Dressing Up and Other Games of Make-believe: The Function of Play in the Art of Cindy Sherman*
Be what you would seem to be—or, if you’d like it put more simply—Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
New York-based Cindy Sherman ranks among today’s most successful contemporary artists. Sherman’s oeuvre—consisting primarily of photographs of herself in a variety of guises and disguises—has provoked questions of alienation, female identity, and transformation in a postmodern age. Some art historians have labeled her narcissistic due to her self-consciousness and overemphasis on self-portraiture (Larson 1987; Danto 1991, 8). Contrarily, postmodernists have believed her work to be self-abnegating for they insist it is fiction, about representation and, therefore, about nobody in particular (Krauss 1993). Feminists have perceived her art in terms of the deindividualization of women in society and claimed that in a patriarchal culture, woman is nothing more than “image” (Mulvey 1991). It is not my intention to dispute any of the above-mentioned views; I think all three have offered valuable insights into Sherman’s work. As a psychoanalyst who writes about art, I would like to consider Sherman’s work from yet another perspective—the perspective of play. In this paper, I hope to demonstrate that Sherman’s art represents an arena, much like Winnicott’s potential space, a location existing between mother and child, external and internal reality, in which [End Page 139] conditions are created for the growth of authentic agency through play.
Sherman dresses up and masquerades as others; she plays peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek games, games of loss and retrieval, and she plays with dolls. Erik Erikson (1950) claims that “child’s play begins with and centres on his [her] body” (213). Sherman’s art depicts a theater in which she manipulates her favorite toy—her own body—to play out an infinite number of roles. She literally makes a spectacle of herself as she becomes innocent girl, seductress, man, woman, hermaphrodite, old, young, rich, poor, monster, beast, etc. In her human comedy (and more often tragedy), she sets the stage on which her infantile and adult selves, as well as figures she has loved and hated in the past, become acquainted and reacquainted, and in which various ambivalences and contradictions come together in an attempt to assume a more cohesive identity. Like Scheherezade, Sherman continuously takes life and death into her hands as she weaves story after story in a lively panorama of psychic scenarios. She “plays” with images appropriated from pop culture (film, television, advertising) and history (art masterpieces), gender stereotypes, myths, fairy tales, dreams, and nightmares. Everything is permitted; and nothing is off limits. Yet, despite—or because of—her emphasis on illusion and make-believe, Sherman confronts powerful emotional realities. Her art can be viewed as progressively peeling off layers in order to arrive at deeper truths, more frightening wishes, and archaic anxieties. Working through ambiguities in her “artistic play,” Sherman searches out meanings and answers to the following basic questions: Who am I? What should I look like? What is my role? What am I made of? What is my relation to the past? and How do I relate to others?
In order to facilitate an understanding of Cindy Sherman’s art, I have divided her work into five phases, each of which progressively illustrates a deepening of her use of play in the service of the development of female identity and the differentiation between fantasy and reality, and self and object. I will show how Sherman first plays with the constancy of identity in the face of masquerading roles. Emphasis on external appearance [End Page 140] gradually shifts to representation of the contents of her inner world. In so doing, Sherman intensifies her experience of self and identity. From the internal, Sherman eventually moves to a relational perspective. Her self-perception broadens further as she begins to define herself in connection to others. Discovering her place vis-à-vis her familial and artistic heritage, Sherman ultimately plays out her relation to the world. Before turning to Sherman’s art, I would like to present a brief overview of some of the more important psychoanalytic writings on the subject of play and creativity, with particular emphasis on those which I believe shed light on Sherman’s oeuvre.
Play and Creativity
Child’s play is often dismissed as an activity that lacks earnestness. Freud (1908), however, correctly observes that play is serious business that represents the opposite of reality, not work. He adds that with maturation, people cease to play and, as adults, construct fantasies instead. Freud was the first to draw a direct parallel between creativity and children’s play. In his 1908 paper, “The Poet and Daydreaming,” he states that “every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him” (143–44). Whereas Freud emphasizes that play, like art, demands emotional and energic investment, in 1908 he still claimed that both activities were in effect evasions of reality.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud moves beyond his view of play and art as sublimated representations of unconscious wish fulfillments and addresses the repetitive aspect of both endeavors in their drive for mastery. He explains that both pleasurable and unpleasurable types of experience are repeated in children’s play as a way of reexperiencing pleasure or gaining mastery. These two goals, although distinct, are not viewed by Freud as mutually exclusive. He claims that like play, art does [End Page 141]
not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt as highly enjoyable. This is convincing proof that even under the dominance of the pleasure principle, there are ways and means enough of making what is itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind.
