Cindy Sherman is an artist I have been greatly interested since the beginning of second year, however this year has been the first time I’ve taken the time to look at her work properly and understand her stance in the feminist community. This has then lead to her influence in my own films leading up to the degree show.
I personally really enjoy the Grotesque series, as it links to the food aspect of my work, but instead of sexualising it, Sherman makes it look like flesh. She’s also questioned femininity, and how women are constantly in a performance piece of how they desire to be identified as, which is usually a more conventionally desirable and attractive them. Her photograph below of her peering into the mirror is one of my favourites; she appears to be making herself seem as desirable as she could, almost seducing herself in the mirror until she is satisfied. I’ve used this effect many times in my pieces leading up to the show, using mirrors as an ongoing statement in my performances. This parallels to the idea that women’s sense of self is always contingent on something else, as she always looks away from the camera. She also chooses ultra-feminine roles who seem to always be reacting, therefore seen as slightly fragile. I think this is from how she’s taken ideas from films that often depict women in a misogynistic way, where there’s always a blonde victim type character who must be saved from the threat and are under the gaze. This thus plays on both sides of empowerment.
I wrote about Sherman in my dissertation, dissecting the Mother Embracing Children photograph collage, where she appears to depict a monstrous mother. I directly used Freudian theory to describe her possible meaning behind her piece, and I think her pieces here also challenge his theories; such as the Ego Ideal.
After Untitled Film Stills, Sherman’s work took an arguably darker turn and she started to utilise props and mannequins more heavily. The monstrous feminine began to take form in both her Sex Pictures series and Fairy Tales. Grotesque images of dismembered bodies, pubic hair and traumatised genitalia were just some of the themes that the artist touched on. Exemplified by her 1985 image “Untitled #140”, which features her lying on the ground with a pig snout covered in blood, Sherman articulates the uncanny and carnivalesque qualities that are conveyed through fairy tales.
I’ve been interested in joining all of these aspects in my films, especially how she’s built her characters of females and how they’re portrayed.
As said by Rachel Maclean herself, “Make Me Up is an exploration of both the achievements and complications of contemporary feminism. It sets out a discussion of how women’s bodies, voices and minds contend with a world that often prefers you to be slim, silent and subservient”.
I’ve had a huge fascination and passion for Rachel Maclean’s work, ever since I saw her film “Spite Your Face” in the Scotland and Venice show in 2017. Make Me Up takes place in a seductive and dangerous place where surveillance, violence and submission are a normalised part of daily life, where we see her using robotic single eyes scanning their expressions and watching what they’re doing, suggestive abuse with facial bruising and screaming, and the voice of Kenneth Clarke narrating almost everything through a woman’s body. The film explores how the media, on one hand, can be a great way to express and explore identity through the use of pages like YouTube. On the other hand, social media can be seen as a gilded prison that encourages women to conform to strict beauty ideals by perhaps those exact platforms. I’ve also chosen to use social media in my work because of these reasons, using sexualised emojis as one of my main topics.
The artist chose Kenneth Clark’s voice because of its evident associations with class and patriarchy. Rachel’s interests in found audio originate from ideas surrounding what senses form our identity, her use of different voices form a collage that changes the audience’s perception of the film’s tone. This is seen in Kenneth Clark’s pedantic and over-pronounced accent coming through the body of a woman stirring up themes of power and control. Make Me Up’s vivid compositions are informed by Rachel’s interest in “making a feminist film which looks at the female representation in art history”. The predominantly pink aesthetic is a comment on the “canonised view of art history which is very masculine”, subverting the male gaze into a doll-house aesthetic, looking like a naughties Barbie film. I loved how she joined so many examples of sexism, empowering connotations and Easter eggs in her film to convey our problematic patriarchal system.
I especially enjoyed the “temptation” scene, where the women compete against each other with the temptation of eating a sausage from a tree. This is also the scene that we see the woman with the bruised face, making it simultaneously carry the metaphors of domestic abuse, Eve tempting Adam, eating disorders, and aggressive control over women’s bodies. I think this scene alone greatly impacted my work, which is to do with the sexualisation of foods, especially considering the food Maclean chose was of a phallic shape.
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