Kirjahaku

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives. Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills--or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clich s.Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones--those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.

For almost 50 years, the theme of fashion has been a constant in the work of US artist Cindy Sherman. The exhibition Cindy Sherman - Anti-Fashion is the first to focus on this close engagement with fashion and approaches her photographic oeuvre from a new perspective. In so doing, it sheds light on the interplay between art and fashion. For Sherman uses her numerous commissions from magazines and her collaborations with renowned designers as a constant source of artistic inspiration. The exhibition reveals the subject of fashion as the starting point for the artist's critical investigation of gender, stereotypes, and our attitude to aging. The wide range of Sherman's assumed characters highlights the artificiality and changeability of identity, which - now more than ever - is shown to be selectable, (self-)constructed, and fluid.

Type 42 presents 120 works from an extraordinary archive of work by an anonymous artist. The archive is composed of black-and-white polaroids showing headshots and close-ups of actresses taken from the television screen beginning in the late 1960s. They are mainly distorted, slightly blurry and occasionally pixelated, but a strong emphasis on the science fiction or B-movie genres pervades. In some of the photographs the television screen can be seen as a framing device, but for the most part the television’s borders are absent from the picture – one of the many remarkable aesthetics of this collection.‘Type 42’ refers to the type of Polaroid film used. The entire body of work was found intact in New York in 2012 by artist Jason Brinkerhoff; his attempts to trace the origins of the polaroids have remained unsuccessful.All but a handful are inscribed. In most cases the name of the actress is written across the bottom of the photograph; in some cases the title of the film or TV series she appears in is written across the top of the photograph; and in a few cases both sets of information are written on top and bottom accordingly. There are also 31 photographs where the artist has written the women’s measurements across the top along with her name across the bottom.