“The challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of”
Art, Gender and Ritual / Seth Freilich
Trailers | March 4, 2009 | Comments (7)
Dustin typically flies his feminist flag high around these parts. While I prefer to be a loutish pig, I’m going to have to let my feminist flag up a little today because of Cindy Sherman. I discovered the artist through a college course and wound up writing a paper about her which I’m sure I would find wildly overwrought and pretentious were I to read it today. But it came from a good place because I thought, and still think, that Sherman is brilliant (some might even say she’s a genius, pointing to her 1995 MacArthur Fellowship as evidence).
Primarily a photographer, Sherman is most well-known for her Untitled Film Stills, a series of photographs featuring Sherman in various get-ups with assorted props and framed as stills of an unnamed actress from a familiar-feeling, but not actual, film. In the ’80s and ’90s, she continued to take self-portrait photographs, fashioned as historical portraits, soft-core sex shots, and fairy tale images, among others. Her work is fascinating and many consider it strongly feminist even though she only takes the feminism bent so far: “The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.”
I bring her up because a trailer for Guest of Cindy Sherman has just sprung up. The documentary, which showed at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, was created by Paul H-O, a cable TV host who dated Sherman for a number of years. As a Salon column from last year explained:
“Guest of Cindy Sherman” … feels more like three or four docs fused into one entertaining (and sometimes squirm-inducing) concoction. We get a sidelong view of the art world and its symbiotic relationship with commerce and celebrity, as well as an exploration of the awkward life of a famous person’s “plus one.” (H-O’s own complaints are bulked up by an amusing interview with Elton John’s companion, David Furnish.) At the center of it all is Sherman, in a fragmented portrait of a woman H-O calls “the most famous mystery girl of art,” a photographer who has used her own image as the basis for a hugely influential body of work.
Sherman famously disassociated herself from the film, which is a shame, but it doesn’t lessen my interest in seeing the flick (even though the douchey-named H-O looks to come off as a bit of a dorky sexist):
Comments
Posted by: tamatha at March 4, 2009 10:56 AM
There's something fitting about the fact that Cindy Sherman has now distanced herself from the movie, since although it's about her, it sounds like it's really about Paul H-0 and his experience being the less famous person in the relationship. It also sounds like making the film led to the end of the relationship, which also makes sense, since it would have brought a spotlight to the issue.