Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills
Photographs by Cindy Sherman. Text by Peter Galassi and Cindy Sherman.
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2003. 164 pp., 69 duotones, 9½x11¼".
One of the most potent words in artistic dialogue is 'ready-made', immediately conjuring up DuChamp's ghost and the debates that have swirled within and around modernism over the past century. Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, as a body, is a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980. It is highly regarded, seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. In them, Sherman assumes the roles of an imaginary blond actress, creating fake publicity pictures and movie stills. She was 23 when she began the project. It started out as an experiment, but she quickly discovered that she had stumbled upon a ready-made vocabulary, one that she could bend and exploit at will. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés. The Museum of Modern Art, New York purchased the entire series from the artist in 1995 for a record sum. This book marks the first time that the complete series has been published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.
