margins, if she appears at all. The figure in the frame might be built out of dismembered mannequins, prosthetic body parts and bondage gear. There are pools of fake vomit and beaches littered with skeevy cupcakes. Taken together, it all looks like the portrait of a meltdown, with the artist sometimes literally spilling her guts--or a reasonable store-bought facsimile. Sherman delved into this grotesque territory during the worst years of AIDS, when the body was a target of fear and loathing. In those same years, she also endured the breakup of a 15-year marriage. So even if the pictures aren't self-portraits in the ordinary sense, you get a feeling they report to the world from an undisclosed location inside her.
Writers who profile Sherman always mention how nice she is. It's her art that's ferocious, and over time it's gotten more that way. In 2003 she started to costume herself as a series of very unnerving clowns. Some are pure malevolence with a funny nose. Others, like the sad sack in Untitled #424, are trapped in a candy-colored world where it looks as if the laughs come hard. (If you don't see yourself in these pictures, you need to look again.) Then, four years ago, came the chilling suite of society women. Brittle older gals with money, Medusas of the 1%, these women have constructed an ironclad social mask for themselves.
A few of them, like the inward-looking stalwart in Untitled #470, also appear to have accomplished through surgery and Botox what Sherman has been doing for years with makeup and wigs--transforming themselves into grotesques. The multiple levels of artifice are quite something in these pictures, in which Sherman impersonates older women as they struggle to impersonate younger ones. Because she places them against backgrounds more detailed and realistic than what you find in most of her work, the series takes a turn from the ambiguous and unruly into the realm of pure social satire. But isn't that also just part of what she was doing all along? By devoting herself to the ancient mystery of metamorphosis, Cindy Sherman came early to the discovery that life is the ultimate makeover show.
TO SEE MORE OF CINDY SHERMAN, GO TO time.com/sherman