(17)
According to Freud’s early (1908) writings, then, the artist’s private, unacceptable, unconscious fantasies and built-up tensions are exhibitionistically released in disguised form onto an audience as a way of relieving internal pressure and obtaining pleasure. The art work, like children’s play, is geared toward gratification and wish fulfillment, and additionally, like a neurotic symptom, is viewed as a safety valve that helps bind repressions and avoid reality. In Freud’s later view (1920), the artist and the child at play are considered in less pathological terms as individuals who assert and gain mastery over their impulses and who, by using formal techniques, enjoy the act of doing so. This sense of mastery applies not only to the artist’s own experiences, but also to the manner in which s/he is able to control the audience’s reactions. (See Spector 1972, for an exhaustive review of Freud’s views on art.)
Like Freud, D. W. Winnicott (1951) appreciates the relationship between play and art. He believes the “transitional object,” first witnessed in child’s play, to be the precursor of artistic experiences and creative works: “There is a direct development from transitional phenomena to playing, and from playing to . . . cultural experiences” (1971, p. 51). Winnicott locates both play and creativity in the intermediate “potential” space between inner psychic reality and external reality and points to the common aspects shared by both: “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self” (56). Winnicott understands the pleasure derived from play as relating to the infant’s sense of magical control over the mother’s availability and responsiveness. In play, a template is formed for later artistic activities in which an adult can [End Page 142] create—or re-create—a world that hovers between psychic and objective reality.
That play and creativity are activities that possess many common features has been noted by others in psychoanalytic literature. Neither is required for the task of survival yet, through both, an individual can safely express unconscious fantasies and gratification of wishes. Opportunities are provided in both play and creativity for the mastery of instinctual life as well as traumatic or anxiety producing experiences. Through his/her creations, the artist, like the child at play, can turn passive grief and feelings of helplessness into active mastery, and s/he can obtain pleasure from the process of doing so. Both art and creativity facilitate the attainment of certain developmental tasks, such as reality testing, separation, and identity consolidation. Both endeavors also provide avenues for expression and resolution of conflict and, because of their symbolic nature, are related to the development of one’s inner sense of self and others. Play and creativity additionally provide an arena for the establishment of a sense of self in interaction with one’s internal world of fantasy and the external world of reality.
Despite the similarities delineated above, it is important to distinguish between children’s play and adult’s creativity. Phyllis Greenacre (1959) makes two critical distinctions between children’s play and later creative activity in adulthood. First, she differentiates between play in the service of creative imagination and play in the service of conflict. She also distinguishes creativity from productivity and believes that only the creative act involves the capacity for making something new and original. Like Freud, Greenacre perceives repetition as central to both play and creativity; pleasure is obtained from the establishment of the sense of the familiar in a remembered experience. Greenacre distinguishes this experience of familiarity from repetition compulsion however. The latter, she believes, limits the individual’s experience of freedom while the former enables one to experience reality from a variety of novel viewpoints which, in the end, brings him/her nearer to the comfort of the familiar.
Kleinians, such as Hanna Segal, have also compared play [End Page 143] with creativity. Along with dreams, play and art are considered means of expressing and working through unconscious phantasy. Segal (1993) distinguishes the two activities, however, and indicates that art entails communication; and the artist, unlike the child at play, has an impact on an audience. According to Segal, art also involves pain which turns the need to create into something of a compulsion (108). Edith Kramer (1979), one of the mothers of art therapy, also claims that art presents “truthful images of conflicting realities” and faces dangers far beyond those faced in play (64). She adds, however, that although play is largely devoted to wish fulfillment and libidinal pleasure, it can sometimes turn into a joyless, compulsive, or even, catastrophic activity.
It is not my purpose in this paper to equate the art of Cindy Sherman with the play of a child. Rather, I wish to demonstrate the manner in which play and creativity overlap, and how an artist like Sherman employs playfulness in her work. Like the oedipal child who, in her imaginative play, is preoccupied with questions like: “What will happen to my body if I succeed in my wish to be big and have power over people?” Sherman, in her art, both entertains and keeps in suspension multiple, potential solutions to problems of gender and identity. One obvious difference between the play of a child and the play of Sherman concerns the fact that Sherman’s art is directed at an audience. An additional difference entails the amount of control the artist exercises over the games she plays. As Kramer has noted, art makes more stringent demands on the ego and is more lasting than play (63). Sherman assumes the roles of director, actor, cinematographer, lighting designer, makeup artist, and costumer; simultaneously behind and in front of the camera. She sets the rules, limits what takes place, and has the power to stop the game whenever she wishes. She also employs her camera as an instrument through which she examines, plays with, and works through questions of representation and identity. In her own words, Sherman has exclaimed; “I want to play with what’s real” (Collins, 1990, 17). [End Page 144]
Play in the Art of Cindy Sherman
Phase I (1977–1980): Dressing Up
Phase I: Untitled Film Still, #15, 1978. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
In the late seventies, Sherman became known for a series of black-and-white “film stills” in which she photographed herself in a variety of 1940s and 50s Hollywood B-movie situations, particularly of the film noir (Hitchcockian) genre. Alternately resembling a film starlet (à la Marilyn Monroe), a worn-out housewife, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, a woman on the run or waiting in anticipation, she dressed up and posed as one stereotyped female after another. The single constant in Sherman’s photographs of this period is her solitary figure; throughout her chameleon metamorphoses, she is always alone. She seems to have been trying to establish the constancy of self in the face of her changing appearance.
