The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Cindy Sherman · a series of sixty-nine black-and-white photographs scored as one work, each image titled Untitled Film Still with a number · gelatin silver prints · 1977 to 1980 · the artist the model in every image, and no image taken from a real film · the sixty-nine as the artist has fixed the series, surviving in prints from her negatives in editions, so that no single print carries the work
Mode
Staged photography as the critique of an image; self-portraits that are portraits of no one
Mythos
The stock types of the mid-century screen, built as a catalogue; the mirror, the mask and the wanderer evoked
Phase
Made from 1977 to 1980, by an artist born in 1954, in the turn of American art from conceptual and performance work to the image
Presentation
Sixty-nine gelatin silver prints in black and white, each titled Untitled Film Still with a number, with no other text
Register
Cool, deadpan, pastiche; suspense, solitude and small recurring chills
Scale
Sixty-nine frames, one figure in each, the series read as one argument
Governing Proposition
Sixty-nine black-and-white photographs, made from 1977 to 1980 by an artist in her twenties, show one woman in every frame, and she is never the same woman: the ingenue, the housewife, the career girl in the city, the woman alone at a mirror, the runaway on the road. Each image looks like a still from a film, and there is no film. The wager of the series is that the femininity the screen offered is a repertoire of roles made of costume, posture, setting and light; that a self photographed in all of them is in none of them; and that the viewer who supplies the missing story shows his own repertoire in the act of looking.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Every image carries the same title, Untitled Film Still, and a number, and nothing else: no name for the woman, no film, no place, no year. The series is sixty-nine black-and-white photographs, gelatin silver prints, made from 1977 to 1980 by Cindy Sherman, who was born in 1954 and was twenty-three when it began. In every frame the model is the artist. In no frame is there a still from a real film. The titles promise a film and the images deliver a moment from it, and the film does not exist.
The work scored is the sixty-nine as one work, the series as the artist has fixed it. Some accounts give seventy, and the reason is not settled here; the sixty-nine are the series as the artist has fixed it, and nothing is charged for the difference. The images survive in prints from her negatives, printed in editions, so that the work is carried by no single print and none is known to be lost. What stands now is what was made. The colour Rear Screen Projections of 1980 and the Centerfolds of 1981, which followed, are other works, and bear on this one only as context.
One still is a picture of a woman. Sixty-nine stills of one woman who is never the same woman are an argument, and the argument cannot be made in one image. Take away any single still and nothing breaks; the method is additive, a repertoire extended until, by the artist’s own account, the types ran out, and some images are thinner than others. A set of sixty or of eighty would be the same work. What cannot be taken away are the constants: one model, no caption, no film, the single figure, black and white. The number is permitted. The repetition is required.
Movement II
The field was American art at the end of the 1970s, turning from conceptual and performance work back to the image. In 1977 an exhibition called “Pictures” was held at Artists Space, and in 1979 Douglas Crimp published an essay of the same name in October. Both are context, not the work, and both named a generation that would take the images of mass culture as its material. The series became that generation’s emblem, and the theory of postmodern art found its case in it.
The inheritance was threefold: photography as document and as fine print; the self-portrait; and the conceptual and performance art of the early 1970s, in which the artist’s body was the material and the photograph only its record. The self in costume had been photographed before: Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, Claude Cahun, and in the same decade Eleanor Antin and Lynn Hershman’s invented persona. The precedents were close, and the field around Sherman was moving the same way.
The departure was to join three turns at once. These are self-portraits that are portraits of no one. They are photographs that copy an original that never existed, a still from no film. And they are prints made to look ordinary and commercial, in the manner of a publicity still, at the moment when art photography was claiming the fine print. The stake was real: an unknown artist risked being read as the stereotypes she staged, and as neither serious photography nor serious art.
Movement III
Many of the images are interiors with one woman in them: kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, a library. Many hold a mirror. A woman at a mirror in a bathroom or a bedroom, close, half-dressed, looks at herself being looked at, and the camera that looks at her is in the place of a viewer she does not acknowledge. The mirror recurs often enough to summon Narcissus and the divided self, and the series never names either. It builds something else.
