Sherman's March

PHOTOGRAPHY

ARTS FAIR

Too much to see, too little time: Riding the crest of an august cultural wave

Cindy Sherman is not what she appears—in her art—to be. The thirty-three-year-old photographer is known for pictures that are best thought of as single-frame films, pictures she scripts, directs, and, in an astonishing array of guises and moods, stars in. But there is nothing theatrical about Sherman herself. She has the aloofness of someone who is always thinking, but not necessarily about what you are saying.

"It's not me in the pictures,'' Sherman says; it's her characters, characters culled from her memories and observations— and made to question ours. To grasp how far and deep Sherman's work has gone, one need only visit the Whitney Museum, where a major survey of her photographs has just opened. The earliest pictures are the small, black-and-white "Untitled Film Stills," earnest send-ups of scenes from genre movies that she began in 1977. They look as though they might be documentation for performance-art works, which in a sense they are: Sherman began "getting into character" not for photos but for parties at college. It was only later, in the early 1980s, that she mastered the techniques of photography, and moved beyond easy irony to create women characters of striking emotional complexity.

In her new pictures—nosein-it scenes of gruesome aftermaths, haunting but also hilarious—Sherman is barely around. The work reflects her desire to take a break from getting into character. She tried using friends from her crowd at the Metro Pictures gallery as actors, but felt funny pushing them as she has always pushed herself. "I felt like I was imposing," she says. "With me, alone, I could take hours, all night, for the right shot." Thinking of Sherman working all night for one picture, you see her as the artist she is. Whitney Museum. New York. (Through 10/4)

The program is called Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul, hut to some of us Franklin is the queen of American pop music, period. The PBS documentary, airing this month, traces her rise from gospel singing in Detroit to rock stardom, and it's replete with testimony from her "musical peers"—as if she had any.

GERALD MARZORATI