Notes/Summary of Amelia Jones’s Tracing the subject with Cindy Sherman
As Amelia Jones Jones states, Cindy Sherman has been claimed as an artist/genius excavating the human consciousness or as a producer of work exemplifying a postmodern culture of simulation. Sherman is also a feminist negotiating of the male gaze, or the condition of the abject in artistic practice. From Jones’s perspective, the fact that Sherman uses a subject marked as feminine, within the context of the feminist-inflected postmodern scene, necessarily relates intimately to a feminist problematic of the subject.
In the essay, Jones draws to feminism and phenomenology resemblance in Sherman’s work, which then participates in a particular mode of performative artistic production typical of post 1960 body-oriented practices. In translation, it is a mode where the subject is enacted through representation rather than veiled as in the modernist project. That mode then proposes a new relation between the viewer and the artist, linking to the phenomenological idea of chiasmus, a way in which embodied subjects intertwine through the regime of a visibility that itself turns the world into flesh. Sherman’s work here then encouraging the viewer to ‘turn inside out’, with the intention to experience the investments and desires relative to the figures enacted in Sherman’s work.
A reason to connect Cindy Sherman to the male gaze is coming back to a theory of the projective eye, which is understood to be violent and penetrative. It then gazes and catches its victims on its vise grip, a tool with a purpose for the constitution of those without a penis as pathetic specks pinioned by its inexorable force-lines. Following a reference to John Berger and his book Ways of Seeing: “men act, and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” (p.34)
The theories of the projective eye state, that there are three ways in which the victims take their place relative to it.
In the first case, there is a representation of feminism’s model or how femininity has been produced within the logic of the so-called Male gaze through the dynamics of fetishism and scopophilia. Laura Mulvey notes on this with words that woman stands in a patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, referring to that male can live out his fantasies and obsessions by imposing them on the silent image of woman tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning.
The second case introduces us to the example of a masquerade: a production of the self as the thing most expected but marking it as fake. The female is projecting onto herself the womanliness suited for the male gaze. It is a mask that can be worn or removed. The masquerade would therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as imagistic (p.35).
The third case turns the eye into something other than projective. It is important to remember that the projective eye is not a transcendent function waiting to be revealed. World being seen through gaze has a long history, in which the gaze was mechanized through the apparatus of the camera and its prototypes, instrumentalizing the dualistic logic of Cartesian or Enlightenment conceptions of subjectivity. The logic is that: ,,I’m here–you’re there, I have camera with an industrialized nation behind me–you, are dominated by me.”
Cruz, A. et al. (1997) Cindy sherman : retrospective. London: Thames & Hudson.
