Cindy Sherman Now!

Most gallery art isn't quite what I'm looking for. In fact it's never exactly what I was hoping it would be. Except I was unexpectedly surprised by the work of Cindy Sherman at the Martin Gröpius Gallery in Berlin (a fascinating place itself). Her art is something that left an impression on my thinking for hours. Her pictures are unsettling, and the poke at the heart of American feminist issues, such as media portrayal. All of her early pictures show a frightened young woman, for example, clenching a newspaper article and lying on a kitchen floor, as if about to cry. Or "B-grade" women who are applying to be some kind of actress, and someone hasn't told them they simply aren't good enough yet. They're ugly. They're American. They have big aspirations. She focuses on the people of low art who in turn fetishize the unattainable ideal of high art.

On the other hand, women in Rear Screen Projections look fashionable enough, and there's even something erotic about them. Except you wouldn't say these pictures are erotic: they never strike you as such. In fact all these women have something much more in common. They're all acted out by the same person: Cindy herself. This is what amazes me--this ability to change places, to change roles and characters. She is at once a clown with buck teeth, and in another still she is an ominous blonde on a bicycle. She's the face of the distressed woman in top-down society. And yet not always a woman. There's nothing constant about her, destroying any possibility of there being anything "real" about her. The idea that every photograph is taken of someone named Cindy Sherman is irrelevant. They're all completely different people.

Her work has something of theatrical twist to it. It's photography as if were for film still production. Cindy is also very fashion conscious and woman-conscious. Her Sex Pictures evokes feelings of a voyeurist, except it isn't quite doing that because the artist is inviting us in to see how wretched things really are. Horror Pictures explores the deeply psychological link about women in 80s horror film that drove groups of feminists to write flurries of essays on "the last girl" or the screaminig ingenue.


I would say Sherman's work most closely resembles Rembrandt's. Recall the painting where Rembrandt messed up the head of the lady while the man is enjoying his tall glass of beer. This reminds me of Sherman's work. Rembrandt was a theatrical painter. He also pointed out vices in human behavior. Such as in , for example, gluttony. Sherman points to the same things. She points out vices in women, in feminine behavior, that we presume is linked to something that a man has done. Perhaps women have done it to themselves at the same time. For example, being fashion-conscious is something Sherman appears to attack. And yet much of her own inspiration comes from shopping, she's said. She's feeding her ideas with the things she's opposed to. Another example is female vulnerability. In each picture the female is vulnerable. But how many men, when they look on a vulnerable blonde woman, arouse masculine urges to "protect", "save" and "comfort"? Which of these men really wants the women not to feel vulnerable? Psychologically, they want the woman to feel insecure, and secretly they want to be the ones to whisk her away and comfort her, and then have a dominating form of sex, undoubtedly.

The Fernsehenturm

No doubt the tallest
Walter Umbrecht's last erection
Quick! The Pope will see!

Revolt of the Aficionados (especially Claude Monet)

Is Monet's art optimistic? The aficionados at the Neues National Gallerie in Berlin (pictured left) the aficionados seem to think so. The en plen-air style has such a silly effect on people in galleries. It is faux-idyllic adornment for them. Every woman, mother, and little girl walks by the light-colored oil paints and smiles to themselves, reassured that Monet's art makes everything beautiful for them. Simply, their "beauty" is dishonest. They would hang the prints up in summer garden houses so they're bourgeois neighbors can chat about it over tea. Monet, that is, amongst their pastel swans, their ornamental pine cones and nasty Thomas Kincades. How revolting!

Of course, they loved the summerly "Etes" (on the right). The smiley-faced critics would use words like "humorless" to describe some of the other works in the Neues Gallery. In fact I heard them say in Prague that Picasso was incomprehensible! And then they walked off with smug grin on their faces. I like those incomprehensible works, for what it's worth. Perhaps even you, Monet, are incomprehensible at times. But this whole business about smiling unrepentantly at art I don't understand. Perhaps because I find nothing to smile about Monet's art. To me the impressions (or, "little blobs of spit" as one critic said) appear like bouts of insanity over a sad, almost blase, fleeting moment. So the smiling gesture is completely obscene to me. My little gallery notebook is chalk-full of comments about the paintings, and many of the meanest ones are directed toward the faux-aficionados who think smiling at art is required of them. Honestly, it isn't a fail-safe response to anything in a gallery. When they saw Otto Dix's "War" in Dresden--a very bizarre Guernica-like depiction of the barbarism of war--they cringed and nearly left the gallery. Canadian women are the worst. (Political isolation also becomes artistic isolation.) This lady in the pink parapet smiles at everything in the Neues Gallery so absurdly, the kind of look unparenting women give to whiny children while the parent's are trying to shush them up. Hodling her dainty audio-guide in hand, she will be sure to get a well-rounded chorus of "appropriate responses" to fill her head.

I might even tag this blog "absurd gestures toward art". (But then, to be fair, I would need to also list the antithetical "appropriate gestures toward art" as well.) I think to be always smiling at a thing you hardly understand seems more like a code of conduct for a cast of circus clowns. After seeing many cheery "Frauen Kopf"s in galleries I don't think I feel the urge to smile back at them. Not at this point. Maybe when I've seen over a hundred, then perhaps I will have developed a well-established relationship, enough at least, to smile back in a non-retarded way.