Naturally, postmodernist and feminist interpretions of Sherman’s oeuvre address her exchangeable feminine guises in terms of the lack of a set feminine identity in modern life. [End Page 145] While this may be true, from the psychoanalytic perspective of play, Sherman’s dressing up as a woman (or women) reveals a game of playing with identity by manipulating one’s exterior much the way children do when they dress up in their parents’ clothing. Freud (1930) claims that most children’s play is dominated by an unconscious desire to be grown up and to do what adults do. Erikson (1972) similarly outlines play’s function as preparatory for adult roles and societal expectations. According to Erikson, play allows children to try on adult functions and alter these roles as they become aware of “society’s version of reality” (127). Sherman herself recalls how, at the age of 10, she dressed up in her grandmother’s clothes in the cellar. She even rolled up socks and stuffed them under her blouse to simulate breasts (Sherman 1994).
Indeed, like a child putting on her mother’s clothes, Sherman playacts by wearing the mask of grownup female stereotypes. Behind the feminine costumes, however, her gaze remains empty, demonstrating that exchangeable exteriors and environments are not sufficient to fill a vacuous interior. One can dress up as a grown up woman; but to be convincingly taken for a grown up, one must have lived the life of a grown up. Anna Freud (1965) describes how children make use of “dressing up” games as a means of creating an illusion of assuming the identity of someone they admire. Riviere (1929), Zavitsianos (1972; 1977), Kaplan (1991), and Knafo, (1993a) write about women who use femininity as a masquerade and who dress in the clothes of their own sex for defensive purposes. Such individuals also demonstrate Reich’s (1973) distinction between imitation and identification. Trying to bypass the process of maturation, they hold onto the magical and wishful thinking that they can be the parent without having to become like him or her. A fundamental confusion exists between superficial imitation of the parent and real identification. At this point in her career, Sherman appears to believe that role-playing is either a substitute for or interchangeable with self-knowledge, for it is her clothing that is meant to convey her identity. The emotional vacancy exhibited in her blank facial expression has the effect of creating affective distance in the viewer. Content in the meantime with [End Page 146] her outward identity as woman, Sherman has not yet begun the quest for an inner, psychological identity.
These photographs are the smallest in Sherman’s oeuvre (8 × 100), and the fact that they are assigned serial numbers rather than titles (a practice she continued throughout the remainder of her work) additionally emphasizes not only the interchangeable nature of identity, but also the lack of a distinct identity. Akin to the personal identification numbers tattooed on the victims of Nazi concentration camps, these figures are denied true identity, definition, or belonging. Sherman seems ambivalently to declare at once: “I can be anyone I want to be, and I am no one, I am merely a number.” Furthermore, she averts her gaze by looking off into the distance and avoiding direct eye contact. Although these photographs are ambiguous and mysterious, there is nevertheless something familiar about them that allows the viewer to project meaning onto them and interpret them in a variety of personal ways. What is important thus far in Sherman’s work is her statement that she is a woman; the kind of woman she is in her mind has not yet become relevant.
Phase II (1980–1985): Masquerade
In the early eighties, Sherman turned to color. Although she continued to dress up in feminine clothes and pose in a variety of situations, her photographs of this phase appear to delve deeper than the black and white stills of the seventies. First of all, the colors Sherman employs are vivid and the lighting powerful, lending her image a sense of reality previously denied them. They also possess a glossy veneer suggesting the reflective process she has begun to engage in. In this phase, Sherman begins to question the identities she previously seemed to take at face value and asks us to question them as well. What does it mean to be a woman? What does a real woman look like? What is the relationship between a woman’s external appearance and her internal world?
Sherman employs the technique of backlighting which produces a candlelight effect that enhances the erotic exploration of her image. By illuminating her figure against the background, Sherman’s body boundaries become clearly [End Page 147] delineated. This Rembrandtian glow further suggests a greater awareness of her inner world and the beginning of an introspective process. She now appears absorbed in thought although it is not always clear what her thoughts might be. Her facial expression remains rather empty, yet there is increased emotional subtlety that additionally indicates an interior space. A noteworthy development involves the gradual disappearance of environment; background becomes superfluous and dispensible. Previously defined primarily by her setting, the camera now zooms in on her figure, and more specifically, on her facial features. As the distance lessens between Sherman and the camera, so does that between the viewer and the image. Sherman’s photographs now invite the spectator to approach and enter.
