Once more, it is that time of the year when the German art schools fling their doors wide and become social gathering points centred on up-and-coming art that is ready to test its wings in public. I am in Hamburg for an open house event at the city’s art academy. Recently, I was an external examiner at a similar exhibition at another art academy. One of the students there had made a kind of self-portrait: a life-sized doll dressed in his own clothes. Even though the face was a cast of his own, it was the clothes that carried the narratives. We talked about the paint stain on the shoe, about the hole in the hood (the kind that only a cigarette burn can make), and how the scarf was tied tightly around the hood. We talked about how even though all these pieces of clothing were mass produced and quite basic, the styling made it a portrait of an archetypal art student. From there, of course, the conversation moved on to authenticity and class.
The Falkenberg Collection at Phoenixhalle – an outpost of Deichtorhallen located in an industrial building on the outskirts of the city – is currently showing a comprehensive exhibition based on Cindy Sherman’s collaborations with fashion houses from 1995 to 2019, unfolded more or less chronologically. The show also includes a number of thematically related works from the museum’s own collection, featuring artists such as Barbara Kruger, Christopher Williams, and Paul McCarthy.
Bearing the splendid title Anti-fashion, the exhibition is, according to the museum, the first ever to focus on Sherman’s work with fashion, advertising, and magazines. It surprises me that such a major canonised artist whose artistic materials are to such a great extent makeup, clothes, and photography has never been contextualised in relation to fashion before. It seems such an obvious thing to do. Perhaps there is something about our current times that only now makes it possible to stage such a large exhibition that takes fashion’s critical potential seriously.
I find myself genuinely surprised and impressed by how many collaborations with different fashion houses and magazines Sherman has done over the last thirty years. There are many covers, especially from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. And it feels quite overwhelming that these commercial formats have shown Sherman’s very camp and at times quite bizarre photographs. Presumably they did so because the photographs constantly strike a fine balance between being absurd and aesthetically pleasing. Only in a few cases have the commercial partners ultimately – and at the last minute – opted to not to publish Sherman’s work.
The iconic 1975 film Doll Clothes, shot on 16mm film in black and white, is a short looped sequence of small classic paper dress-up dolls – Sherman herself – being dressed in different clothes by large, dominant hands. It is a very overt feminist message, which forms the basis for the rest of the exhibition’s more ambivalent works.
The artist’s collaboration with the Japanese brand Underground for the spring/summer collection 2018 is particularly interesting. Portraits of Sherman are printed on the models’ shirts, jackets, and bags. All these beautiful, thin, and serious-looking people wear and carry her image, and it seems as if Sherman’s face is almost leering at the whole performative spectacle that makes up a fashion show. Her face becomes a pop culture brand. Her photographs are brought to life. Here they not only mimic billboards and advertisements but become part of the surface of the clothes worn on the models’ bodies. Separating her art from fashion becomes impossible here, and it’s all quite wonderful.
The campaigns for Comme des Garçons from 1994 in which Sherman is made up as various clowns are so beautiful, almost velvety in their colours and lighting, and very tactile. They are quite unlike the photographs created for her collaboration with Chanel Couture from 2010, which are hyper-sharp and digitally flat. In the Chanel pictures, Sherman appears devoid of makeup, but her image is manipulated and retouched; her characters appear disoriented in desolate and deserted landscapes. It’s a striking contrast between the couture clothes and the almost AI-like photographs.
Robert Longo is one of the artists whose works from the museum’s collection are included in the exhibition. An entire room is dedicated to his classic monochrome drawings: scenes showing the Hollywood sign, the American flag on fire, a runway, and a large gun aimed at the viewer. I am reminded of the foreword that Sherman wrote for Longo’s book Men in the Cities: Photographs 1976-1982 (2015) – full of iconic photographs of young people in suits dancing uncontrollably, pogo-like, on the top of New York. Sherman was part of the cast back then. Writing about this, she says:
It’s also really interesting looking at the clothes. This was before people called old clothes ‘vintage’, before designers had any hip appeal, and no one ‘went shopping’. We bought clothes at thrift stores because it was cheap, easy and we liked the way they looked. […] What I do remember is that it was actually fun and challenging posing like this, throwing one’s body around, sometimes losing balance and literally falling (especially in heels!)
It is as if the fashion world understood this game so well that it ended up absorbing her practice to such an extent that a large part of her oeuvre turned out to be commissions created for this circuit. The intuitive, fun energy that Sherman describes in the quote mirrors an energy from the fashion world which has always fascinated me, one I have never really found anywhere else. Essentially, it has very little to do with the clothes; it is much more about how the clothes make you act and feel.
When I entered a Cindy Sherman exhibition for the first time ten years ago in Berlin, I felt very much seen. It was about all the thoughts that I, like so many others, was dealing with in relation to issues such as: how we perform a gender every morning when we get dressed; how the whole world is a theatre consisting of a number of archetypes that we can opt to select or deselect; how we can try to trick the world into thinking we belong to a different class, or try to signal something subtle that can only be seen by those you want to communicate with. This beautiful, young realisation that we are not just a single finite thing throughout our lives, but can become anything we want to be – or at least make it look that way – is the very foundation and building blocks of the concept of queer. Cindy Sherman showed me all this back then in Berlin.
Fashion photography is interesting because it is strange. It is strange because it cultivates not the normal, but the impossible. It cultivates what you are not, yet desire to become. I think that is the very nature of the commercial image, and as I walk around Deichtorhallen I think that this is what fascinates Sherman as well. The commercial image is not unequivocally superficial. It makes a lot of sense to dwell on the surface, especially at a time when a pop phenomenon like Taylor Swift may help decide the outcome of one of the most important presidential elections ever. A delicious, beautiful image can be the most effective Trojan horse of all.
On Instagram, I come across two new portraits of Sherman shot by Jürgen Teller for Marc Jacobs. One of them shows her with greasy brown hair, thin eyebrows, and legs spread. The other shows her with a petty-bourgeois, short blonde hairdo. In both, she poses in front of the entrance to a Marc Jacobs store. The game continues, and the tentacles of fashion and art continue to wind in and out of the shops and museums.