What it builds is a typology: the feminine as the screen of the mid-century made it. The ingenue, the housewife, the woman alone at the mirror, each is a particular moment, a room, a dress, a glance, and each reads at once as a type. The series is the catalogue. That is myth in the sense of a culture’s own stock figures, and it is constructed, not alluded to. Its limit is that the archetypes built are those of one industry and one half-century; the older patterns, the mirror, the mask, the wanderer, are evoked rather than built.
Each type is made of costume, wig and make-up, posture and the direction of a look, a location, and the framing and light of a genre. The command is exact in these, and the plainness of the prints is a decision. The photographic means are often modest, and some images are flat or merely competent. Whether the artist released the shutter in every frame is not settled, and the axis does not turn on it: the performance, the costume, the set and the choice of frame are hers, and the making bears load there more than in the photograph as an object.
Movement IV
Outside, the woman is in the street or against buildings. Seen from below against the towers of the city, the career girl stands with the vertigo of noir. Further out the images reach exteriors and landscape: the road, the shore, the hill. A small figure with a suitcase on a road at dusk, against open country, gives dread and openness at once, the empty world of the road film and the old figure of the wanderer. These are the series’ summits, and they are small: chills at the scale of a print, with the knowingness of the pastiche keeping the viewer half outside each one.
The sources are recognisable without being quoted: the Hollywood melodrama and noir, the B-movie, the European art film of the late 1950s and early 1960s. No image reproduces a real still. Each implies a story before and after itself, and the viewer supplies it, from his own stock of stories about women. That is the series’ second disclosure, about the one who looks: his repertoire is exposed in the act of completing the picture, and the gaze, the viewer’s own desire, becomes part of the work.
Set the woman at the mirror beside the figure on the road, the two most distant elements of the series, and they obey one law: a single woman, alone in the frame, caught between two moments of a film that does not exist, played by the artist, framed as the screen once framed her and offered to a viewer who must supply the story. No image has a second figure, a caption, colour or a real film behind it. The range under the law is wide, interior and landscape, America and the art film, comedy and menace; the law itself is simple, and the medium never changes.
Movement V
The publicity still is the form, and the form is the knowledge. Make the images colour, large and captioned, and they become portraits of characters, and the viewer no longer supplies the story. Give them sixty-nine women and they become a survey of stereotypes; with one, they show the self to be the costume. Only the repetition across difference can disclose that there is no essential self behind the roles, and black and white sets every role in a past the viewer half remembers. What is open is the number and the order, and some images could change without the work knowing less.
For forty-six to forty-nine years the literature has divided rather than closed. Is the series a feminist critique of the image of woman, or does it reproduce the pleasures it exposes? Rosalind Krauss’s book of 1993 argued against reading the images as stereotypes at all and toward their photographic means; Judith Williamson, Craig Owens and Arthur Danto read them in other ways again. Is there a Sherman in them? Are they about cinema, photography or the self? The questions have reached into the culture of the self-taken image, which the series did not foresee and now seems to address.
The orders the series holds are the self, gender as a social order of roles, the family and domestic labour, the city, mass culture and the cinema as an industry, and the gaze; it holds no history but the screen’s, no state, no sacred order, no death but the menace of genre, and no other person in any frame. Beside it on this desk, Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (8.4) takes the same subject, the woman as a screen image made in quantity, and keeps the larger swerve and the deeper myth; Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (8.8), from the same years and the same field, holds a woman’s role in domestic space in duration rather than in single frames. The series stands below both, at 8.2, a world of one figure in many rooms.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites on the single image and fails on the series. Take away any one still and nothing breaks: the method is additive, a repertoire extended until, by the artist’s own account, the types ran out, and some images are thinner than others. A set of sixty or eighty would be the same work. But the multiplicity cannot be taken away. One still is a picture of a woman; sixty-nine stills of one woman who is never the same woman argue that there is no woman behind them. What is required are the constants: one model, no caption, no film, the single figure, black and white. The number is permitted rather than compelled, and the axis is held there, two tenths above the cap.
