Cindy Sherman's made her reputation playing other people. Far from self-portraiture, the photographic series Sherman has starred in over the years, which has seen her inhabit everything from "Clowns" to her famous "Complete Untitled Film Stills" are a means of disappearing. As the artist once memorably told the New York Times, "I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear." Showing now in London is a series that sees her in the guise of six middle-aged women. As Adrian Searle, art critic for the Guardian puts it, "These new works deal with age, with women clinging on to a misguided idea of beauty and sophistication. They have chosen to spend their way out of ageing, or to stare it down and scare it away."

For a woman in her fifties, working in the art world, this is no small matter. While Sherman has resisted the label of "feminist" as assiduously as she has all others, her work has always tacitly taken on ideas of stereotype and objectification with stunning results. In these images, Sherman seems to reflect the futility of fighting the aging process, the valor of the fight, and sheer variety of people who come under the blanket heading of "middle-aged,' all without judging. What's different this time around, of course, is That Film. As everyone knows, Sherman's former partner has released a documentary, Guest of Cindy Sherman, which the artist has since disowned. For someone who's made the conscious choice to lose herself in her work, to control her image or lack thereof, what's generally regarded as a petty meditation on sour grapes can't be easy to swallow. Ironically. though, it serves only to add an interesting dimension to this latest set of portraits. Both works are, in a way, dealing with the role of women - specifically, aging women. As Sherman explores the tacit invisibility of her subject, she is the star of a film in which she still manages to play second fiddle to the man who resents her success. The documentary claims Sherman's part of a leading kabal of female artists, while the boys' club reality the movie portrays tells quite a different tale. In a sense, this provides the perfect seventh image to Sherman's series: the middle-aged woman, successful, at the top of her field, and still subject to an inevitable and unkind scrutiny.

Photographer Cindy Sherman's changing faces [Guardian]
A Portraitist's Romp Through Art History [NY Times]
Related: Breakup Film Makes Author Look Bad, Art World Look Sexist
Cindy Sherman's Un-Famous Ex-Boyfriend Finds That Being A "Wife" Is The Pits

Paul Hasegawa-Overacker's Guest of Cindy Sherman is something of a cause celebre in the art world, given the bitchy shenanigans surrounding its making and the pair's subsequent falling-out. While H-O (his preferred nom de guerre) apparently wanted to make some kind of sweeping statement about the fickle world of art and fame, the result is what the Prospect describes as "a creepy, cringe-inducing rehash of a relationship's failure, told through intimate home-movie footage and the annotations of friends."

In addition to making the auteur look petty, which everyone expected, the film serves to showcase - unintentionally - the entrenched sexism of the art world. H-O ascribes Sherman's success in part to timing: a backlash against the machismo of the 80's art scene that resulted in a female art bubble. The Prospect's Kriston Capps disagrees, saying,

When the Broad Contemporary Art Museum opened last year at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, the demographic breakdown of the first exhibition was 97 percent white and 87 percent male. The Broad collection as a whole, which is considered to be a significant bellwether of contemporary art, is not much different; 96 percent of its artists are white and 86 percent are male. In 2007, the feminist-activist group The Guerrilla Girls ran a full-page ad in The Washington Post examining the gender ratio of exhibits on display in four public modern and contemporary art museums in the nation's capital. The Smithsonian American Art Museum fared the best — with 88 percent of the artists on display being male.

It's certainly true that, watching the film, there;s a definte boys' club air to the whole scene. Sure enough, as of December, the NEA revealed that female artists make $.75 to the male greenback. Tracy Emin - some would say not the best mouthpiece - made waves a few years ago when she denounced the art world's pervasive inequalities at the Venice Biennale, saying, "The work of female artists sells for phenomenally less than male artists. Male artists started wearing power suits and smoking cigars in the 1980s, but women are only taken seriously if they are wearing dungarees." Her film dealing with the issues, What Price Art? doesn't seem to have affected the change she'd hoped for -yet.

Sherman-as-subject is, in a way, encouraging. But like this? Capps calls the treatment "voyeuristic discrimination" - a level of undignified inspection her male peers wouldn't generate. And you do have to wonder: why does her partner's frustration merit its own story? Women have traditionally been the muses of more successful male artists, but when it's a guy, he feels he's noteworthy. At the end of the day, it seems like the film's larger lessons about sexism may be overwhelmed by H-O's shenanigans. Says the New York Post, "If he intended the movie as a tell-all exposé of a reclusive artist, he failed. If he intended it as a vehicle to make himself look like an egotistical wannabe, he succeeded."

Update: Commenter Khrushchev has brought to our attention a comment that H-O himself left on our first post. Basically, he says don't judge without watching, he worked hard on the film, and it's done with love. Somewhat more defensively, though. But don't take our word for it.

Portrait of Misogyny [American Prospect]
Emin Blasts Art World Sexism From Biennale [Telegraph]
Sexism, Ageism Rule The Art World [BlackBook]
Guest Of Cindy Sherman [New York Post]

Earlier: Cindy Sherman's Un-Famous Ex-Boyfriend Finds That Being A "Wife" Is The Pits

I have no idea how Cindy Sherman treated H-O in the course of their relationship — maybe she was completely selfish and denigrated his needs. But the thing is, Sherman was scads more famous than Paul when the pair got together, it's not like her art stardom was something that should have come as surprise to him. Cindy had mixed feelings about Guest from the get-go. She told the Financial Times during filming, "I was and still am extremely ambivalent about the film, not that I don't think Paul will do a great job, but that I'm in it. I wish he could tell the story without mentioning me. I thought it could be fictionalised or something. But I told him I didn't want to participate actively; any past footage he had of me was OK to use."

Although — according to H-O — Cindy got final cut veto on the documentary, Cindy has since disassociated herself with the production, and Variety reports that Sherman said, "I apologize to all those who participated, thinking they were doing me a favor in giving interviews and otherwise assisting in the fabrication of this film. Against my better judgment, it was clearly unwise to cooperate with the project at it's inception."

In a video on Salon's website, they show H-O being interviewed on the radio by two women. Paul says again, "I know what it feels like to be the wife," and one of the women, poignantly, responds, "You see how sexist that is? How come women have to put up with this? Why shouldn't you put up with this? What's the problem?"

I Dated Cindy Sherman ...And All I Got Was This Documentary[Salon]
Cindy Sherman Rejects Doc[Variety]
Gallery Beatnik Turns The Tables [FT]

Related: Guest Of Cindy Sherman