Reveling in the Grotesque

These were our marching orders: Keep an eye out for “anything really weird that almost seems useless.”

At the Santa Monica Airport swap meet, that would seem to cover a lot of territory. We are here on a blistering October Sunday at Cindy Sherman’s behest.

The woman of a million faces has been interviewed a million times, so we asked the artist if she’d like to talk about herself and her art someplace other than in her studio. Sherman suggested going shopping at an L.A. swap meet, since that was first on her list of things to do here.

She likes to mine markets near her homes in New York City and upstate New York, trolling for old scrapbooks, possible personae and stuff that’s just really, really weird.

“A couple of years ago, I got a sealed Pepsi bottle but inside was a weird liquid that when you shook it up would become silvery. It looked like it would totally poison you.”

Fabulous. Such off-kilter taste is a signature of the 43-year-old photographer, whose mid-career retrospective opens Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A month later, Sherman’s first foray into film opens at the Nuart. “Office Killer” is a low-budget horror movie starring that dread species, a deadly downsized copy editor.

Sherman received the imprimatur of the Museum of Modern Art last year when it spent a reported $1 million to acquire her 69-image series of “Untitled Film Stills.” The entire series went on view last summer in an exhibition underwritten by Madonna. Sherman made the series of black-and-white self-portraits that imitate film stills, many of which appear in the MOCA retrospective, in the late ‘70s, creating various film heroines with wigs and wardrobe.

A 1995 MacArthur “genius” grant winner, Sherman has been the subject of three retrospectives in Europe and Japan in recent years. The current show, organized by MOCA curator Elizabeth A.T. Smith and Amada Cruz of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, includes 156 works and is actually her second on American soil. Ten years ago, the Whitney Museum of American Art surveyed her work when she was at the tender age of 33.

Through the manipulation--and often

disfigurement--of her own image, Sherman’s work has become a running commentary on contemporary culture. In her photographs, Sherman re-creates herself with myriad props and sometimes disappears completely, letting the objects speak for themselves. Sources for her work are everywhere, and today she’s shopping. For her art. For herself. And sometimes for both.

These days, both Sherman’s film and her artwork revel in the grotesque, and her trip to Santa Monica offers plenty of opportunities for skewed delight. Discarded dolls always merit a look for their dismembering possibilities; Sherman likes to rearrange fake body parts in her work. So does her cinematic alter ego, the mousy Dorine, who drags dead bodies from the office to her basement, where she arranges them into tableaux.

“I just like things that are not typically pretty,” Sherman says later, biting into a Memphis Belle sandwich at the nearby Spitfire Grill. “I love the idea of something that’s sumptuous from a distance and sucks the viewer into it, and you realize when you’re looking at it that it’s a mask of rotten food.”

Today a hideous oil jug beckons. It’s a fat ceramic monarch with a spout for a mouth, trailed by a small silo decorated with platters of chickens.

“I could just use it for flowers,” Sherman muses. “I also collect really weird objects that I don’t really do anything with, although eventually I incorporate them into props. But mostly, I just like having them around.”

In the past, swap meets have been gold mines of props, costumes and found objects that Sherman used to create characters she would later photograph. She has been an Anna Magnani-like Italian housewife, a Renaissance nobleman, a corpse and a deranged fashion model, in the process challenging media-driven notions of gender and sexuality. She doesn’t consider herself primarily a photographer but rather an artist who records performances.

For her late-’80s history photographs, the flea markets in Rome were particularly fecund. Sherman’s taste for weirdness found a match in Old Master paintings, which inspired a celebrated series of portraits of Sherman as a nobleman, an old woman and a breast-feeding mother.

“When I did the history pictures, I actually did make lists of props I wanted to find, like a magnifying glass or old books. The Rome flea market was really great because I found old fabric and clerical things that looked like an altar boy’s robes, things I wasn’t expecting to find.”