Many of the photographs in this phase are horizontal, which also lends them an increasingly intimate, close-up (as well as centerfold) quality. The final “self-portraits” of this phase mark an important shift in Sherman’s self-representation and preview what is yet to come. The photographs become increasingly bizarre as they portray a woman examining her own vulnerability and sanity. Several even seem directly to pose the question: “Who am I?” Dressing up eventually turns into masquerade as “normal” clothes are replaced with Halloween-type costumes and garish makeup. One almost expects her to shriek “Trick or Treat!” These portraits clearly portray Sherman as deranged; her clothes are bizarre, she wears oddly cut wigs, and she either grins eerily and inappropriately or appears lost in a catatonic reverie. Playing with one’s boundaries, as Sherman begins to do in these photographs, involves a certain risk. She toys with the simultaneous excitement and danger involved in self-knowledge and the interplay between psychic reality and control over actual objects. Who said all games have to be fun?
Phase III (1985–1989): A Grim Fairy Tale
Phase II: Untitled, #150, 1985. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
A major shift in Sherman’s self-representation took place in the mid–1980s. No longer using her photography to help create changing images of herself, she now began to explore external appearance as a means of expressing the contents of [End Page 148] her inner world, fantasy life, and primary process thinking. The first part of this phase involves Sherman’s use of material from fairy tales, dreams, mythology, and fantasy, all of which represent a more marked transition from external to internal world. The world Sherman presents is hardly a friendly one; it is terrifying and awful, albeit somewhat comical as well. It is reminiscent of the atmosphere created by preadolescent children who gather around a campfire at night and compete with one another to determine who can tell the most horrifying tale. Laughter and screams combine in their expressions of horror and excitement. Sherman, however, competes only with herself; each photograph attempts to surpass the previous one in its sole capacity to frighten and delight. At every turn, we almost expect her to jump out from a hidden corner squealing, “Boo! I scared you!”
The artist adds false body parts to her own for the first time. The alluring, vulnerable females in Sherman’s “film stills” are replaced with a motley cast of grotesque, scarred, pock-marked, cow-tongued, pig-snouted, wart-chinned, [End Page 149] blemished-derrièred images of the artist. Sherman transforms herself into a giantess in the land of Lilliputians or the witch from “Hansel and Gretel” who prepares to devour little children. Whereas she sometimes flirts with danger and we believe she might be taking matters too far, there is both pleasure and relief in being reassured that it isn’t real after all. Bruno Bettleheim (1975) illustrates the importance of fairy tales as symbolic depictions of the “essential steps of growing up and achieving independent existence” (73). He elucidates the ways children intuitively know that fairy tales are unreal, but not untrue. As Sherman’s audience, we are aware of a similar distinction.
Whereas these pictures are dark in color and spirit (Sherman’s camera lighting simulates sunlight, moonlight, and firelight) and more monstrous and nightmarish than those that preceded them, they still play with the erotic, although play becomes more dangerous as it is now accompanied with disease, infection, and mutilation. Seduction turns into rape; playfulness into crime and sin. Oedipal guilt and fear of punishment are clearly at work in these pictures which, at six feet tall, are large enough to threaten the viewer with their size as well as their content. Sherman describes her turn to the grotesque:
I began reading the fairy tales and found that I was going in the direction anyway. The grotesque. I read Aesop’s fables, the brothers Grimm, the Arabian Nights, and some Chinese folktales, which I liked best, because it wasn’t always a story leading to some happy ending. I liked it when things got weird or ugly.
(Vanity Fair, Oct. 1985, 112–13)
And things do get weird and ugly in the latter half of this stage during which Sherman regresses to what I shall label children’s “gross out” games. The photographs—some of which do not include her own likeness for the first time—are filled with images of excremental matter: vomit, debris, trash, and fungus. Her motive is clearly to make the most repulsive and disgusting scenes possible. Indeed, she seems to be [End Page 150] creating a monster child or to give representation to the ugly, bizarre parts of herself through these repulsive pictures. Overwhelmed with angry impulses, fears, and anxieties, Sherman attempts to cope with the disgust and fear of the anal child. She tries to take control of the tendency to make a mess and partly accomplishes this by turning the viewer into an unwilling participant in a regressive state in which there is no control over one’s body fluids.
