Cindy Sherman on AI Experiments, Pottery Lockdown, and Being a Woman in Today’s Art Market

Since she was little, Cindy Sherman has played with disguise, artifice and camouflage. At first she dressed to overcome her shyness, attended parties and gallery openings in New York, later documenting her transformations as an art form. She played the 1950s screen siren, central pin-up girl, guardian of the old masters, clown and aging Hollywood diva.

For his solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich, Sherman has created a new body of work reminiscent of his early cut-out black-and-white collages of the 1970s, manipulated and scaled for the digital age. She was often at the forefront of technology, building and Photoshopping “profile pictures” long before Instagram. Here she tells us how AI helped shape her latest series, why she started making ceramics during the pandemic, and what it means to be a woman in today’s art market.

The Art Newspaper: For your last body of work, you went back to some images that you started making in 2010. What made you stop working on them and why did you have to take them back?

Cindy Sherman: I was originally thinking of ideas to create a sort of wallpaper image that would repeat parts of the skin or parts of the face so they’re not really recognizable until you get close to them. I finally did something else for this particular project. Periodically, I returned to this body of work, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with it. And I never did anything until I started thinking about this show, that maybe this work that I shot 13 years ago would work better in black and white.

So I was playing around with Photoshop to make things black and white, and then accidentally left a part in color. And that’s when I got the idea to make it look like it was really a collage from black and white and color. Then I realized that I wanted to start shooting recent stuff. I had a new camera and didn’t expect the resolution to be so much sharper that’s why I zoomed the new images a bit because you can see every little hair and pore in your skin.

In the show’s catalog, you talk about “dreading being in front of the camera again”, having to compare yourself to your “face 13 years younger”. I was struck by the fact that you have been scrutinizing your face for almost 40 years. How has this affected you?

This is one of the reasons why taking parts of the face was helpful for me, because I didn’t feel like it was really revealing me. Even though the original photos are extreme close-ups, I don’t use the whole thing. I mix them all from different images. So I guess I didn’t really feel like it was that revealing. It’s as if I involuntarily accept aging.

You are active on Instagram and have posted AI-generated images based on your own work. What do you think of AI? Will you use it as a tool for your work?

I don’t know if I would use it as a tool, but I get ideas from it. I use Lensa, where you choose a group of images, usually selfies, and you feed them into this program and they create avatars from the selfies.

Generally I think they try to make really attractive avatars of your face. But because the images I gave them are these edited images, the results are so much more surprising. Some of the characters appear to have two hands sticking out of one arm or the face looks sort of chopped off. It partially inspired me for this new body of work. People would respond to my Instagram posts saying, “Your other work was so much better,” but I don’t consider [Instagram posts to be art] works. It’s just fun, I’m having fun.

This is the first work you have done since the pandemic. How has this whole period affected you?

I was not able to work at all. I actually ended up buying a kiln and a potter’s wheel, and got into making ceramics, which was great, therapeutically. It was so nice to use my hands again and make things I could touch and then paint and cook. I loved it.

But as far as my photography…it was difficult for me at first, because I had this big show coming up at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, which I had spent years working on, and I didn’t I never got to see it. I feel like almost no one has seen it. So I felt a bit exhausted. And I had no idea of ​​future work.

Even doing this show, I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing until late fall or early this year, even. I warned them. I said maybe I couldn’t do this show. I really didn’t know what I was doing. It was a combination of what I went through during Covid, it was very hard to get back to thinking about working again.

And partly because I got older, and I also gained weight during Covid and I became very aware of that and how that was going to affect my work. Because in the past, my body has always been relatively consistent: gradually aging and gradually gaining a little weight. But, like many people, I gained a lot of weight. And then I thought to myself, “wow, what kind of work am I going to do? An intentional series about being a heavier, older woman? It took a while to figure that out.

I would say that your work is both implicitly and explicitly feminist, even if it can often be read as ambivalent. Has feminism been a driving force in your work?

I guess in the past there were times when it was kind of a driving force, but not so much where I was consciously going, “Oh, I’m doing feminist work.” It was more about issues that I felt affected me as a young woman – the [portrayal] women in movies and TV shows: you’re a mother, you cook, you take care of the family. There were certain roles that I started to question – “do I really want to be like this?”. So yeah, it informed the work, but I certainly wasn’t articulate about it.

Who, or what, would you say are the biggest influences on your work?

August Sander. I’ve always loved his portraits, his study of people. I feel like a big part of my job is to study people. And Goya. But also a lot of cinema and television. I’ve always thought that bad movies, bad television, even bad publicity are always very interesting because of what makes them bad. So I would say the media is really the biggest influence.

Your work has sold for millions at auction and you are represented by one of the greatest galleries in the world. What do you think of this level of commercial success?

Even though the art world has evolved – women are better served and artists of color are better represented – it is still dominated by men. I hear people complaining that there are so many mediocre women or artists of color getting attention now. But how many years have we seen a lot of mediocre male artists getting attention? Financially, yes, I’m doing fine, but my male counterparts still fare much better at auction. It’s going in the right direction, but it’s still a bit of an uphill battle. Either way, much of the art world is overhyped and overpriced.

• Cindy ShermanHauser & Wirth, Limmatstrasse, Zurich, until September 16