Putting Yet Another Face on Her Career : Cindy Sherman Has Made Her Mark With Photography--Now She’s Trying Moving Pictures

Cindy Sherman had visions of horror films dancing in her head when she made her latest body of work, an exhibition of which opened this week at PaceWildenstein in Beverly Hills.

The 14 photographs of lurid and somber masks and faces were inspired by Sherman’s current foray into film on the heels of the ‘80s art pack. David Salle, Robert Longo and Julian Schnabel have already tried their hand at directing, and now Sherman is taking her directing bow with a low-budget horror movie about a murderous office worker in a tizzy over downsizing. “The Untitled Office Killer Movie,” from Sherman’s story line and produced by Christine Vachon (“Kids” and “Safe”), is about to go into pre-production in New York.

“I was thinking of [the masks] as if they were characters from various horror or science-fiction films, as these bizarre characters,” Sherman said by telephone from her New York studio. “They could be the victim or the killer. You’re not sure if they’re screaming out of terror or laughing with hysteria.”

Sherman helped forge the art of staged photography and, partly in recognition of that, the Museum of Modern Art spent a reported $1 million last month to acquire a complete set of artist’s proofs of her early work, the “Untitled Film Stills.”

Those 69 black-and-white self-portraits from 1977-80 are artfully contrived female archetypes for the generation spoon-fed on matinees--the ingenue, the housewife, the career girl. Sherman, a 1995 MacArthur “genius” grant winner, made the photographs right out of art school. The MOMA purchase also includes seven later color photographs. And, in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art will mount a retrospective of her work late next year.

Sherman’s museum conquests underline her enduring presence.

“You could think of [the MOMA acquisition] as being a long-overdue recognition of the importance of women in the postwar art world,” says Andy Grundberg, director of the Friends of Photography in San Francisco. “And it’s great that they can get away from Frank Stella for a moment and see that photography can be so central to the way we think about art that it warrants an important acquisition.”

Sherman’s role as bellwether for the changing fortunes of postmodern and Conceptual photography may be significant, but it isn’t winning friends. The artist, whose current market prices range from $15,000 to $50,000, says few people called her when the MOMA purchase was announced.

“A lot of my friends are probably really jealous,” says the 42-year-old artist. “I don’t blame them. . . . Actually, [the acquisition] makes me feel more secure. It’s a great seal of approval. Probably the next time I get back into the studio and start working, I’ll feel the pressure--what do I have to do now to sustain everybody’s expectation and get rid of people’s expectation that ‘now she’s going to really fall on her face’?”

The chameleon-like Sherman, who frequently appears in her work and is only barely recognizable, has variously disguised herself as a monster, a model, a Renaissance nobleman, a sex kitten and a corpse. Influenced more by performance art than her forebears in photography, Sherman’s work has always boldly proclaimed its artificiality. Her new show of large-format masks and falsified faces comments on that.

“My work is definitely about artifice, but it’s also about showing the fact that it’s all a face,” she says. “I’m not trying to trick people. So the masks are a perfect metaphor for all of my work.”

They were also convenient. Sherman was feeling pressed for time because of the film, and she thought it would be easier to get the work done if she concentrated on faces.

The meditation on masks also springs from her last show a year ago, for which she cut up theatrical masks and transformed them into garish Cibachrome images of demons. That work followed Sherman’s angry riposte against the religious right and NEA censors in 1992--a series of grotesque sex pictures using dolls from medical supply houses used for practice in inserting catheters.

After a first decade marking Sherman as a cracked mirror for female identity, her shift to plastic props of often questionable gender has confounded critics who had pegged her as a poet of feminism.

“I wasn’t thinking at all about gender when I was doing this,” she says of the recent work. “I think I’ve really gotten it out of my system enough that it isn’t even an issue when I’m working.”

Indeed, part of Sherman’s appeal stems from her willingness to defy expectations, Grundberg says.

“She once told me that she’d show a body of work, and these critics would wax on about it, in what she thought of as creative misinterpretations,” he says. “The next body responded to how the last body was apprehended and it countered it. If they say her work is too purple, she does work that’s yellow. She’s always counterpunching. Then when you see the big books of her work collected, it all kind of flows together.”

For the current work, she cut up the masks, sometimes applying masses of silver makeup to her face and the mask pieces, which appeared silver, gold or other colors depending on the type of film. She shot much of the work with a camera hand held at arm’s length.

“Sometimes I would purposely let it move so it was blurry,” Sherman says. “I could never anticipate what the final results were going to look like, so it was really more about playful experimentation.”

To retain that feeling, she also used a hand-held camera for shooting mannequin heads in the new series.

Sherman agrees with some critics’ view that last year’s show of mutilated masks was transitional, but she says it’s unclear whether her new work represents a destination.

“At this point, I’m not really sure that I’ll continue with these masks, these faces or if I will choose one of the other directions [from the last show]. Maybe after working on this film, I’ll wind up discovering a whole other idea for a series I want to do.”

* Cindy Sherman at PaceWildenstein, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills through March 9. Hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday. (310) 205-5522.