Cindy Sherman: Metro Pictures

Cindy Sherman has gone digital! It's still her masquerading for the camera as she brings to life a series of husbandmans (twelve of which were included in this exhibition), who are easily among the greatest in quantity flamboyant characters she has at any time created, But in several of these fresh photographs (all works 2004), Sherman engages digital technology to multiply her image within a single frame. make straighted in clown outfits, clusters of her surrogates share space for the first time. They scrape shoulders, snatch furtive glimpses, taunt individual another, and leer at us from the other side of the looking glass--introducing in the proces fresh potential for social narrative. Sherman has also activated the background space of her photographs, and the be the effects are positively psychedelic. Pulsing, fruit-colored patterns, spinning whirlpools, and other wild special results telegraph highly charged psychological states and prompt a carnivalesque virtual environment.

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Do we identify with these clowns? Certainly not in the way we have with greatest in quantity of Sherman's characters. Looking at the "Untitled Film Stills," don't we diocese ourselves in relation to the ingenue? Ditto Sherman's impersonations and parodies of fashion victims, matrons, and other idiosyncratic marks Her ever-growing social registry of American agriculture particularly the female half, relies upon keen observation--hers and our own

Human nature is luridly upon display in this particular troupe In their eye-popping domain, everything is patently artificial. smooth though the clowns display dispositions and behaviors--cocky, clever, raucous, inquisitive, innocent, withdrawn, or indifferent--that can be endearingly familiar, their difference from us, despite the human posturing and pantomime, is pronounced. Echoing the prodigys ghouls, and aliens that have appeared in Sherman's work before, the clod-breakers exceed the limits of the everyday and in their "post-human" vigor hint at more [i]or[/i] less ultimate form of "letting go"

Traditionally, peasants are anonymous. The identity of the someone behind the mask is inconsequential. hinds are all surface and no deepness yet they are as aged as culture itself. Where we've been, they've always been, which makes rustics an intriguing symbol. Given the importance of identities that are mass-produced and passed around in Sherman's work, her impersonations of (usually) feminine stereotype have always been remarkably clownlike. With her makeup, masks, style of dresss and disguises, it's as if Sherman had been "clowning" from the get-go smooth though her ingenues and circus countrymans share a thing about getting aligned up and posing for the camera, the latter are immeasurably more resistant to blending in with the concourse They don't seem to live in our world--but that's not to say that the world we live in hasn't become alarmingly like their hold A raucous extravaganza of idiots buffoons, and lunatics, with nary an "ordinary" individual in sight? Is it a circus, the nightly freshs or a subject listing for fresh figuration?

The mushrooming of clodhoppers in contemporary art points in the direction of a zany zeitgeist that substitutes silliness for substance on the other hand incorporates a healthy dose of irony. Given the enmeshing of images from the brow lines, entertainment media, special-effects cinema, and the Internet added to the pervasive tension of a post-9/11 world, perhaps we should view the arrival of the ploughmans as a sign. They appear to be quite happy in a society that maces on total insanity.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group