Cindy Sherman By: Jim Lane Untitled Film Still #21 by Cindy Sherman 7 3/8"x9 3/8", 1978, Gelatin-silver print Museum of Modern Art, New York (Click on image for more of Cindy Sherman's work.)

There is nothing like an irate mayor and an obstinate curator to wake people up to the fact that the Postmodern world of art is not, as a car ad once put it, "Your father's Oldsmobile." Artists and public alike have had a rude awakening these past few months. The vast majority of working artists have, for years, been content to simply mosey around from style to style, subject to subject, turning out pretty pictures, hoping someone will buy them, and make them rich and famous. The overwhelming majority of "the public" has been just as content to hang these pretty, innocuous ruminations of the artist's mind on their off-white walls over their earth-tone couches in an effort to announce to their friends their cultured "good taste." Never a thought is given as to whether the work "means something" above and beyond showcasing the artists technical skill, or his or her mastery of the esoteric aesthetics of art making. All too often, the best that can be said about them is that this art is "about art."

In 1976, a young woman graduated from the State University of New York in Buffalo. She was a photography major, but NOT your typical camera buff. In fact, as a college freshman, she'd flunked her first photography course (not having mastered the technical basics). But she thought like a painter and did NOT buy into the premise of creating pretty pictures for the sake of creating pretty pictures. Unlike many photographers, the idea came first, then the photo. That is, she did not haunt the world around her looking for interesting subjects to click away at. Her early black and white photo-paintings always had a message before they had a negative. She was into stereotypes, such as Hollywood heroines, often with sexual undercurrents (as in the photo above).

As a youngest child, growing up in the 50s and 60s in Rochester, New York, she used to like dressing up in old clothes and making herself up into imaginary characters. Years later, as a photographer, mostly she used herself as a model for her stereotypical feminist statements, dressing to fit the part; as much an actress as a photographer. Like a strong, Postmodern painting, her photos were contrived to address some aspect of the human condition from HER point of view and on her terms. Sometimes they delved deep into her own psyche, depicting her experiences, using signs and symbols, exploring how the world, and particularly how the mass medium saw and used women.

Cindy Sherman is, today, forty-six years old. Her exposures of feminine stereotypes are often satirical and exaggerated. She "painted" with her camera the world of insecure, middle-class women, always seeking approval of men, of cultural conditioning, or young girls measuring themselves by comic book or soap opera romantic standards. In the 1980s, Sherman turned to color, exploring with her camera what she might have done had she been a famous male artist from the past, such as Holbein, David, or Ingres. It was pure Postmodernism, exploring the past through parody as a one-eyed artist of the twentieth century.

Moving into the 90s, caught up in the movement to convey a message in her art at the expense of all else, Sherman began to explore reality with the same single-minded effort she'd exhibited in the past to "make a difference" through her art. Like an abstract artist, she has never titled her work. But then again, there is seldom any need to. In her Untitled #175, for instance (click on the image above), she explored the beach after the people had all gone home, leaving behind the "human factor," their waste, filth, and litter--subject matter so repulsive as to border on the nightmarish. Untitled #175 is a sickening assemblage of rotting fruit, half-eaten cupcakes, and vomit. And just so you don't miss her point, it's a photo is living color SIX FEET in diameter. It's not your father's fun day at the beach.

Jim Lane is fifty-ish, balding, bearded, bespectacled, professorial, outgoing, knowlegable about a lot of things, expert on a very few. He grew up in the small town of Stockport, situated on the Muskingum River in Southeastern Ohio. He graduated from a un-noteworthy business college in Cincinnati, from the U.S. Air Force, and from Ohio University where he also obtained a masters degree and wracked up several hours of post-graduate work as well. For most of his professional life he's run a portrait business out of his home, specializing in sports portraits done in pencil and colored pencil.

Happily married for 30 years, Jim taught elementary and high school art for 26 years and also spent many enjoyable hours in the front of a local community college classroom. Recently he has retired from teaching in favor of painting, traveling, writing, designing web pages, and "...doing things I've never done before."

E-mail Jim at: jimlane@jimlaneart.com

Visit The Jim Lane Collection at:   http://www.jimlaneart.com

Or Jim Lane's Arty-fact Archives at:   http://www.1st.net/users/jimlane/Archive.html