Cindy Sherman has followed me around for more than half my life. I’ve seen her on the street, distracted, and in the distance, unaware I’m there. I’ve seen her pensive and seen her distraught, seen her swimming and smoking. Spied her through an open door, in her bathrobe and on the stairs. I’ve caught her eye and she’s caught mine. I’ve trailed her and stalked her and she’s stalked me.
Sometimes her eyes are a tell, and I’ve come to know those cheeks, those lips, in fleeting moments of recognition. How strange we’ve never met. Her art is a lesson in throwing followers off a trail, keeping up a legend and putting on a disguise, hiding in plain sight and going undercover. I know I know you from somewhere, but then you’re gone, a name that just escapes me in a sudden deja vu.
Sherman in all her guises and roles fills room after room at the National Portrait Gallery. Sherman in her multiple poses, a self that’s just out of reach. In an early short film she plays a sex worker smoking and checking her makeup, pacing about on the street, waiting for a john who never arrives. In her Murder Mystery photos she assumes all the parts: guilty and innocent, detectives and con-artists, dodgy blokes and flamboyant floozies. We never get to the bottom of it. Then we are plunged into the series that first made her name, the Untitled Film Stills, each beautifully composed and visualised, in a Rear Window world of characters in motion between one scene and the next. Every time I think I’ve seen these shots too often I remind myself how the pleasures of film noir are unending, when seen in repetition. Sherman gets us to write a new script every time we look, a new black-and-white movie to run in our heads.
The characters keep on coming, racing from genre to genre, the artist strapping on latex breasts, masks, wigs, prosthetic noses, applying makeup, wearing costumes. The show hurries from scene to scene, series to series. She does Renaissance portraiture with leaking nipples, wonky moustaches, Botticelli braids. She does women on the verge and women who’ve gone over the edge. A crazed woman crawls on a beach, another stares at a silent telephone, begging it to ring. Then she’s a buck-toothed crazy person in the woods at night, a fairytale human pig, a scary clown and a rich collector, maimed by Botox and privilege.
In work after work Sherman takes on social mores and the absurdities of fashion. This is all great fun, and never a boring critique. There is always a degree of pain in her best work – the sadness of human vulnerability. When she plays to the male gaze, she gazes right back through it. She cuts through the smug self-conscious vanities of the selfie to show us bleak and desperate insecurities. Every detail counts. Turning her eye from the camera, she gives us introspection, absorption, an unassailable and unknowable selfhood, even one we know is false.
Like a great actor, Sherman knows the power of doing nothing, and how to remain as inscrutable and blank as the green screen she works with. A whole room here is a mock-up replica of her Manhattan studio, with its racks of wigs and prosthetics, the things pinned to her walls, her lights and mirrors and book collection. Like the selves she presents to us, none of it is exactly real.
If only we knew what the real was. It is in here somewhere, among all the masks. For most of her life Sherman has adopted the guise of others: from her childhood dressing-up games (even pretending to be an old lady while walking through her neighbourhood) to the period when, as a gallery assistant in the late 1970s, she would arrive at work as an invented persona. Most of her photographic career has been conducted without the use of digital technology. This has always given her work a particular kind of verisimilitude, and allowed her to reveal the tricks and faultlines in subtle ways – breaking cover with the mask that doesn’t quite fit, a smudge of overdone makeup, an OTT outfit.
Her uses of digital technology (including Instagram) are less convincing and less interesting, even when they allow her to occupy an image multiple times, or to insert herself into some far-fetched landscape. The masquerade is too easily won. Her recent series, Flappers, repositions her as an ageing starlet. She’s no Norma Desmond. But she’s almost, perhaps, Cindy Sherman – or someone like her.
