In Your Face?

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.

DH: What made you focus on society ladies in your new work? Is it a natural evolution?

CS: Well, a friend had been turning me on to some characters on websites. There's this one called "Brenda Dickson" -- she was a soap opera star who's sort of infamous now on YouTube, where people mock her website. She has a video on her website which is all about how to look as effortlessly beautiful as she looks. And she doesn't look at all effortless! She just looks so over-the-top. Originally the posing stuff came from work I did last year for French Vogue. They were meant to look like snapshots at parties. You know, people trying to look so eager to look good for the camera. I liked these older women trying to look good and dignified and over-the-top. Just the idea of these rich ladies who pose in ball gowns in their living rooms with their toddlers -- it just looks so ridiculous.

DH: How important are the outfits in helping you to get into the right mental state?

CS: The outfits were sort of important, because it had to look somewhat realistic. When I first started, I was kind of unsure that I really liked what I was doing, because they looked so natural -- not so cartoon-y or as caricature-ish as some of my other stuff.

DH: And the mental state?

CS: The mental state is more important because I really want a character to come through. I started to think about some of the characters -- how they're older women and if they are successful, maybe they're not really that happy. Maybe they've been divorced, or they're in an unhappy marriage, but because of the money, they're not going to get out [Laughs]. That's what I was thinking -- that there's something more below the surface that you can't really see.

DH: What were you doing during those years you weren't doing shows? Did you take a little break?

CS: I usually take a few years off in between working, and so I was busy doing other projects or just dealing with past work -- going to my lab to check out stuff that needs to be reprinted or something. So it's not like I was just taking off for a couple of years and, like, knitting.

DH: I'm sure you were doing stuff, but I'm curious. I mean, it would be great if you were knitting.

CS: I think it was really about moving. I wanted to move.

DH: You have a very different space from the other, as I recall. Your space in SoHo was more rococo, I guess.

CS: Well, yeah, [that place] went through a couple of phases, too. At one point it was kind of gothic -- the architecture of the place was just more old-fashioned loft-like.

DH: And then you decided you wanted something more modern?

CS: It wasn't even about that. I just really wanted to get out of SoHo, and I really wanted outdoor space. I just wanted a change. I was looking around and when I found this place it was just completely raw. There was nothing here.

DH: So you had a chance to design it?

CS: That does take up your energy. And my studio wasn't ready then, because I was living in a transitional place while this was being done. For one whole year I didn't have a studio. And then once I got it, it was like, 'Well, what to do now?' It was kind of a struggle -- just starting over in a new space and getting used to the feeling of it, and then switching over to digital was just, like, 'Whoa' -- a lot of changes at once that took some time settling in.

DH: Is there any particular reason you wanted to get out of SoHo? Because you were very emphatic when you just said that.

CS: It's just awful! [Laughter] SoHo is just awful! Ugh. I am so glad to be out of there -- the traffic, and weekends were horrible.

DH: You've said you're not making self-portraits, but your work has a lot of you in there. Is it draining? Energizing?

CS: Well, it's energizing to be working. It's not draining, but what gets harder is the goal of trying to seem somewhat different. And that was another reason why, when I was doing some of these characters, I wasn't that happy with them, because I thought they reminded me of other characters I've done. Or I saw too much of myself in some of them. To me, it's a little scary when I see myself. And it's especially scary when I see myself in these older women. After the first six I thought, 'This is great, this is so easy -- I have a whole new category of women to explore.' It was kind of scary how easily I could make myself look so much older. But that was always the case in the work. Not about age, but I realized how easily I could look this way or that way, and it was kind of scary -- like your life could have been completely different if one little thing was different.

DH: And the draining part?

CS: What I think becomes draining is just working alone day after day and starting to feel like I'm so in my head. I think a lot of artists feel that way. When you do go out and see people, you feel sort of tongue-tied because you aren't used to having to communicate with anybody, and you're so obsessed with thinking about what you're working on, that it's a little hard to form sentences.

DH: In my research, I found out that every time you start a new series, you buy a whole bunch of new music. Is that true?

CS: Whenever someone does an overview of [music] that's coming out, I rip it out and look it up and if I like it, I order it. There's this band called MGMT. Vampire Weekend. James Pants, he's great.

DH: Is it mostly to have music playing in the background?

CS: No, it's more than just a background. I just like having music on pretty loud.

DH: Do you dance around also?

CS: Um... maybe [Laughs]. If I get really inspired, I might.

DH: Critics have read all these issues of identity, gender and post-feminism into your work. Your response has always been that these kinds of issues are not something you are necessarily thinking about, that you work more from instinct. But now that you have heard all of that, is it still possible to be instinctive?

CS: Yeah, yeah. Because a lot of those theories I never even read. I'm aware of some of the early ones, but I guess it's just made me want to do more men. I think I'd like to be a bit more equal opportunity.

DH: Are you still interested in doing films?

CS: Oh, yeah. In fact, I bought a video camera with the optimistic intention of doing something with it. I think I would approach it as if I was shooting one of my pieces. For years I've been thinking, 'Gosh, if I could only think of another idea for a story.' I think I had to do this body of work first, and with the move and everything, now I feel like I can maybe settle down and start thinking seriously about something. What also was inspiring was David Lynch's last movie [Inland Empire]. He apparently started it with a new camera, experimenting and filming a few scenes, and then filming a few others and literally just thinking, 'Maybe I could see how to piece this together,' and filling in the gaps as he went along. And I just thought, 'that's brilliant.'

DH: Is it true that you consciously tried to make un-sellable work at some points?

CS: Sort of. In the mid-80s, when I did the stuff with fake vomit and a lot of fake blood, I was feeling ambivalent about being the flavor of the month. And these collectors, it felt like they would just buy anything because they're told to buy something.

DH: Did it sell?

CS: No. Not so much, a few of them. But there's this whole chunk of that work that didn't sell very well. Or if it sold, it didn't sell for much. [Laughs]

DH: So what is that about? It's almost like Kurt Cobain or something: 'Why do they love me?' And then try to make an album that nobody would like but still sell a lot of copies.

CS: It bothered me how popular some of the series were, like the history portraits. It seemed so easy to do that series for some odd reason, and I felt guilty about that. But then I would go and make these more disturbing [works] -- sex picture stuff, rotting food stuff -- to feel like I could still go back to something that I do more for me, that I don't really care if people like or not. It's what I want to do. And then I can go back to the fun stuff when I use myself, because it is kind of fun, and I know that's what people always want. They're always looking for me in the photograph. And they're always a little disappointed if they find out that I'm not really in this one.

Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th St., New York.