Essay: Female Identity
Female Identity: a brief history of feminism and female portraiture, and an analysis of Cindy Sherman’s Society Portraits
Introduction
James D. Fearon defines the word ‘Identity’ as referring to either ‘(a) a social category, defined by membership rules and (alleged) characteristic attributes or expected behaviours, or (b) socially distinguishing features that a person takes a special pride in’, and also argues that ‘”identities are socially constructed”’ (1999:2). While accepting that identities are socially constructed, I disagree with the idea that pride is always taken in these categorisations. In terms of women, society has long since instructed them on the “proper” ways to look, think and behave; they have been identified as “mothers” and “housewives”, roles not all are willing to accept. If, as Berger expresses, that ‘to be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.’ (2008:47), do women have the ability to choose or define their own identity? Artist Jo Spence also outlines that identity is a social construct: ‘Our concept of sexuality and our social identity stem from both lived experience and the imaginary self we carry in the mind’s eye’ (1988:155), which evokes thought about how we think about or see ourselves in our thoughts, and how project these ideas to the world and people around us can sometimes be very different.
These ideas form the base of my exploration into the concept of identity, specifically female, in modern society and throughout recent sociological and art history. I will use the works of American photographer Cindy Sherman as an example of how artists ‘portray their own body as a way of expressing something essential about their identity.’ (West, 2004:216); in this case, how Sherman displays her body to represent ideas of female identity and the social or cultural expectations and ideals in her 2008 series of images titled Society Portraits.
Identity: in Fine Art and feminist theory
Identity – the way we define ourselves, and are defined by others – has been an obstacle for women for hundreds of years, as up until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were considered widely to not have their own individual value, but simply to be an extension of a man. Stannard expresses how ‘Women are the beautiful sex. Who doubts it?..just as all men are created equal, all women are created beautiful.’ (1972). This simplification very explicitly confines females to one focal purpose: to be aesthetically pleasing, and also places them below males in a patriarchal society. Female authors and philosophers have endeavoured to fight against these ideas and ideals in their writing, a famous example being Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, and the “first-wave” feminism movement sought to correct this sense of inequality, to give women the same rights as men – to education, work pay and the vote – and to redefine themselves as more than accessories.
Artists have also worked to challenge this conception of beauty as purpose, as ‘Beauty and art were once thought of as belonging together, with beauty as among art’s principal aims and art as beauty’s highest calling.’ (Beech, 2009:12). Therefore, much of twentieth-century ‘elite art’ is ‘in many respects a history of resistance to the female subject as a symbol of beauty.’ (Steiner, 2001:45). Some of the main contributors to this are Frida Kahlo, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman; some contemporary examples include Marlene Dumas and Jenny Saville. Dumas, who challenges both social and cultural stereotypes of women in her work, stated that: ‘If we return to the female nude and notions of ideal beauty, we come to Manet who broke the rules with his Olympia.’
Fig. 1
Olympia (Fig. 1) is one of the earliest and most well-known examples of controversial depiction of the female form. The subject of the painting is not, as was common in that era, a pure, beautiful, virginal female, but a prostitute, displaying her body unashamedly and meeting the viewer’s eyes with a calculating gaze. This look defies the pre-twentieth century conception that women should be passive, almost without identity, in art and in society. Since then, the idea of challenging the idealised nude or representation of women in general has arisen in portraiture, along with the well-used motif of the “female gaze”.
Manet, E., 1864. Olympia
Gender identity is explored by artists of both sexes, however it seems that often it is women that feel they have more to prove. ‘Preoccupation with the body in contemporary art is often autobiographical, and has been the province of a number of women artists since the 1980s. This may in part be a feminine phenomenon, a reaction against centuries of painting of the female nude by men for the delectation of other men.’ (Gibson, 2000:252). Here, Gibson draws attention to the face that women often paint or photograph themselves as a way of reclaiming control over both their bodies, and identities; to declare that they are more than sexual objects or accessories, but strong, independent minds, equal to men. However, still today, women face stereotypes and sexualisation in the regions of advertising and the media. ‘The female body is fragmented and colonized by advertisers in the search for the new markets for products and is fetishized and offered for male consumption through pornography.’ (Spence, 1988:155), emphasising that the feminist theory and protestation is still relevant and ongoing to this day.
