The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM

Spies in the House of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art, through August 26

Playing House

Brooklyn Museum, through August 26

***

New York

'Artists are the secret constituency of museums." That's the opening textual salvo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's incoherent photography exhibition "Spies in the House of Art." It also has little to do with the show's other claim—that the exhibition demonstrates how "artists explore the secret life of museums and their collections." Museums are filled with secrets, among them attribution disputes, art deaccessions and exchanges, unsavory provenance issues, and power struggles within and between trustees and staffs.

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

'Untitled #207' (1989) by Cindy Sherman.

At best, the argument that this show "surveys various ways museums inspire the making of works of art" is evident in a few of the photographs on view—most notably the large Cindy Sherman portrait that conjures up an Old Master painting (and wonderfully confuses you as to precisely which one it might be). But, by their very celebrity, Ms. Sherman and other oft-seen artists in this show have long disposed of the notion that they constitute a secret museum constituency....

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

James Rosenquist's "F-111" is so familiar by now that memory has begun to smooth its shark-tooth edges and recall the Cold War period it exemplifies with nostalgic sighs. For some of us it's hard to recall a time when this wicked satire of the U.S. Military-Industrial-Consumer Complex was not around. A controversial hit when first exhibited almost half a century ago, the painting was quickly designated a Pop Art icon in textbooks. Students have been parsing its candy-colored tapestry of incongruous images on art-history quizzes for decades.

© 2012 James Rosenquist/Museum of Modern Art/James Rosenquist/VAGA

The Museum of Modern Art's installation restores this 86-foot-long, four-sided behemoth to the original arrangement intended by the artist.

What's jarring about its current installation at New York's Museum of Modern Art is that, until now, museums may never have done justice to the piece. That's reason enough to visit the fourth floor, where until July 30 the 86-foot-long behemoth can be seen as Mr. Rosenquist introduced the painting in 1965 at the Castelli Gallery in New York: a four-sided, wraparound mural for a space (23 feet by 22 feet) little bigger than a squash court.

This old/new arrangement alters the experience and perhaps even the meaning of the work. On previous occasions when I had stood in front of the 10-foot-high images—a turbocharged montage that splices together a U.S. fighter-bomber, a Firestone tire, a vanilla-frosted cake, a light bulb, a girl beneath a hair dryer, a nuclear-bomb explosion, a beach umbrella and a plate of spaghetti—the items were presented tautly stretched across one wall or at most two walls. Installed in this manner, viewable from far away, "F-111" could be digested as entertainment. Despite the threat of human extinction in the combustible ensemble, the work had the eye-catching appeal of a billboard along Sunset Boulevard for a disaster movie. (Mr. Rosenquist's sense of humor and spectacle is not unlike Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern's in "Dr. Strangelove." Indeed, their black comedy about nuclear Armageddon was released in 1964, as the artist began work on his painting.)

In the current MoMA installation, however, the violence isn't so easily laughed off. Bent around the four walls of a tiny space, the piece now offers uncomfortably little area for the visitor to step back. The confinement is menacing. Being forced to look at the mural from a few feet away is like examining the X-rayed stomach contents of a giant anaconda, one that has slithered its way into your dining room and is flexing its coils. The aggressive, cynical maleness of the piece is almost overwhelming.

Mr. Rosenquist has said he made it in angry reaction to U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam, a claim that has never squared with the fetishistic rendering of the sleek, deadly instrument for which the work is named. Rather than an earnest work of protest, "F-111" has always seemed patriotic, an ironic salute to national might and knowhow. (After all, the atomic bomb was an American invention.)

The silhouette of an F-111, the most advanced jet aircraft of its day, runs the length of the work and is painted on 23 aluminum panels. This high-tech material supplies the undercarriage for the images and is in some ways inseparable from them. Our eyes are asked to run along the shiny metallic skin.

Pop Art is permeated by ambiguity toward the bounty of America's consumer society, and Mr. Rosenquist's attitude is no different. He just amped up his mixed emotions in a work of unprecedented size and complexity. (Its gigantism reflects his training in commercial art, painting billboards above Times Square during summers in the early 1950s.) As with Warhol, the visual language inserts images from magazine advertising and journalism into a re-edited commentary on the culture at large. David Salle and Barbara Kruger are but two artists who in the 1980s adapted these photo-mechanical techniques to make large paintings as combative as "F-111."

New Wave cinematic rhythms for images on this scale were unheard of in 1965. Read like a strip of film, they are connected by jump cuts instead of clear transitions. The central figure (and the only human) is a smiling blond girl, a figure lifted from a 1950s Saran Wrap ad. Wearing lipstick and with her hair in ribbons but inside a hair dryer, she's a child aspiring to sophistication beyond her years. The machine on her head is also a jet engine—cone-shaped, blasting heated air, made of reflective metal—and may be sucking her up with a force she is unaware of.

