Inspiration: Cindy Sherman? The Queen of Facades


Before there was the explosion of self-portrait photography for web appetites and social media transformation titillation and the like...



of which the girl in the mirror is a particular subset



there was Cindy Sherman, the camouflage photoartist, looking into herself, our past, our fears, our horrors, our excesses by turning her camera on her many selves ...



she even once made a very strange film (which the dubbing makes even stranger in this trailer)



sprinkled along her interviews she has has some strange quotes, this one from New York

I was working part-time as a receptionist at Artists Space and occasionally I would come in dressed as a nurse or as a secretary from the forties. I didn’t have to show up to work until one o’clock in the afternoon, so if I happened to be just futzing around, I would stay in character and go to work. At a certain point, I stopped dressing up in public. I never really wanted to stand out in a crowd.


Sherman seems very much in vogue these days, cited in many magazines, (I discovered her being interviewed in the French magazine Les Inrocks by French actress Isabelle Hupert reflecting on putting oneself in the artistic spotlight), a recent MoMA coronation, but several years ago she was also punked in what seems to be a classic documentary of the ultimate in gonzo art periphery work by Paul H-O, who was trying perhaps to outart, outpostmodern the artist in a classic of the mockumentary genre. Allegedly he was the B art critic turned Cindy Sherman lover turned scorned.




Is the film despair turned into art? Was she in on it? Did she "disavow" the film (and filmmaker) as this article claims? Is it performance art to the max, or does the filmmaker really only have his film as the only shred of respectability going? I could go on but basically that's the beauty of "metadocumentaries".

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