Cindy Sherman, 1975-1993

Book excerpt: In this first presentation of the artist's complete work, leading contemporary art historian Rosalind Krauss reviews Cindy Sherman's remarkable series of photographic works - in which the artist has notoriously assumed various roles, from B-movie starlet to Old Master model - and the enormous influence these works have had on feminist thinking and on current dialogues about the strategies of contemporary art in general. Almost perversely, Krauss argues, Sherman's unsettling attempts to dissect the formation and perception of images have turned her artworks - and herself - into icons for feminists' and others' agendas. Krauss explores in depth the various approaches to Sherman's work taken by philosophers and art historians and asks if they have not often lost sight of the imagery itself - or, more specifically, the way the images are constructed. In a further essay, Norman Bryson, internationally known for his pioneering theories on the semiotics of looking, explores Sherman's most recent, horror-show images of mannequins (known as the Sex Pictures) and identifies their place in her continued out-of-body investigations. Along with a bibliography and chronology, more than 200 illustrations (140 in color), including numerous unpublished works, represent Sherman's complete career to date.