Score: 7.7 / 10
What the series brings into the open is a meaning, and it can be stated. Femininity as the screen of the mid-century presented it is a repertoire of roles, each made of costume, posture, setting and light, and each needing a viewer to complete it. Since the same person plays them all and none of them is she, the self in these images is produced by the camera and the genre, not expressed by them. A second disclosure concerns the viewer: every still implies a story before and after, and the viewer supplies it, so his own stock of stories about women is exposed as he looks. Held short of the top because the condition is shown through its mid-century images, and how far it holds beyond them is left open by design.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The register is cool, deadpan and pastiche, and elevation is not the series’ aim. What rises is suspense and solitude, and it rises often enough to count. A woman with a suitcase on a road at dusk, small against open country, gives dread and openness at once, the empty world of the road film. A woman in the city seen from below against the towers has the vertigo of noir. In the interiors a glance off the frame, or a figure at a window, gives unease. What holds the axis at 7.0, the lowest of the eleven the gates weigh, is that these are small chills at the scale of a photographic print, and the knowingness of the pastiche keeps the viewer half outside each one. No grandeur, no transport.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Built, but built from types more than from deep myth. The series constructs a typology of the feminine as the screen of the twentieth century made it, and the typology bears load: each still is a particular moment that reads at once as a type, and the series is the catalogue. That is myth in the sense of a culture’s own stock figures, constructed and not alluded to. The deeper patterns are evoked rather than built: the recurring mirror summons Narcissus and the divided self, the one body taking every shape summons Proteus and the mask, the woman alone on the road or the shore summons the wanderer and the abandoned heroine. Each image stays particular. Held below the gate because the archetypes built are those of one industry and one half-century.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is threefold: photography as document and fine print, the self-portrait, and the conceptual and performance work of the early 1970s, in which the artist’s body was the material and the photograph its record. The self in costume had precedents: Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, Claude Cahun, and in the same decade Eleanor Antin and Lynn Hershman’s invented persona. The departure joins three turns at once: self-portraits that are portraits of no one; photographs that copy an original that never existed, a still from no film; and prints made to look ordinary and commercial when art photography was claiming the fine print. The stake was real for an unknown artist of twenty-three. Held below the top because the precedents were close and the field around her was moving the same way.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing almost everything. The publicity still is the knowledge: a single frame that implies a film, plain as a studio handout, so that narrative is promised and withheld. Make the images colour, large and captioned and they become portraits of characters, and the viewer no longer supplies the story. The single model is the knowledge: with sixty-nine women the series would be a survey of stereotypes; with one, the self is shown to be the costume. The series is the knowledge, since only repetition across difference can disclose the absence of an essential self. Black and white sets the images in a past the viewer half remembers. Held a step below the top because the number and the order are open.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: forty-six to forty-nine years of return, and the literature has divided rather than closed. Is the series a feminist critique of the image of woman, or does it reproduce the pleasures it exposes, and can that be decided? Rosalind Krauss’s book of 1993 argued against reading the images as stereotypes at all and toward their photographic means; Judith Williamson, Craig Owens and Arthur Danto read them in other ways again. Is there a Sherman in them? Are they about cinema, photography or the self? The questions have reached into the culture of the self-taken image, which the series did not foresee. Held below the top because much of the yield lies in the series as a concept, and a single image is read out faster than a great painting.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American art of the late 1970s: the turn from conceptual and performance art to the image, and the place of photography and of feminism within it. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what a photograph by an artist can be: from document to staged fiction, from portrait to the critique of identity, from fine print to a copy without an original. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the series became the emblem of the “Pictures” generation and of the theory of postmodern art, and its reach runs through staged and constructed photography, the artist as many selves, the teaching of photography and of feminist art, and the vocabulary of the self-made image. Discounted because some of that reach belongs to the generation and to the artist’s later work.