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PERFORMANCE/PHOTOGRAPHY Larry Qualls Cindy Sherman, Metro Pictures, New York Nan Goldin, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York uring the past fifteen years photography as an art medium has virtually been defined by the apparently antithetical careers of Cindy Sherman and the Metro Pictures artists poised on one end of a balancing board, and that of Nan Goldin and the punk-sex documenters balanced on the other. Both artists are now at mid-career and apparently searching for new directions, based on the examples of their new works shown in New York in Winter 1995. But what becomes clear in examining these new works is the similarity of their ideas and goals, despite the apparently disparate paths they took to reach them. Their careers, in fact, are as much about the routes necessary to achieve celebrity in the art world as they are about artistic choices, unless such a choice is seen as the art work itself And perhaps it iS. Cindy Sherman is an example of an artist whose career is tied in with the fortunes of a specific gallery and gallery style. From her first New York solo exhibition in 1980, she has been identified with Helene Winer and Janelle Reiring of Metro Pictures. Winer first came to prominence as the director of the not-for-profit Artists Space, while Reiring worked for Leo Castelli during the seventies. When the two formed their own commercial gallery, their tastes led them to develop the careers of Sherman, Louise Lawler (who herself had once worked for Castelli), and Laurie Simmons, among others. Since the development of the bourgeois art market in the first decades of this century, the "value" of an artist's work has been very closely related to the "value" of the dealer; by the beginning of the 1980s, when the art market bubble began to expand, the first judgment made about a contemporary artist was the celebrity of the dealer. If the dealer had market value, then so did the artist. When the bubble burst, those dealers whose value-that is, the amount of money they could garner from their marketing power to support their own careers and those of their artists-was weak faded, as did the careers of their artists, few of whom were picked up by other dealers. Cindy Sherman was luckily in the right gallery, so her career has continued and her works have increased in "value." 26 0 Sherman first achieved recognition for her series of black-and-white imitations of movie stills, in which she posed herself in various noir-like situations. These works participate in the appropriationist ideas that were very popular in the early 1980s, in which works by others are redefined by their reuse in a new context. The important aspect here is Sherman as a performer in the scenes she has staged; she has created the makeup, chosen the locales, and arranged the lighting to compose scenes, with herself as star, that served to comment on images from movies that may or may not have been (except in the mind), but which resonated in the then still film-mad world. The impetus for these was clearly Jean-Luc Godard, particularly Les Carabiniers,and the study of semiotics that was at its peak at the time. In the next phase of her career, Sherman moved from still-sized black-and-white photographs to large-scale, brilliantly colored cibachromes. But she still remained the performer, this time appropriating the images of high art, particularly that of the Renaissance. Using various prosthetic devices attached to her body, she recreated images that resonated with the entire history of grand portraiture, while clearly displaying its discrete elements. This is artifice revealed on a grand scale; she deconstructed the techniques of the "great artists," often to show the rot beneath. But always she remains the performer enacting a role. She is the actor at the center of the scene, creating an illusion, but not necessarily revealing Cindy Sherman. This development coincided with the development of careers of other artists at Metro, including those of Laurie Simmons, whose use of puppets in installations and cibachromes is related to Sherman's development, and of Louise Lawler...

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