Cindy Sherman
Until March 7; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

“She’s here? Where?” friends whispered to me at the private view, necks craning wildly. They had just scrutinised 50 photographs of the artist’s face, and still they didn’t know what Cindy Sherman looked like. That’s the general idea, of course: in the last 30 years, the artist has produced over 400 vivid photographs of men, women and children – every one of them a cultural stereotype, and every one of them Cindy Sherman.

The retrospective (first shown this summer at the Serpentine) starts with a roomful of high impact mythical characters whose elaborate costumes and settings suggest half-explained narratives, evoking cultural references from Medusa to the Madonna. There is something disturbingly Scottish about the tea-supping elderly prim sitting in a high gothic chair in the half light. I imagine her abandoned, friendless and loveless, and then I wonder if that masculine coat has been wrapped romantically around her shoulders by some amorous mystery gent.

I’ll never know, because all of Sherman’s works are untitled, identified only by a number, and the curators provide no further information in the wall captions. The history paintings are especially infuriating, because they are so evocative of particular styles and periods that you’re racking your brains to come up with the original – which, of course, doesn’t exist. It’s as if you have a tune in your head and no-one will remind you of the words.

When Sherman shot to fame in the mid-70s with her Untitled Film Stills series, of female types in old B-movies, people said they recognised the films even though Sherman had made them up. This is the key: the artist taps into cultural short-hand, playing on our shared cultural assumptions and turning them against us. While we happily judge a book (film/painting/woman) by its cover, she changes that cover again and again until we can’t ignore our transgression.

The show is divided up according to categories (history painting, fashion models, and so on) rather than chronology, allowing you to compare and contrast Sherman’s guises in relation to each other – an important route to understanding her work. As has been said in the past, there is very little point exhibiting a Sherman photograph in isolation.

The last category is Sherman’s latest work, completed in 2003. These are five photographs of clowns (all Sherman, of course), a logical extension of the artist’s preoccupations with costumes, masks and emotional ambiguity. These recent works have a new lucidity and vividness, using colour, face-paint and digital backgrounds to make them almost cartoony. It does make you wonder, though, where the artist can go next, having exaggerated every feature of her art to reach this point.

Here’s where I have to admit that I’ve never been excited by Cindy Sherman’s work. Perhaps like the naïve new generation which thinks the feminist battle has already been fought and won, I just don’t see her work as radical or challenging in the 21st century. It worries me that she is still doing what she did 30 years ago, just bigger, with colour.

Sherman was nominated by ARTnews in 1999 as one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century, and perhaps that is her fate: she has been an inspiration to many, and has claimed her place in the history books. She has stretched out her idea over three decades, pushing it to the limit with those clowns, and now – what?

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 21.12.03