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, at forty-six to forty-nine years. Form: whole. The series as the artist has fixed it survives in prints from her negatives, and no image is known to be lost. Presence: as wide as any photographic series of its century, shown and reproduced constantly; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: gelatin silver, among the most stable photographic processes, printed in editions, so that no single print carries the work. A surface fixed to its moment would be charged, but the moment the series takes is already a remembered past, and the work has outlived the theory of its own decade. Nothing is charged, and the figure sits where its age and its presence place it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged as command of the medium, photography, with the performer’s craft included because the artist is her own material. The command is exact where the work rests: costume, wig and make-up that place a type at a glance; posture and the direction of a look, which do most of the narrative work; the choice of location; framing and light that quote genre without quoting a film, the low angle in the city, noir light on an interior, open country around a small figure. The plainness of the prints is a decision, not a lack. The costs: the photographic means are often modest, some images are flat or merely competent, and the range of camera, print and tone is narrow by intent. The making bears load in performance and frame more than in the photograph as an object.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a woman at a mirror in a bathroom or bedroom, inside, close, half-dressed, and a small figure with a suitcase on a road in open country. They obey one law: a single woman, alone in the frame, caught between two moments of a film that does not exist, played by the artist, framed as the screen once framed her and offered to a viewer who must supply the story. Every image is that law. No image has a second figure, a caption, colour or a real film behind it. The range under the law is wide for a photographic series: interior and landscape, America and the European art film, comedy and menace, city and suburb. Held below the top because the law is simple and the medium uniform; the width is in genre and setting, not in kind of making.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held: consciousness and the self, the question the series turns on; gender, as a social order of roles; the family and domestic labour, in the kitchens and the housewife; the city, in the street and the office girl; mass culture and the cinema as an industry of images; the gaze, the viewer’s own desire made part of the work; and, faintly, landscape and the American road. One question integrates them, how a woman is made by the image, and the integration is achieved across sixty-nine images rather than listed. What holds the axis at 7.0 is what is absent: no history but the screen’s, no state, no sacred order, no death except as the menace of genre, and no other person in any frame. A world of one figure in many rooms.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Living Form at 8.8, then The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.7. A reorganisation of what a photograph by an artist can be, from document to staged fiction and from fine print to a copy without an original; a form in which the publicity still, the single model, the series and black and white are each the knowledge; a work whole in prints from its negatives; and one law, a single woman alone between two moments of a film that does not exist, governing every frame.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime and The Encompassed at 7.0: the elevation is small chills at the scale of a print, held at a distance by the pastiche, and the orders held are the self, gender, the household, the city, mass culture and the gaze, with no history but the screen’s, no state, no sacred order and no second person. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 7.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.9: the number of images is permitted rather than compelled, and the types built are those of one industry and one half-century.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5, by two tenths. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Imperishable at 8.7, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.9 falls short by six tenths. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.0, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 98.8, an average of 8.233 that displays 8.2, in the band of Tier IV and short of the 9.0 that the summit also requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the series in reproduction and from the catalogue tradition, not from a viewing of the prints; the series is known well as a whole and a number of its images closely, and the full sequence cannot be reconstructed here, so no image is cited by its number. The work scored is Untitled Film Stills, the sixty-nine black-and-white gelatin silver prints made by Cindy Sherman from 1977 to 1980, as one work: the series as the artist has fixed it, surviving in prints from her negatives, printed in editions, with no image known to be lost and nothing replaced or remade. The count is given as sixty-nine; some accounts give seventy, and the difference is not charged. The Rear Screen Projections (1980), the Centerfolds (1981), the “Pictures” exhibition at Artists Space (1977), Douglas Crimp’s essay in October (1979) and the critical literature are context and bear on the work only as reach. No words of the artist’s are quoted; her account of ending the series is paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the numbering of the titles and its gaps, the reason for the seventieth image, the sizes of the prints, the sizes of the editions, the collections that hold complete sets and when they were acquired, who operated the camera in each image, which numbers belong to which images, and which later artists have acknowledged the series.