Histories: Versions and Subversions

Stereotypes are a crude set of mental representations of the world. They are palimpsests on which the initial bipolar representations are still vaguely legible. They perpetuate a needed sense of difference between the "self" and the "object," which becomes the "Other"—Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology

The simplest cultural accounts are intentional creations.... [I]nterpreters constantly construct themselves through the others they study. —James Clifford, introduction to Writing Culture

THE SPECTACLE OF HISTORY

It is the entrance to a flea market.... Sloppy crowds. Vulpine, larking. Why enter? What do you expect to see? I'm seeing. I'm checking on what's in the world. What's left. What's discarded. What's no longer cherished. What had to be sacrificed. What's someone thought might interest someone else. But ... it's already been sifted through. But there may be something valuable, there ... something I would want.... Something that speaks to me. To my longings. —Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

History pictures. History pictures. Rulers and priests, scholars, madonnas, and courtesans. Symbols of power and eminence—reproduced, re-presented by the artful assemblage of wigs and costumes, masks and makeup, false noses and breasts. Performances. A spectacle. A series of life-size tableaux vivants photographed and hung in gold and silver frames: Cindy Sherman's History Portraits.

And, through the looking glass, our history, Carl de Keyzer wryly suggests with his photograph of the exhibit. A woman is looking at a photograph. Young, blond, dressed in jeans and turtleneck, her head in profile, her body arrested in the forward stride of her right leg as she turns away from us, hands clasped in front of her crotch, she mimics the posture of the object of her gaze: a framed portrait of a woman with an enigmatic smile, her body turned slightly away, hands folded in her lap, her gaze averted (fig. 1.1). To be a spectator at this History Portraits exhibit must have seemed like being in a funhouse of distorted mirrors. Within the multiply framed gold borders of Sherman's "Mona Lisa," de Keyzer catches the ghostly reflected presences of a "man" in another portrait and of the young woman standing before this one. Because of the camera's position to the left, "Mona Lisa" here is off center, hanging on an angled wall, so that the viewer is the other gazer, completing a triangle in which each looks at the other who does not return her gaze.

Living in Rome at the time (a sort of postmodern Henry James New-woman, come to make over Europe in her own image), Cindy Sherman went Shopping in Old World flea markets for the props—silk garters, lace curtains patterned with angels, tiaras, tapestries, lengths of satin fabric, collars, books, dolls, and an assortment of false body parts—that (like Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country) she would play with in front of her mirror, making up (herself) and making up (stories). These are gawky simulations of the teasingly familiar: the Virgin with One Bare Breast, a balloonlike protrusion stuck on to the middle of her chest or a falsie attached loosely to her dress (fig. 1.2); Renaissance profiles with tremendously elongated noses. Which is which, however, is not always so easy to tell: it becomes difficult to distinguish virgin from courtesan, or even male from female (some of the subjects seem to be in drag) when what commands attention are the exaggerated and prominent body parts. Indeed, the wit and brilliance of the details—the tinny cast to the pearls, the hair covering of fishnet or tartan scarf, the voluptuous pregnant torso clipped on at the shoulders, the drop of blood running along the seamed nose or of milk at the end of the fake breast, the red locket that matches the nipples of attached breasts like some Cyclopean eye, the richly patterned and textured tapestry that figures in more than one portrait—have the cumulative effect of flattening the individual portraits. The overwhelming impression is of a collection of parts, of props, of pomp and artifice.

The thirty-five portraits in the exhibit, identified only by number (they come from a much larger collection), follow a chronological sequence from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. There are also visual and iconographic sequences: a carnival of prominent body parts features grotesque breasts or noses; the placement of hands calls attention to symbols of power and knowledge (objets d'art, crosses, jewels, eyeglasses, books) or to genitalia, bellies, and death heads; details of costume or setting (wigs, head coverings, jewelry, draperies) form patterns, as do poses (the Renaissance profile, the downcast introspection of the Virgin, the almost frontal gaze of the Mona Lisa) and themes (female alternating with male, holy with secular or profane). These patterns do not add up to a reassuring narrative, however; to the contrary, the bits and pieces are combined and recombined in a most disorderly parody.

In assembling the segments of her history, Sherman draws upon traditions from both high and popular culture. Piecing together forms of the ideal has been a technique practiced by artists from Phidias, who used the face of one model, the mouth of another, the nose of a third to create a beauty that transcended its models, to Albrecht Dürer, who in his sixteenth-century Treatise on Measurement advocated a similar construction of an ideal nude, to Charles Dana Gibson, who at the beginning of this century printed "bits and pieces of the pretty girls he saw ... like snapshots in his memory," later to be combined at will in the creation of his famous Gibson Girl.

Sherman also draws on theatrical traditions—the trying on and display of clothes, which Peter Stallybrass has identified as the source of the formation and dissolution of identity in the Renaissance theater—particularly tableaux vivants, which were offen grandiose presentations with large casts, exotic themes, and elaborate scenery and costumes especially popular with nineteenth-century theater audiences in Paris and London. Contemporary with the Gibson Girl, tableaux vivants were staged in New York at society balls, such as the one depicted in Wharton's The House of Mirth, and in turn-of-the-century (as well as earlier) photographs. These living pictures depended for their effect on verisimilitude—that is, how accurately the live representation of a painting duplicated the appearance of an original—and upon the audience's ability to recognize the works represented. Sherman (like Wharton) re-presents historical portraits with which we are immediately familiar—by Leonardo, Raphael, Caravaggio, La Tour, Fouquet—and some with which we are...