16/06/2016
Arab Times
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Beyonce performs during the Formation World Tour at Ford Field on June 14 in Detroit. (AP)LOS ANGELES, June 15, (Agencies): Long before the selfie, there was Cindy Sherman, the shape-shifting artist best-known for her often grotesque self-portraits.
For the first time in 20 years, some of her most influential works are going on view at Los Angeles’s Broad Museum, focusing on Hollywood’s feminine cliches in the city that invented them.
From blond Hitchcock starlets to aging socialites to pin-up housewives, Sherman has imitated the spectrum of feminine tropes.
“She’s produced some of the most influential work of her time,” said Philipp Kaiser, the curator of the exhibition “Imitation of Life,” which opened last Saturday.
One of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists, Sherman’s works are worth millions and consistently break auction records.
The artist plays her own model, donning elaborate costumes and garish makeup, that play on cinematic imagery.
Her all-encompassing retrospective includes work that plays off stereotypes from Hollywood’s Golden Age, B-list horror films.
The show, which runs until October, draws “on cinema roles in the shaping of identity and stereotypes” said Joanne Heyler, director of the Broad Museum, at a press event.
The first major exhibition at the Broad since its grand opening last September, 120 pieces created over four decades by Sherman are on view.
Collection
The works come mostly from the collection of real estate mogul and philanthropist Eli Broad, a long-time collector of the 62-year-old artist’s work.
Broad designed Los Angeles’s newest contemporary art museum to house his vast art holdings, including the world’s largest collection of Sherman pieces.
“Cindy has held for a long time a very special place in our collection,” said the wealthy businessman, who remembers being “dazzled” when he discovered her work in the 1980s.
The show is coming at a poignant moment, as critics lambast Hollywood for the lack of recognition given to women in the industry, at the same time that Hillary Clinton could become the first woman in the White House.
“It’s a particularly interesting time to present to the public the work of an artist which questions the way the media shape feminine identity in images, and how, as an artist, she talks back to these images,” said Heyler.
Each of her photographs resemble a short silent film, added Heyler.
Sherman sometimes employs the same techniques old Hollywood is known for, including large-scale projections that resemble frozen movie screens, reproduced on entire walls of the Broad.
She also poses with comically frightened expressions, as if taken aback in the style of a “damsel in distress,” putting herself in submissive positions.
The New York artist’s body of work also includes imagery from fashion magazines, like a satirical photo series that plays on images from the 80s. In those works Sherman poses in chic designer outfits with chalky makeup, slumped shoulders and greasy hair.
Because Sherman is her own model, her subjects age along with her, Heyler told AFP.
The artist’s 2008 series satirizes aging society women, clad in sequins with impeccable blowouts.
In her most recent pieces, recently shown in New York, Sherman plays 1920s stars including Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, with their extreme eyebrow arches, turbans and theatrical poses.
“Imitation of Life” will also include Sherman’s black comedy film “Office Killer,” a special screening of the artist’s directorial debut, appropriately looping in a city defined by its film industry.
Imagine a house containing a towering bronze pitchfork and shovel that will never be used for gardening; a working vacuum cleaner — topped with the gilded bust of a horse — that will never clean floors; and an oversize saucepan — made of crystal, bronze, wood and gilding — that will never find its way to the stove.
The art and design duo known as Studio Job specialize in creating works inspired by household goods but never intended for use.
Now, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York has transformed two floors into a “Studio Job Mad House,” featuring some of these eye-popping designs. The exhibit, which runs through Aug. 21, is set up as an imaginary house of an imaginary collector of Studio Job’s works. It exudes a sense of history, fantasy, irony and opulence.
The design team, founded in 1998, is composed of Belgian conceptual and 3-D designer Job Smeets and Dutch graphic designer Nynke Tynagel. Their works straddle art and design, and nod to medieval traditions of patronage by producing monumental works in high-end materials like bronze, crystal and gold.
Perception
“They tend to react to what is common and do the exact opposite, challenging the perception of what is normal,” says Ronald Labaco, a senior curator at the museum who organized the exhibit.
The works, many commissioned by patrons, rely on ancient crafts like bronze casting, gilding, marquetry, stained glass and faience, all with a contemporary perspective. The designs often draw from pop culture (like the movie “King Kong”) or historical events (like a bombing in London or the sinking of the Titanic).
The New York installation features 57 pieces, including sculpture, lighting, furniture, floor covering, wallpaper, drawings and other works produced over the past 16 years.
Adding to the sense of entering a realm of the unreal, the museum’s wood flooring has been covered in a vinyl covering that Tynagel designed to resemble a sort of cartoon of a wood floor. The walls are covered in her brick-themed, gray-and-white wallpaper, which vaguely resembles the inside of a medieval castle.
“We always think about placing our work inside a castle. We see it as a small society with every aspect of life within it,” Tynagel said in a 2010 interview, quoted in the wall text.
The pieces in the exhibit are organized along loose, sometimes contradictory ideas, such as love/lust, agrarian/preindustrial and church/religion.
“The idea is to create a kind of dialogue between the works,” Labaco says.
Four private commissions are on public view for the first time, including a caste-bronze “Pitchfork and Shovel” (2014); “Heart” (2012-13) and “Dr. Cruetzen Illuminator (2011-12), both in stained glass; and a “Unity” cabinet in marquetry.
“Unlike most designers working today, we are not coming from modernism,” says Smeets. “Our contribution is that we’ve recovered a lost path. Is that design? Is it art? I’m not sure.. We’re situating decorative arts within the 21st century.”