Many have mistakenly believed children’s play to consist solely in pleasure or fun. This parallels outdated views about art as depicting only that which is beautiful. On the other hand, according to Peller (1954), play reflects the child’s attempts to “compensate for anxieties and deficiencies, to obtain pleasure at minimum risk of danger and/or irreversible consequences” (180). Winnicott (1971) additionally addresses the precarious nature of play when he explains that “playing is always liable to become frightening [since] it is always on the theoretical line between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived” (50). Erikson (1972) is also aware that not all play is pleasurable when he comments on children’s “anxiety play.” In fact, he views play as taking place “on the border of dangerous alternatives” and always “beset both with burdening consequences and with liberating choices” (127). Cohen (1987) writes about play objects that cause fear. He calls these objects “chimeric objects” to differentiate them from transitional objects whose purpose is to alleviate anxiety. Finally, Arlow (1987) discusses games that are well known to child analysts—games in which children pretend to be blind or crippled. He labels such games “damage play.”
Sherman’s art of this phase easily fits into the categories of anxiety or damage play. The photographs are dark in content and replete with references to disease and death. The game she plays now resembles the child’s game “statues” or, at times, the more macabre “playing dead.” In fact, when Sherman does make an appearance in these photographs, it is as a corpse, a dead body. The pictures at least partially represent her inner state of emptiness and deadness.
In contrast to the grim subject matter, Sherman’s lush colors are almost shockingly vivid and glowing. The colors lend [End Page 151] a sense of reality and even an uncanny attractiveness to these photographs which can easily be considered the most difficult to view to date. Kuspit (1991) describes the manner in which Sherman employs color to lure us into what he calls her “vomited fantasies”: “We sift the ruins of Sherman’s pictures in search of her identity, and we find it in the tension between the erotic, glamorized pleasure of color that is part of the ingeniousness of artistic construction, and the thanatopsistic scene” (396).
What Kuspit refers to as Sherman’s “thanatopsistic scene” can also be interpreted as the artist’s projection of the interior of the female body. No longer using external appearance as a means of trying on feminine roles, she now reveals the monstrous “other” hidden behind the carefully crafted cosmetic facade of her film still beauties and displays a wounded body that essentially disappears into a mass of vomit and body fluids. As bulimic women know well, behind the mask of the “perfect female,” there is an abundance of turmoil and debris to be evacuated. It is no coincidence, therefore, that these pictures are replete with images of junk food and vomit. No longer masking her sense of herself as a wounded creature, she expresses her anger and control by vomiting onto the viewer, so to speak. Repelled by these scenes, we are nonetheless compelled by the power and forcefulness they project.
Many of these photographs seem to depict scenes of a crime; and the crime appears to be sexual. One is able to discern a destroyed bed, a fallen head, bloody underwear, a woman’s hand, condoms galore, buried body parts, and a partially inflated sex doll. These images are clearly scenes of destruction. In addition to portraying crimes against women, as feminist critics correctly interpret, however, these photographs also depict the dissolution of Sherman’s made-up images. These are pictures of fragmentation of the figure in which the boundaries of identity have become erased. Thus, what we are faced with are part-objects: shreds of hair, fingers protruding from the ground under which they have been buried, scraps of clothing, and disconnected body parts. There is no longer a whole, not even a fake whole. Sherman seems to be saying that this mess is what was hidden behind the masks she wore in the previous stages; the “shell” has vanished and in [End Page 152] its place are disintegrated remains, bits and pieces torn apart and scattered about.
A further clue to these scenes of destruction is to be found in the tormented pair of eyes discernable in several of the photographs. These eyes are reflected in the lenses of a discarded pair of eyeglasses, a small mirror, and a piece of broken glass. Through these images, Sherman seems to be depicting the kind of fragmentation that takes place in one’s self image when one has experienced inadequate mirroring (see Lacan 1949; Winnicott 1967; and Knafo 1993b). Through her art, however, Sherman compels the audience not only to witness her disintegration, but also to mirror her ugly, distorted image. Benjamin (1988) has noted that “The act of violation of the body becomes a way of representing the struggle to death for recognition” (55). Sherman, therefore, portrays her fears of disintegration, and simultaneously brings them under aesthetic control by establishing containment for a fragmented image.
Phase IV (1988–1990): Playing House
Phase IV: Untitled, #216, 1989. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
As in Freud’s famous fort da game (1920), or the classic drama of destruction and survival, Sherman reemerges whole, but this time in full body costume. The artist’s genius for acting, makeup, and costume climax in her “history portrait” series. She leaves behind the realm of popular culture, fairy tales, and horror movies, and turns to that of art history by adopting the genre of portraiture that was popular during the Renaissance. Coming forth from the self-destructiveness of the previous stage, Sherman enters a “renaissance” (that is, rebirth) in which she turns to the past—her own past, the world of her ancestors—her parents. It is no coincidence therefore that many of these portraits represent mother with child (the largest is an 8 × 109 Madonna). This is also the first phase in which Sherman takes on the appearance of men as well as women. She dramatically depicts a blending of past and present, fantasy and reality in the child’s relationship to the parents through her multiple and shifting identifications. Thus playing with the family romance, Sherman dons the costumes of her predecessors and retells the story of the past in [End Page 153] her own unique way. Most importantly, she begins to explore her identity in relation to others.
