WOMAN OF A THOUSAND FACES

By Georgette Gouveia

ggouveia@westfairinc.com

Long before there was Lady Gaga, there was Cindy Sherman – a key player in the thought-provoking “Deconstructive Impulse” exhibit at Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum of Art and subject of a show opening at the Bruce Museum  in Greenwich Jan. 29.

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, the photographer and performance artist began taking images of herself as various female stereotypes – some might call them archetypes -- for her “Untitled Film Still” series, which critiqued the idea of woman as object of male desire.  There was Sherman as a kittenish librarian, a European sexpot, a noir moll, a flushed ingénue, an 18^th-century royal mistress. Like Lady Gaga, you were never sure in what guise she might turn up. She was a woman of a thousand faces, none of them seemingly her own.

Unlike Gaga, however, Sherman wasn’t  trying to be herself – or a version of herself. Rather she belonged to a generation of photographers – Hitchcockian Purchase College grad Gregory Crewdson is another – mining the deep vein of the visual art form that has in some way eclipsed the photographic medium – film. Call Sherman a still actress, just as Crewdson is a still director. Seen today in a post-feminist light, Sherman is not merely the minx or the tough housewife or the brittle career woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown or any other cliché that actually casts a jaundiced eye on the way the male-driven media view women – one of the themes of the Neuberger show. She seems to be channeling specific actresses. There’s a lot of both Sandra Dee and Brigitte Bardot in her “Untitled Film Still #13” (1978), aka the kittenish librarian, at the Neuberger. There’s something of Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe in “Untitled Film Still #54” (1980), the noir moll, the Neuberger again. And there’s a bit of Norma Shearer’s Marie Antoinette in “Untitled” (1989), at the Bruce exhibit, which considers Shermans in private area collections.

By harking back to movie stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age (the ’20 through the early ‘60s), Sherman isn’t merely or even primarily sending up stereotypes. She is plumbing both the artistic and the very American capacities for reinvention. And that’s where Gaga comes in. It’s fascinating that if both women walked into a room, nobody would recognize them. That’s not just the result of effective costuming. Though both ladies are attractive, neither is possessed of the idiosyncratic beauty of a Julia Roberts or the spectacular beauty of an Elizabeth Taylor. Rather Sherman and Gaga possess the kind of agreeable but mutable features of the chameleon. To paraphrase what Daniel Day-Lewis once said of his aquiline nose, they have the kind of faces you can hang costumes on.

In this, they are helped not only by the arts of makeup and fashion design. They are aided by the camera, with which they both have an ambivalent relationship. (Show me a woman as sex symbol, or a woman playing at sex symbol, who doesn’t.)

Sherman in particular seems to explore the love-hate affair with the lens. In “Untitled Film Still #7” (1989), at the Neuberger, she is brunet-bobbed Clara Bow/Anna Magnani/Elizabeth Taylor, with a glass of Champagne in one hand and a scowl for the camera that has caught her en dishabille at the sliding door of her boudoir. But note the way one hand lifts her slip to expose fleshy, stocking-ed thighs. Sherman understands that the camera reveals as much as it conceals, and she brilliantly exploits its twin abilities as voyeur and accomplice.

The desire and gift for reinvention is as old as art and as fresh as the American dream. Who doesn’t believe that with a little luck and a ton of try, we can start again? Who doesn’t love a comeback kid?

What Gaga and Sherman illustrate by way of dress-up is that F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong when he said there are no second acts in American lives (although he should’ve known better since he wrote “The Great Gatsby.”)

Not only are there second acts, there are third, fourth and fifth acts, all of them starring the eternally protean self.

“The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991” is at Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum of Art through April 3. Hours are noon-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Admission is $5; $3 for senior citizens and students with ID. The college is off Anderson Hill Road between Purchase and King streets. 251-6100, neuberger.org

“Cindy Sherman: Works From Friends of the Bruce Museum” runs Jan. 29-April 23. Hours are noon-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. and 1-5 p.m. Sun. Admission is $7; $6 for students and senior citizens; free to children under age 5 at all times and to all on Tuesdays. The museum is at 1 Museum Drive, Greenwich. 869-0376, brucemuseum.org