The Portrait/Homage/Embodiment exhibition devoted an entire gallery (the Cube Gallery) to a selection of works from Cindy Sherman’s History Series, as well as included Sherman’s Soup Tureen in another space. The great number of Sherman works included in this exhibition and the decision to create a “salon” of her work speaks to the inability to discuss portrait identity without paying a special homage to Sherman’s legacy. Similarly, it seems any discussion of contemporary photography practice must consider Sherman’s contribution. For my session at the symposium I asked that we consider the effect of this legacy on contemporary artists and in turn the effect of this more recent work on reframing Sherman.

It seems after Sherman the tradition of photographic self-portraiture is no longer a viable one: contemporary artists must work within the genre as it has been challenged and reestablished by Sherman. Often referred to as an artist working with the medium of photography, rather than a straight photographer, Sherman pressed the limits of the medium, while simultaneously, her technical skill helped raise the status of photography in the early 1980s. Identity in Sherman’s work is mutable and performative, and thus shown to be a construction, as many theorists were positing by this period.

Various contemporary artists have pushed Sherman’s project, both in terms of theory and technique, further. In my session I focused on Sherman’s near contemporary Yasumasa Morimura and more recent artist Nikki S. Lee. Morimura more overtly challenges the art historical cannon and explores issues of race an ethnicity in ways not addressed by Sherman’s work, but he calls attention to his debt to her legacy when he appropriated her work in To My Little Sister: For Cindy Sherman, 1998. Lee takes these explorations perhaps even further than the preceding generation and performs identity by often changing any combination of race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age. In her images she allows room for recognition of the social realities of identity while upholding Sherman’s initial claim that these are constructed categories. These images do not demonstrate the same technical sophistication of aesthetic appeal of Sherman or Morimura’s work (in fact she does not take her own photographs) but rather appear as amateur snapshots.

In my session, I suggested that through looking at Morimura and Lee’s work we might turn back to Sherman’s work with new questions. These questions include the following.

In a medium long considered inferior, how much is technical proficiency still valued in conceptual photography? Lee’s work reveals little of her technical skills (despite her years of training). Has Sherman’s work allowed for, created space for, this less aesthetic approach? Part of Sherman’s project included revealing identity as constructed, mutable, and performative. In this post-Sherman, post-Judith Butler era, in which self-conscious gallery-goers might assume the performative, are these still valid explorations? Does Sherman’s work fail to acknowledge the social realities of identity? Issues of race and ethnicity are overtly explored by both Lee and Morimura (identities not addressed in most of Sherman’s work). Does Sherman’s whiteness, femaleness, and status as elite artist effect our reading of her as identity chameleon? Some critics have suggested that Lee’s work is most impressive because of her ability to camouflage her race. The tendency to think of whiteness as a kind of blank slate seems not to have been challenged by Sherman or her champions. Again, in this post-Sherman post-Butler era is constructed or performed gender an easier concept to swallow than constructed or performed race?