Identity has also been explored within the art world in relation to cultural biospheres; what it means to oneself to be a part of a group with specific customs and beliefs, and how these are defined or identified through possessions, skin colour, dress etcetera. As McEvilley summarises in Art and Otherness: ‘A culture’s visual tradition embodies the image it has of itself…art draws into visibility from the depths of intuition a culture’s sense of its identity and of its value and place in the world.’ (1992:129).
Cindy Sherman’s Society Portraits (2008)
Figs. 2/3/4
In her introduction to Re-framing Representations of Women, Shifrin encourages the reader to consider the questions ‘What constitutes female identity?’ and ‘What role have artefacts of material culture played in the defining women’s places in society?’ (2008:8). These are key ideas that Cindy Sherman’s work focus on as she portrays a variety of stereotypes and female ideals.
Born in New Jersey, 1954, Sherman went on to study at New York State College, ‘[rising] to celebrity status internationally in the early 1980s with photographic self-portraits in various scenarios.’ (Gibson, 2000:231). Her work focuses primarily around the concept of identity as she uses herself as the model, however with a variety of artificial guises to adopt the persona of others. In Through the Looking Glass, Rich states that ‘”women” is in effect, a shorthand tem that summarized a plethora of identities.’ (2003:5). What Sherman strives to do is represent the full spectrum of these identities, to reflect not just one individual woman, or even how she views herself, but certain “types” that generalise women today.
She was ‘one of the first artists to use straight photography as a medium for imagery that thirty years earlier might have been expressed in paint’ (Gibson, 2000:231). One of the reasons for this could be because Sherman feels that a photograph captures a more honest and real image of the subject, ‘utterly exposed by the camera -- and our scrutiny.’ (Martinotti, 2009), an ironic concept as her pictures are in fact a façade as she hides under layers of masks and disguises. In an interview for The Guardian with Simon Hattenstone, Sherman expressed another reason she adopted photography as her main medium; ‘There's a theory that there were so many women photographers at the time because we felt nobody else was doing it. We couldn't or didn't really want to go into the male-dominated painting world’. This again makes her work almost contradictory; she poses as certain stereotypes to challenge the roles and expectations of women, however she is content to sit in the confinement of photography for fear of contesting a woman’s right to paint. Nevertheless, Sherman is ‘widely considered to be ones of the most important and influential artists of our time and her work is the unchallenged cornerstone of post-modern photography.’ (Bunyan, 2014).
Throughout the last three decades, Cindy Sherman has ‘generalised critique of female stereotypes as portrayed in the media and advertising…from pin-up to housewife, sex-kitten to murder victim, girlish, boyish, worried or self-possessed.’ (Gibson, 2000:231) In her 2008 work, she chooses to target a “type” of woman much more familiar and perhaps relatable in a series of photographs which she titled Society Portraits. ‘Sherman’s photographs demand that the viewer question the visual codes according to which class and gender are being defined.’ (Rich, 2003:19); in this case, the subjects depicted are obviously very affluent women, appearing in their forties to sixties, ‘past their prime physically but at the height of their social powers’ (Martinotti, 2009). There is something very familiar about the images. ‘Her works speak to an increasingly image-saturated world, drawing on the unlimited supply of visual material provided by movies, television, magazines, the internet and art history.’ (Bunyan, 2014), and so the viewer can relate the women in the portraits to the idealisation of the female form that can be seen all around in advertising and the media.
The colour photographs are monumental in size, similar to classic portraits commissioned by sitters in Renaissance and Baroque Europe asserting their prestigious place in society and very allusive to her 1988-1990 series titled History Portraits, where she parodied period portraits by some of the Masters such as Caravaggio and Raphael. It seems these recent images may be a continuation of her earlier work, with the titles suggesting that instead of looking back into the history of art and portraiture, Sherman is now exploring the situation and issues in twenty-first century society.
