Mural, 2010, by Cindy Sherman

 
After a few fallow years, about seven or eight years ago (just about every good artist goes through them) Cindy Sherman quickly returned to form and produced this rather staggering Mural, printed on adhesive fabric, just in time for her big museum retrospective.  One can see something of what she may have learned from Jack Smith here, in the trashy glamor of the costuming and the transparently composed quality of the characterizations.  What isn’t clear from these reproductions is the scale of the figures, which are some three times life size.  These ladies are monumental.  I like to think of them as goddesses protectively hovering over a rebirth of the Dark Ages.

FAUST

by Alexander Sokurov, 2011

 

I’ve only seen this great film by way of a Russian dvd video recording (as it didn’t get a very extensive release in the United States,) in which the German dialogue, with a slight delay, was loudly spoken in Russian translation over top of the  quieter German.  It created an unintentional yet effective alienation effect that was not completely unpleasant.  Luckily I knew the story that Sokurov was telling very well and the images were every bit as ravishing as one might expect from this master.

Figures in Landscapes wearing Vintage Chanel

by Cindy Sherman

In the photographs above and below (though they don’t maintain the same grand scale as the previous series of the Mural figures) Cindy Sherman again presents herself as a group of fancifully dressed Titans, this time in relation to some very wild Romantic landscapes (shot in Iceland during a volcanic eruption and on the less volatile Island of Capri) that she actually went out and photographed (separately) in order to properly place her figures.  I believe that the resultant pictures first appeared in some magazine or other, but eventually found their way to the walls  of her dealers’ galleries, in a somewhat larger scale than that in which they first appeared on the page.  From what I’ve read, this series all began with an invitation by this magazine editor to select some fancy dresses from the Chanel Archive, around which she was to fashion a collection of characters.  The gowns and other outfits Sherman chose to wear were designed either by Coco Chanel or Karl Lagerfeld.

Cross Dressing Male Brothel Workers fooling around, circa 1890

I’ve seen this collection of photographs referred to as examples of Victorian era pornography, which might lead one to suppose that they were English in origin; but judging by the features of the two young men and their costumes I am guessing that they’re French.  I made a considerable attempt to discover the origins of this series, but met with no success.  The boys depicted here appear fairly comfortable in their deliberately unconvincing disguise.  Their playfulness does not seem entirely an act for the viewer’s arousal.  It genuinely looks like fun, and yet I can’t help but suppose that they were professional boys from one of those large scale brothels, for which Paris was so famous at the time.