Knowingly or not, Mr. Rosenquist may have woven her into his design under the influence of the so-called Daisy television ad. Broadcast in 1964 only once, but analyzed widely while "F-111" was being constructed, that notorious attack by Lyndon B. Johnson's political team on Barry Goldwater as a dangerous extremist operated on a similar sneaky level to make its point.

It, too, featured a fair-haired girl and a nuclear explosion. Standing in a field, she counts the petals she is pulling off a daisy. Suddenly an anonymous voice interrupts her and starts counting down to zero as the camera narrows to her eye. The screen then fills with a mushroom cloud. Created by media guru Tony Schwartz, the Daisy ad never mentions Mr. Goldwater. It ends with a written message: "Vote for President Johnson on Nov. 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home."

As in advertising, the images within Mr. Rosenquist's panorama act on us subliminally, not logically. Other meanings that were elusive before are harder to ignore in cramped quarters. The spaghetti in tomato sauce, which dominates the right side of the mural, no longer seems merely to represent an unappetizing meal out of a can typical of the American diet in the 1950s and '60s. Viewed up close, the strands of pasta are alarmingly squirmy, like maggots or spilled human intestines.

MoMA has restored some of the shocking energy that "F-111" must have had in 1965. (Curiously, the dead spots in the work are also easier to detect; Mr. Rosenquist never quite figured out how to make it turn the corners at the Castelli Gallery.) It's still hard to accept the mural as an antiwar statement on a par with "Guernica," a comparison the artist vainly invites. Then again, he was addressing the escalating madness of Vietnam in the 1960s, not the destruction of a Spanish village in the 1930s. In retrospect, he may have created the first (and only?) psychedelic masterpiece.

—Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 10, 2012, on page C13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Destruction All Around.

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

New York

Has any American artist ever enjoyed a career as streamlined as Cindy Sherman's? Since taking off in this city at the Times Square show in 1980, the photographer-cum-performer from Long Island via Buffalo has ascended on a steady ride to the top of the art world, seemingly without effort.

Cindy Sherman

The Museum of Modern Art

Through June 11

Enlarge Image

Close

Museum of Modern Art

'Untitled Film Still #21' (1978).

So esteemed by institutions that the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is her third (the Whitney Museum honored her first, in 1987, when she was only 33), she long ago achieved pop status with baby boomers. Name-dropped in lyrics by Chicks on Speed and on HBO's "Six Feet Under," she is overdue for a guest spot on "The Simpsons."

To be acclaimed without inspiring resentment from the art press or her fellow artists is little short of miraculous. No one minds that for 35 years she has been making the same kind of photograph: self-portraits that depend on a Lon Chaney-like repertoire of disguises to address questions about social reality and the vulnerabilities of the female body. The spectrum of characters she has created with this simple formula, everyone seems to agree, is dazzling.

Her popularity isn't hard to explain. Most of her pictures aren't brain-teasers and can be read at a glance. Too much has been written about Ms. Sherman's art reflecting the ocean of images from movies and television that surround us. (The MoMA catalog essay by the show's organizer, associate curator of photography Eva Respini, continues this tired and wrong-headed line of thought.)

It's true that Ms. Sherman's pictures often refer to other pictures. The justly celebrated "Untitled Film Stills" series from 1977-80, seen here in its entirety, relies on her audience's knowing the sources for her characters in Hollywood and European cinema. But to interpret these female types through the lens of Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist who proclaimed that the "simulacrum" of media had replaced lived experience, is to miss the empathy and self-amusement behind her role-playing. Critics love to bedizen her photographs in fancy theories, but Ms. Sherman seldom overthinks. The most impressive aspect of her work may be how economically she orchestrates her three-ring circus of effects.

Ms. Sherman is a superb caricaturist and comedienne who with body language, props, hair, make-up, facial expressions, backgrounds and camera angles can signal exactly how she wants her audience to feel about her subjects. Unlike, say, Matthew Barney's rococo mythologies, the sets never engulf the point of her photographic cartoons.

The artists who came to mind as I walked through the MoMA show were not those her own age, but Honoré Daumier and Thomas Rowlandson, and the actresses Tracey Ullman and Meryl Streep. Ms. Sherman's stage-directed tableaus also come out of the history of American illustration and advertising as well as postmodernism, rootstock that MoMA could have exposed had it shown her 1987 travesty of Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving meal.

Ms. Respini's essay cites the feminist artists Hanne Wilke and Lynda Benglis as forerunners. But there is nothing truly confessional or shocking about Ms. Sherman's self-portraits. She does not bare her own breasts or buttocks, only prosthetic ones. Her wigs and masks don't conceal so much as they expose the visible flaws and grotesque insecurities of the characters she plays.