In Santa Monica, Sherman wasn’t expecting to find props for her next series, and she didn’t. She’s contemplating taking a crack at the obsession with physical fitness--or its reasonable facsimile--and she’s been stocking up on fake brawn from a novelty store. Sherman, who doesn’t always appear as characters in her work, hasn’t decided whether she’ll make an encore in these photographs.

“I got muscles you slide your arm into and it gives you Popeye arms,” she says. “I’ve read that men can get implants for their abdomen and their butts. Really scary.”

As “Office Killer” is poised for its premiere, Sherman says she is eager to return to the studio, where she can work alone without regard to her audience. The anticipated reaction haunted her during the making of the film.

“I could have said, ‘Let the audience be confused,’ but I was conscious of the audience liking it. When I make artwork, I don’t think, ‘Will the audience like this?’ I’m more antagonistic toward my audience.”

Even so, the film’s debut at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August drew mixed reviews. “It is not a great film,” sniffed the Guardian of London. “And yet, it has a cultish quality.”

“I knew it was mixed because I overheard people trashing it,” Sherman said with a laugh. “I was sitting in front of them at another screening. Ultimately, it’s a film that divides the audience. People will either hate it or hopefully love it.”

Sherman’s directing bow follows earlier efforts by such art-world contemporaries as Julian Schnabel, David Salle and Robert Longo, the latter her boyfriend at art school in Buffalo, N.Y.

Directing a horror film would seem a logical extension of artwork that refers to cinematic archetypes and focuses on the grotesque, particularly her most recent pictures, which mimicked techniques by the Surrealists.

Some of Sherman’s more difficult work, such as the 1992 sex pictures using bizarre arrangements of doll parts from medical supply houses, has been an acquired taste even for the art world.

“It’s created some conflicts, which I think is a sign of how important her work is,” says art historian Amelia Jones, who contributed to the exhibition’s catalog. “I hear people say, ‘Well, the film stills were interesting but this just goes too far.’ ”

Perusing the flea market with Sherman, it can be hard to reconcile her passion for the bizarre with her pleasant, waif-like presence. She’s inconspicuously dressed in a white T-shirt and muted plaid pants, and her delicate features are framed by a short shock of bleached hair.

Only two things stop her from blending in with the crowds, the reporter and photographer who trail her among the stalls, prompting vendors and shoppers to ask, “Who is that woman?” Not that her unadorned face is that readily identifiable.

Sherman strolls among the stalls, her radar picking up every unclaimed doll in the area. Linda Cathcart, an old friend from Buffalo and former gallery owner who represented Sherman in L.A., is along for the ride. Cathcart acts as an early warning system for notably bizarre objects, including another shopper in purple platforms, animal print shorts and long blond braids.

“Cindy, I found a boyfriend for you,” Cathcart hoots.

Both women thumb through every old scrapbook they discover, hoping to find another gem like the one in Sherman’s collection that chronicles a transvestite’s life in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Or the first one she acquired, which had belonged to a teenage girl.

“It had cigarette butts and wrappers for the gum her boyfriend chewed,” Sherman says. “It went on for a couple of years, and then at the end there were divorce papers. It was really intense because she was so obsessed with him and suddenly. . . . “

Sherman likes scrapbooks because they force her to fill in the blanks, to tell stories that may or may not find their way into her work. She likes delving behind many layers and lays claim to her own contradictions--the nice girl who makes gruesome images, who is eager to both please and disturb.

“I’m conscious of the fact that if I’m cutting vegetables with a sharp knife, what if I dropped it and it fell into my foot? Or we’re standing waiting for a subway. How often do you wonder whether someone will push you?

“But I’m a totally optimistic person. I’m incapable of showing anger except to my husband [video artist Michel Auder]. That’s why it comes out in my work. My upbringing was that I was supposed to be good-natured. That’s why I make the work I do. I have to express it somehow.”

BE THERE

“Cindy Sherman” opens Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, Thursdays until 8 p.m. $6, free Thursdays after 5 p.m. Ends Feb. 1. (213) 626-6222.