In order to come to terms with one’s identity, one must necessarily come to terms with one’s relation to significant figures from the past. Sherman claims that she “never did terribly well in art history: ‘I could never memorize the slides’” (Collins 1990). Just as the film stills of the 70s did not refer to a specific film, the portraits of this phase merely recall master painters and portraits. Goya, Ingres, Titian, Raphael, Holbein, David, and others are suggested but never identically copied. Jarring the spectator’s recall of portrait masterpieces from the past, Sherman encourages personal memories to play a crucial part in the way one responds to these works.
As we follow Sherman’s physical and psychological transformations in her game of “cultural charades,” we question: “Where is she now? Who is she now?” She practically has the viewer demanding to him/herself, “Will the real Cindy Sherman please stand up!” Through her chameleon-like incarnations and reincarnations, she becomes in turn a madonna, a Renaissance [End Page 154] prince, a scholar, a bald monk, a hairy-chested Romantic rake, a lord, a lady, and more. Both Sherman and her audience obtain pleasure from the illusion she creates—an illusion that is presently recognized as such. She does not hesitate, therefore, to reveal the overlapping lines of a false nose or oversized prosthetic breasts. No longer attempting to convince the viewer that the clothing she wears is her own, she allows the seams to show; disguise is even flaunted rather than merely implied. “It’s all in the game,” she seems to be saying, amused. Thus, these portraits are the most playful of all and those easiest to take lightly. This does not detract from their seriousness, however, for Sherman’s blatant aesthetic illusion gives the game away.
On the one hand, Sherman idealizes her figures and places them in elaborate frames of varying shapes and sizes. On the other hand, she playfully expresses her anger by poking fun at them. For example, a bulbous false nose is added to an otherwise virginal young lady, or a visible sagging breastplate is attached to an elderly woman. Sherman thus caricatures the methods and subjects her “parent artists” employed between 1600–1800 through her creation of mood, character, class status, gender, occupation, etc. She demonstrates how ridiculous this world of adults appears from a child’s point of view. Over the course of her work, idealization turns into destructiveness and presently progresses toward an ambivalent state of relatedness. In the initial phase of her work, Sherman attempts to be the mother by dressing up in her clothes. Later, she shows the disastrous effects (i.e., disintegration of the self) of poor mothering via a derailed mirroring experience. In the present phase, Sherman singles out the maternal figure as an object of ridicule. A madonna’s exposed prosthetic breasts are thus awkwardly placed or aimlessly squirting milk into the air, and the baby’s features are not discernible. This blending of idealization with the grotesque illustrates Sherman’s coming to terms with a more realistic view of her parents. Whereas these adults remain idealized figures in many ways, they are literally depicted with the warts and imperfections of everyday human beings. Furthermore. she does not allow them to cover up their sexuality and makes [End Page 155] certain that they flaunt it instead. This little girl refuses to be left out of the adult world.
Phase V (1992–1995): Doll Play
Phase V: Untitled, #258, 1992. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
In her most recent phase, Sherman aggressively, yet playfully, explores issues of sexuality, gender, and object relations with life-size, plastic and rubber dolls. Like the child who plays the game, “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” Sherman is curious about her sexuality as well as that of others—especially her parental figures. In her art of this phase, she experiments with the most basic sexual issues related to body integrity and the difference between the sexes. Although Sherman claims that she turned to dolls because she was tired of using her own image in her photographs (Wallach 1992), I believe her doll play allowed her to enter territory she could not have explored had she restricted herself to the use of her own body. Dolls permitted her to delve further in her exploration of sexuality and gender and to take greater risks as she dealt with increasingly psychically loaded material.
Resembling children who play the game “Doctor” to examine the difference between the sexes, Sherman sets up her anatomically correct and hyper-realistic male and female dolls (ordered from medical supply companies) in pornographic poses. Explicit closeups of sexual organs invest the photographs with a gynecological intensity. The photographs are additionally enlarged to such a degree that one is no longer able to discern that they are not flesh and blood. Although the viewer knows this is doll play, the boundaries between make-believe and reality break down, and the line between the two becomes blurred. These pictures, therefore, hit close to home and create intense discomfort in viewers.
