Only hours removed from Philadelphia where she was visiting her touring musician boyfriend David Byrne, art-world superstar Cindy Sherman is back in her Tribeca studio looking at low-res printouts of the works she's completed for her opening on November 14 at Metro Pictures. This marks her first exhibition of new work since 2004, and Sherman seems ready to open doors usually closed to people looking to get behind the mask of an artist who has made an art out of hiding in plain view through a series of iconic images, using herself as a model (that she stoutly affirms are not self-portraits). To Sherman, these images are paintings; to critical theorists, they embody a post-modernist critique -- flares in the night illuminating issues of irony, gender, feminism, celebrity and pop culture.
Bursting on the scene in 1980 with her series "the Untitled Film Stills," Sherman's photographs show her dressed up in different wigs, hats and dresses, playing the roles of various B-movie characters. More recently, and over a decade after directing the cult-indie classic Office Killer, the New Jersey-born artist has had the camera turned on her by Paul H-O, now decidedly an ex-boyfriend, whose documentary Guest of Cindy Sherman premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. Nowadays, Sherman is reveling in her recent embrace of digital photography—maybe the most significant turn in her work since she first picked up a camera as a student at SUNY Buffalo.
Cindy Sherman: I printed digitally maybe starting five years ago, but I still was shooting film, and I'd never go back now. Forget it. What I used to do is shoot the film and then I would have to take off the makeup, bring film to the lab and wait two or three hours for it to be developed. Then look at it and if I had to re-shoot it, I'd have to do the makeup all over again.
David Hershkovits: On your wall I see pictures of men.
CS: Those are off the Internet -- real portraits that I was inspired by and thinking, 'If I get it together, I'll do some men.' I didn't get it together for this show, but I still might try something. Why not?
DH: Your work has often been cited by post-feminist critics for its ability to parse the dilemma of the modern woman. Men don't interest you as much?
CS: I've done some. Not that many. It's just a little harder, is all. It's harder to get the wigs.
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