In public, she is similarly recessive and shy. Her art may be overexposed, but she is not. Even when she became the unwanted subject of a 2008 documentary, "Guest of Cindy Sherman," co-directed by ex-boyfriend Paul H-O, she emerged as unblemished and guileless in contrast to the venal poseurs who rule the international art world in the film.

Despite offers from megagalleries, Ms. Sherman has remained for more than 30 years with Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer, founders of Metro Pictures, the New York space that launched her. Her one professional misstep may be the Hollywood movie she directed in 1997, "Office Killer." (It goes unlisted in the catalog chronology.)

If fame seems not to have afflicted her with a monstrous ego, Ms. Sherman is stoked by healthy fires of ambition. She has spoken of being irritated that her male counterparts from the early 1980s—Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Eric Fischl, David Salle and Julian Schnabel—were more quickly rewarded by the market.

Her 1989 series based on Old Master paintings exhibits her sweet revenge. These pictures, gorgeously installed here against burgundy walls, reflect the diminished status of women and of photography in art history. Playing figures of both sexes in portraits by Raphael, Caravaggio and others, she is climbing into the ring with a stable of canonical male artists while also cheekily humanizing the men and women in the gilded frames. Instead of sabotaging the originals, the act of photographing herself in these guises restores the overvarnished past to the momentary hazards of actual life. Her version of a Holbein ambassador imagines him as a bushy-eyed nerd. An Ingres aristocrat with an appraising gaze is a floozie gone to seed.

With the leveling laughter of comedy, Ms. Sherman has cut women as well as men down to size since the "Untitled Film Stills." That top prices for her prints have surpassed those for all but a few of her contemporaries can be a point of pride for women everywhere. Whether casting herself as abused or haughty, she speaks for those who refuse to be patronized or ignored.

Why is MoMA devoting another retrospective to someone who has already exceeded her share of attention? Wouldn't it be more timely for a curator to elevate some of the younger artists (Nikki S. Lee, Laural Nakadate, Yasumasa Morimura, to name three) who have followed Ms. Sherman's example in first-person photography? Her influence has extended backward as well, bringing renewed notice to Victorians (Lady Clementina Hawarden) and gender-bending surrealists (Claude Cahun) who took on various costumed personae.

But if Ms. Sherman was not the first woman to dress up and act out for the camera, her single-minded exploration of this method may be unique. The MoMA survey justifies its existence by tracking a deepening of sympathies since the Whitney retrospective. There are no indications that constantly photographing herself has left her feeling sick of her own image.

Ms. Respini strengthens Ms. Sherman's weakest series, the clowns from 2004, by dispersing them throughout the rooms and making these sexually and emotionally ambivalent figures a key to her work. Suspicions about the manipulative powers of her face and body, and of photography and art, have been central concerns of hers. With a few easy and readable cues, she can appear as distant as a movie star or as vulnerable as the cursed Ovidian gods and goddesses in her so-called Fairy Tales series from the mid-1980s.

The so-called Society Portraits, in the last rooms at MoMA, are her latest pictures (2000-2008) and my favorites. Here, she manipulates her own face and body with frightening precision, cutting ever close to the bone. Digital tools have allowed her to be multiple people in party scenes and to improve the often muddy color seen in her earlier work.

Ms. Respini is too polite to discuss what is obvious about these middle-age women clutching at remnants of their youthful selves. Ms. Sherman is at a stage in life (58 years old) when everyone stares in the mirror and considers what plastic surgeons might do to allay time's ravages. These doyennes are not unlike the collectors whose support makes possible extravagant shows like this one at MoMA. The artist is not so gently biting the jeweled, liver-spotted hands that have fed her career so richly. At the same time, she is facing down the inevitable atrophy of her own mortal flesh. Any laughter these frail creatures give rise to gets caught in the throat.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 7, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Roles of a Lifetime.

“Since 1977, when Cindy Sherman first exhibited her “untitled film Stills” of fictional B-movie starlets, she has surrendered herself to photographic portraits of nearly every female archetype imaginable. So completely does the artist disappear into her subjects—disheveled fashion victims, art-historical icons, tragic dowagers, manic clowns, Beverly Hills housewives—that it’s hard to believe they are all the same woman.” by Linda Yablonsky for the Wall Street Journal (2/26.2012)

PHOTOGRAPHY'S ANGEL PROVOCATEUR

"At many points throughout this dense, often exciting show, which opens on Sunday, we are confronted by an artist with an urgent, singularly personal vision, who for the past 35 years has consistently and provocatively turned photography against itself." By Roberta Smith for the New York Times