The perverse or fetishistic quality of many of these works derives from the poses borrowed from hard-core pornography. I believe Sherman’s work of this phase is also considered perverse because she essentially represents a child’s vision of gender and sexuality, a vision that predates clear differentiation between the sexes. Irene Fast (1984; 1990) proposes that children’s primary identifications are with both mother and father. She coined the term bisexual completeness to describe the [End Page 156] child’s gender consciousness as both undifferentiated and overinclusive before s/he becomes aware of the difference between the sexes. Thus, many of Sherman’s photographs of this phase display crossbreeds of male and female combinations. Sherman detaches, then mixes and matches the dolls’ numerous body parts, and sometimes adds masks, makeup, and artificial body parts onto the dolls’ bodies. The end result is often jarring as in the case of a limbless male torso attached with a ribbon to a limbless female torso, creating the effect of a hybrid amputated hermaphrodite.
Bernstein (1993) observes that the female experience of her body generates singular anxieties (i.e., access, penetration, and diffusivity) which result in unique defenses for mastery. Sherman appears to deal with these bodily anxieties by magnifying them, thereby demonstrating their inescapable nature. Exemplifying penetration anxiety, for example, one photograph shows a doll posed from behind, opening her buttocks to expose an enormous gaping hole which we, as viewers, penetrate with our vision and imagination. Thus, a rape is [End Page 157] created as the viewers become unwilling perpetrators in a drama forced upon them.
Humor abounds in these photographs despite the fact that the humor is of a macabre nature. Take, for instance, Sherman’s twist on an artist’s model in the traditional odalisque pose. A composite of doll parts lies on a bed of wigs and wears a mask of an ambiguously gendered, wrinkled elderly person who smiles enigmatically. Showing off her naked breasts—although one can see she wears a chest plate with nothing on underneath—she poses with artificial arms behind her head. A pelvis, devoid of limbs, lies in a spread-eagle position, its wide-open vagina stuffed with an enormous sausage. Wallach (1992) aptly calls this shot “Olympia from Hell.”
Sherman’s most recent exhibition (1995) of doll photographs shows bruised and damaged dolls, some of which bear a remarkable resemblance to Mr. Potato Head. Despite the pervasive expression of violence and destructiveness in these pictures, parallel attempts at reparation are discernible for the first time. Sherman uses bandages which she wraps around several of the figures. At once destructive and seductive, these works use dolls to play with decomposition and recomposition and to illustrate highly condensed stories, not unlike perverse mise-en-scènes, that signal hidden meanings in their symbolism.
Discussion: The Artist at Play
Throughout this paper, I have argued that children’s play and adults’ artworks share many features in common. In particular, Cindy Sherman creates a safe space, akin to a child’s playground, in which to play and work through issues of self-image, identity, gender, and object relations. Alluding to her creation of safety, Sherman exclaims in a recent documentary that she likes being scared, but also finds it calming and reassuring to know that the stimulus for her fear is made up or “fake” (1994). I have attempted to demonstrate the manner in which Sherman, as master of illusion in her make-believe world, employs fictionality, artificiality, multiplicity of self, repetition, exaggeration, and photographic illusion to probe [End Page 158] the depths of emotional experience. Her work is a highly personal construction of fantasies and enactments concerning internalized drives, object relations, and the interrelationships between mind and body and internal and external reality.
According to Freud (1905; 1908), adults relinquish play as they mature. He says, “play is brought to an end [in adulthood] by the strengthening of a factor that deserves to be described as the critical faculty of reasonableness” (1905, 128). I join others (Singer 1975; Plaut 1979) who disagree with Freud on this point and who believe that play and playfulness continue to exist throughout the life cycle. Viewing play as an escape from reality or reasonableness neglects the important functions it serves in helping the child, or the adult for that matter, come to terms with reality. Erikson’s (1950) theory of play, for instance, focuses on the child’s creation of model situations to master reality through experimenting and planning. Winnicott (1953) understands play not as opposed to reality, but rather, as bridged to it through transitional phenomena. Studies outside of psychoanalysis have complemented these analytic views by finding support for the socially adaptive and organizing, as well as self-regulating and problem-solving, functions of pretend play (Moore, et al. 1974; Jennings 1975; Singer 1979; Fein 1981). When Sherman says of her later work, “The pictures are fake, yet real” (Collins 1992, C22), I believe she is addressing this very point and referring to the authentic nature of the issues being dealt with in her art.
One of the most important functions of play, which Sherman adopts in her work, is the trying on of solutions and adaptations to conflictual situations. If one can temporarily suspend reality, one is able to enact, in play or through art, a chosen active role in the re-creation of an experience of passivity. One can similarly enact wishes that would otherwise be repudiated by the superego or invite dangerous consequences from the real world (Marans, Mayes, and Colonna 1993). Furthermore, it has been noted (Neubauer 1987; Dahl 1993) that imaginative play can serve as a trial, a rehearsal (a “dress rehearsal” in Sherman’s case) for solutions in reality, or as preparation for future roles in adulthood. Therefore, Sherman’s work is best understood as a re-creation of past [End Page 159] experiences as well as a creation of a blueprint for future experiences. In her potential artistic play space, she weaves past, present, and future together. We are aware that what is enacted in Sherman’s art is make-believe and, therefore, willingly participate in the illusion of her imaginary projections. As in Anderson’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes, we watch with keen interest and amusement as Sherman strutts her stuff before our eyes and ultimately exposes an uncomfortable nakedness.