At a first glance, her Society Portraits are glamorous, grand displays of wealth; for example, in Fig. 2, the pearls of the woman’s necklace and conspicuous earrings stand out, immediately singling her out as a member of the upper class, along with the grand steps – presumably leading up to the subject’s mansion – and the greenery of the grounds and the clear blue sky completing the idyllic picture. Sherman has even taken advantage of digital photograph editing processes to blur the background of the image and bring to the front focus the “sitter”, further imitating a traditional oil painting. However, at a closer look, the large scale of the image only emphasises the women’s imperfections; ‘Sherman is unsparing.’ (Dienstag, 2012) The lines on her face are visible, and made more obvious by the large amount of makeup she wears. Her falsely rouged lips turn downwards, and her tired-looking eyes are slightly narrowed, giving her an unpleasant expression which does not seem to match the lavish lifestyle the viewer is to assume she has. Similarly, Fig. 3 features a middle-aged woman in an elegant evening dress, seated in a lavishly decorated room. Again, when the piece is further analysed, the whole image becomes falsified, from the dog on her lap which turns out to be nothing more than a stuffed animal – a prop – to her pose; stiff and rigid, very unnatural, which, along with her stern forward gaze, makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. Whereas the tones used in this image are all very dull and dank, giving the photograph a dark and almost sinister feel, Sherman has dressed herself in bright scarlet in Fig. 4. The vivid red of her dress, which hangs unflatteringly on her body, emphasising a masculine broadness of her shoulders and absence of curvature around her bust, waist and hips, brings out the stark, clown-like lipstick and blush on her face. The whole image, when examined closely, seems to be mocking the “sitter”; where the colour red usually connotes love and desire, here it simply draws attention to her lack of femininity and sexuality.
Sherman told makers of Channel 4 series State of the Art: ‘I was trying to make content that would be alluring, but then as soon as you looked at it, it would kind of bite you back like something that would make you feel guilty for feeling that way’, suggesting that she intended for the viewer to be taken aback by her work, to perhaps at first crave the lifestyles and envy the beauty and class of the women depicted, however then to realise that everything about the images is superficial. It could be argued that Society Portraits challenges the entire concept of “identity” altogether. That she is evoking the thought that there is no way of seeing someone’s true identity as nowadays so many, in particularly women, hide behind money and clothes and cosmetics to manipulate how people view them. Is Sherman even going so far as to show that she, herself, has lost her own identity as she ‘masquerades as [these] undefinable others.’ (Rich, 2003:19)
Another way of viewing this work is as an autobiographical piece. Sherman admitted that she began her exploration into identity at first without any real intention of displaying it to the public; ‘I would just go in my bedroom when I was depressed and I'd turn into characters’ (interview with Hattenstone, 2011). This statement suggests that, initially at least, her work was a self-exploration into parts of herself or her mind she wanted to get better in touch with, or project to the outside world. When speaking about her Society Portraits series, the photographer admitted that “they are the most realistic characters I have done. I completely empathised with them. They could be me.”; as Gibson summarises; ‘It seems less like role-playing and more like self-examination: it may, in other words, be read as a self-portrait’ (2000:231).
Fig. 5
This idea links very closely to the work of Jo Spence, an artist who also used photography to explore her own identity in the 1990’s. Her series of works titled Narratives of Dis-ease, from which Fig. 5 is taken, documents her struggle with breast cancer and attempts to regain control of her body. Both photographers’ series are very much an ‘examination of identity and gender’ (Hattenstone, 2011), but from different approaches; Sherman adopts the character of upper class women with extravagant clothes, surroundings and make-up to make a statement about the façade of wealth and artificial beauty, whereas Spence, here, stands naked amongst a background of darkness, stripping herself back to the role of a crying girl clutching a teddy bear for comfort. Marlene dumas is another example of a contemporary artist that explores female identity and sexuality. Casadio explains how ‘Her models cannot be real, live bodies: they have to belong to a set of definable typologies’ – like Sherman, however – ‘It is equally important that they nearly always have a name…for viewers to come into contact with the painted image.’ (1999:88).