Brezhnev & Honecker

The East Side Gallery in East Berlin is probably the largest and everlasting open art gallery in the world. Immediately after the fall of the wall, international artists came to Berlin to paint the wall with murals and artistic encouragements. A popular one reads, "No more wars. No more walls. A united world." But the most widely known of these are the figures of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker holding each other and kissing (pictured right). Perhaps less known is the fact that the kiss was originally a mistake; in a hurry to perform the formality and get it over with, one of them aimed at the wrong cheek, and this resulted in an unintended lipsmacking socialist spectacle. One thing is certain--that it came to represent the absurdity of Communist ideology.

Brezhnev, although anti-Stalinist while Krushchev was in power, was pro-Stalinist once he came into power himself. Stalin was then mentioned positively as Brezhnev began reversing Krushchev's policies and started to wield his own repressive cultural policies. When he criticized the Czech leadership as "revisionist" and "anti-Soviet" for liberalizing its politics in 1968, he was met with the student Prague Spring uprising. The Breshnev Doctrine was essentially that the Soviet Union had the right to interfere with the politics of satellite nations to "safeguard socialism". The Helsinki Final Act treaty, a complete failure for the Western countries, legitimized Soviet repression in the satellite countries. All the Western states received in return was the Soviet promise that human rights would be respected in the Soviet sphere of influence. Yet almost as soon as Brezhnev became Chairman of the Communist Party, and the Supreme Soviet of the Union, an economic-slowdown ensued. Dissidents were routinely arrested. Ironically, Brezhnev referred to this as the "Period as Developed Socialism". In fact, the Constitution used to read, "The developed Socialist society is a natural, logical stage on the road to Communism."

And in 1961, it was Erich Honecker who was responsible for building the Berlin Wall. After a power struggle, he replaced Walter Ulbricht as General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Honecker developed a program of "consumer socialism" which used capitalism to boost the performance of the GDR economy. But once Leipzig was protesting every Monday, and the wall soon fell, Honecker was sought after for war crimes and deaths of 192 East Berliners who died escaping to the West.

To depict these two ferocious leaders as being not only in political and ideological union but sexual union as well, successfully illustrates how secrecy and illegitimacy flourished in the Soviet system. It means that something sexual, the mother of all secrets, was taking place behind the scenes, and it hints at much more. For Berliners, to see these two stooges of Socialist power in their region kissing must have been liberating. Emulations and spin-offs of the original work began to surface soon afterward. For example, there is another popular depiction of the Honecker and Brezhnev kissing while a car is crashing through the wall. This seems to suggest that the two leaders are so wrapped up in their own secrets that neither of them is paying attention to where the car is headed, and it ends up crashing through the "anti-fascist protective barrier" into West Germany. Struggling to contain the secrets of Soviet power, the nation crashes itself into Western sphere of influence and thus exposes all its secrets.

No Ideology in Film, Says Museum

Otherwise a spectacular museum, the Museum für Film und Fernsehen (pictured obscurely on the left) in Berlin suggests that some films do not contain any ideological messages. Especially earlier films, it claims, such as those starring or directed by Asta Nielsen, a popular Danish actress who starred in many silent German films during the 1910s and 1920s. She's hailed as the "first international movie star". Yet it seems that all through out film history, the even the figure of the woman (in all its various forms) is idolized and encoded with secret ideological messages. The androgenous Marlene Dietrich, another German actress, was impossible for men to understand. Confident Dietrich also had explicitly anti-Nazi political goals. In a very unobscure way, how can she avoid being ideological in that sense, a simply political sense? Ms. Nielsen was not only a woman acting as various women in political-social situations, she also had a political statement to make as well.

The museum doesn't mention this oddly enough. Ms. Nielsen (pictured right) was approached by the Ministry of Propaganda and asked to promote the Nazi regime through film. She thus fled to Denmark in defiance. An original document in the museum quotes Ms. Nielsen later in her life as saying that she believes in her own genius. She says that she could do anything she wanted, anything a man could do. Hell, she says, I can even "read and write". Her films are mostly like circus-style cabaret from the early, early 20th Century. That's how most films started out too: as imitations and renactments of the circus; mainly for those who weren't wealthy enough to actually attend them. So already her films are participating in a new sort of "circus for the working class masses", and so on.

The circus at any rate is chalk-full of ideological statements. Everything from encoding the legitimacy of animal captivity to human triumphalism, and on that point, reinforcing the many barbarisms of our species. Nielsen's films reflect this circus mentality undoubtedly. The films also reflects her nearly proletarian outlook, almost as if she were a "tramp" in one of Chaplin's films. She lived most of her childhood in extreme poverty. She thus reflects in all her films her own auteuristic, class-conscious personality. Her own ideas and emotions, from her perspective. These are encoded through the use of film, easily. Perhaps the museum wanted to avoid the rather alarming thesis that everything is ideology. But I think it is, even the smallest overlooked things. And I think even the earliest films, those of Asta Nielsen, embed that core ideological fascet of film that persists today.

Rodin's "Thinker"

The real version in Berlin is much smaller than I expected.

The real figure is nothing more than a surging flow of dread, or at least constipation. He doesn't know which leg to put his hand on. I kept asking myself whether Rodin's piece was really thinking or whether he was contemplating suicide. The way his body is twisted into such an unnatural knot, with all his muscles pulling themselves apart, nostrils distended and lips compressed, fist clenched and toes gripping at nothing--considering this--it seems impossible that he has the ability to think naturally, logically. He is rather on the verge of making some sort of life-threatening decision. Perhaps the first and most immediate philosophical question, as Camus said: whether to continue living or to discontinue living from this point on.