Sherman’s art changed over time, revealing a deepening of her explorations into the self. Always a model in her work, she claims “The picture is my own performance. And I am documenting myself” (Collins 1992, C22). Sherman initially presented an isolated self who remained constant despite her changing exterior. The self she showed was one primarily defined by others. Like a child dressing up in her mother’s clothes, Sherman tried on the superficial identities of women she had observed at home or in films. Unlike the child dressing alone in the cellar, however, Sherman the artist maintained control over the final image. Initially assuming the identities of women she impersonated, she played off them but remained empty inside. Sherman eventually realized the limitations of doll-like, made-up, “pretty woman,” or femme fatale images. She reversed the game by replacing make-believe, superficial, feminine beauty with the menacing contents of her internal world. As she unpeeled the mask of traditional femininity and seduction, she employed these same accoutrements to make previously hidden aspects of the female experience visible to all: the very organs and fluids from inside a woman’s body as well as her internal fears and fantasies. Turning to children’s fairy tales, Sherman further fathomed her darker side by facing childhood demons and adult monsters and confronting the disintegration of her self. Fragmentation and mutilation abound in her photographs as she was desperate for authentic self-validation and mirroring. Although her entire oeuvre, in its appropriation of images from the past, could be interpreted as dealing with memory, Sherman’s history portraits do so in the most blatant manner. Taking on the family romance in her creative play, she broadened her world to include others and exposed her ambivalent feelings [End Page 160] toward her parents as well as her parent artists. Believing it “fair play” to both idealize and mock her parental objects, she examined the origins of her identity issues. In her most recent phase, Sherman has moved out of her pictures by abandoning her own body and has turned to doll play to probe the world of sexuality, gender difference, and interpersonal relationships.
Throughout her work, Sherman appears to up the ante, to raise the stakes on the tightrope of identity on which she precariously balances herself. On the surface, her dramatic theater has come increasingly close to the absurd or merely grotesque. As we follow the evolution of her work, we observe the way in which she has become alienated from the reality of her own image. Her feminine disguises have been replaced by mythical and historic ones. More recently, her image has completely disappeared from her art and what remains is a mere mannequin, a dummy, a sex doll ripped to pieces—mutilated, fragmented. Moving from the human image to dolls lends the appearance that she has moved to the dehumanized other. The game no longer appears to be fun. On a deeper, psychological, level, however, Sherman attacks the illusory idea of the unitary self and plays instead with a multiplicity of selves, especially as they are manifest in the spectrum of gender identity. Rather than perceive Sherman’s multiple identifications as narcissistic, pathological, or as a sign that there is no real self, one can understand her trying on these identities as an attempt consciously to bear them all, granting her greater freedom to become that whom she ultimately wishes to be. In fact, part of the child’s early playfulness in the area of self-differentiation concerns the ability to distinguish between me and not me while being able, through play, to retain the potential for assuming either role (Marans, Mayes, and Colonna 1993). McDougall (1985) seems to underscore this point, as illustrated in her discussion on the desirable criteria for the formal termination of an analysis. The analyst must, according to McDougall, permit “those inner characters who have remained in limbo to come on stage.” She adds how important it is for the analysand “to recognize within oneself the roles of Oedipus, Jocasta, Laius, Antigone, Narcissus, Hermaphrodite, and some of the sinister furies” (285). Sherman’s artistic play [End Page 161] unquestionably balances sexuality (she is literally playing with herself) and aggression (she is constantly shooting herself—with a camera), and borders on a precarious, dangerous experience of reality and selfhood. Her “sinister furies” reveal themselves in her emphasis on the macabre, the ugly, and the grotesque. Using her body as a way to express and work through her deepest fears, she demonstrates the discomfort we all feel within our own and the struggle to become comfortable living within one’s body skin (Smith 1990).
Like Alice who traverses her looking glass and meets numerous creatures during her Adventures in Wonderland who help her come to terms with the puzzling process of attaining an adult identity, so too Sherman takes her viewers on a daring and dramatic journey to what often resembles a carnival, complete with its House of Horror and Freak Show. We encounter leering masks, mocking jeers, and familiar personages from the likes of a Wax Museum. Inevitably, we end up in the House of Mirrors. No matter where we turn, we confront our own reflection; it is sometimes distorted, and often frightening, but always familiar.
New York, N. Y. 10024
Footnotes
* I would like to express my gratitude for the helpful comments of Jack Spector and Kenneth Feiner.