Spence, J., 1990. From Narratives of Dis-ease
Through doing this, she generalises them by depicting a “type” of people through her subjects, for example African women, however assigns them a name to give them true identity and significance. Sherman, on the other hand does not give any of her photographs an individual name or title, perhaps suggesting the irrelevance of their actual selves; how they are simply examples of multitude of women at that age; ‘in none of her images is it possible to fix her role precisely. Her posture, outfit and surrounding in such photos evoke general types…but never exactly reproduce specific characters.’ (Rich, 2003:18). Another key theme of Dumas’ work is cultural and racial identity, due to her South African heritage, and she investigates ‘perceptions of blackness: its physiognomies, behaviour, sexuality and glamour’ (Casadio, 1999:88). Sherman considers similar subjects, however in relation to modern wealth, beauty and youth obsessed Western culture. Dienstag also brings forth the fact that the series ‘distill an era’; they capture ‘the aspiration to wealth that was a hallmark of America in 2008, just before the economic collapse and the Great Recession took hold.’ (2012)
Gibson writes that ‘Impressive in their scale and seriousness’, Sherman’s work ‘offers an oblique attack on the role of women in later twentieth-century life and culture.’ (2000:231). From this statement, it could be interpreted that rather than this series acting as a critique on these “types” of women themselves, what she is actually trying to convey through these ‘savage portrayals’ (Martinotti, 2009) is that it is the state of society and influences from the media that force women to take on these specific roles and artificial identities. The idea that under all the money women wear on their bodies and faces with apparent ‘pride’ (Fearon, 1999:2), they are all the same, with equal value and importance, and that female identity is not a concept that can be defined through an image.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the word “identity” raises many arguments about who we are; both how we view ourselves and how others view us. The concept has been a consistent battle for women throughout history, as reflected in the feminist movements that took place from the 1800’s, and in much of women’s self-portraiture in the past, and Sherman’s 2008 work reflects that these explorations are still ongoing. ‘Masquerading as a myriad of characters in front of her own camera, Sherman creates invented personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of expression, and the artifice of photography.’ (Bunyan, 2014) She uses every possible aspect of her work to represent and challenge women’s roles and aspirations, from extravagant jewellery and gowns alluding to classic portraits, heavily made-up faces reminiscent of stage make-up or modern beauty culture, to their surroundings and the motif of the female gaze as she fixes her eyes directly on her viewer.
It seems that, as the ‘issue of identity has come to the foreground both of culture in general and of the visual in particular.’ (McEvilley, 1992:129), it has become a key theme in twentieth and twenty-first century art, and will continue to be so.
List of Illustrations
Manet, É. (1863) Olympia [oil on canvas]. Wikipedia [online]. (Accessed 24 November 2015) Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet)#/media/File:Edouard_Manet_-_Olympia_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
Sherman, C. (2008) Untitled #465 [colour photograph]. MoMA [online]. (Accessed 12 November 2015) Available from: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/gallery/10/#/3/untitled-465-2008/
Sherman, C. (2008) Untitled #470 [colour photograph]. Art Slant [online]. (Accessed 17 November 2015) Available from: http://www.artslant.com/ber/articles/show/4921
Sherman, C. (2008) Untitled #476 [colour photograph]. Art 21 [online]. (Accessed 14 November 2015) Available from: http://www.art21.org/images/cindy-sherman/untitled-476-2008
Spence, J. (1990) Narratives of Dis-Ease [colour photography]. Jo Spence.org [online] (Accessed 2 January 2015) Available from: http://www.jospence.org/narratives_of_disease/n_o_d_6.html
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Dienstag, E. F., 2012. Cindy Sherman: from the 1970s to the present. Eleanor Foa Dienstag [online]. 23 February [Accessed 3 January 2016]. Available from: http://www.eleanorfoa.com/article_view.php?article=131
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Weblogs
Bunyan, M., 2014., Exhibition: ‘Cindy Sherman – Untitled Horrors’ at Kunsthaus Zürich. In: Art Blart [online]. [viewed 23/11/2015]. Available from: http://artblart.com/tag/cindy-sherman-clowns/
Websites
Martinotti, F., 2009. Cindy Sherman, June 7 – October 8, 2009. [online]. Gagosian Gallery. [viewed 24/11/2015]. Available from: http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/june-07-2009--cindy-sherman