Cindy Sherman talks to David Frankel - '80s Then - Interview

ArtForum, March, 2003

DAVID FRANKEL: For many people, you seem to crystallize what was new In the art of the '80s. Did you intend to make that kind of departure? Or did you feel connected to '70s art?

CINDY SHERMAN: I didn't set out to establish an alternative. No one really did--expectations were a lot lower than you see with people coming out of art schools today. I did want to do something different; I was bored by what was going on in art and particularly in painting, but I didn't think I was actually going to make a difference. We all would have been happy just to have a show somewhere.

In the late '70s and into the '80s I was aware that the painting and sculpture world looked down on people who used photography. At the same time, I felt that the photo world looked down on those who had one foot in the art world. So I was outside both worlds, and I thought of my work as art, but not "high" art. Which was fine, because I didn't want to make anything too precious. I didn't want to make "high" art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity (no one was buying it anyway). Around 1981 I started using color, and the printing was a little more expensive, so I couldn't be quite as carefree. But the issue still wasn't the quality of the print, it was about the idea.

DF: But at some point your career did take off.

CS: Things didn't start happening for me until 1982, when I was in Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and around that time a Whitney Biennial also. A bunch of good things all happened at around the same time. I really didn't make money, though, until 1990 or so--I was supporting myself, but nothing like the guy painters, as I refer to them. I always resented that actually; we were all getting the same amount of press, but they were going gangbusters with sales.

CS: I knew those people, but not terribly well. I knew Julian [Schnabel] the least. David Salle, I guess, I knew initially from when I was involved with Hallwalls in Buffalo and he was involved with Artists Space in New York. And then later a bunch of us all lived downtown around Fulton or Nassau--Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, Douglas Crimp, Nancy Dwyer...

DF: Did you feel as if you and they were all part of the same world?

DF: What about the people we now call appropriation artists, like Sherrie Levine?

CS: I didn't think of it as appropriation, that idea hadn't crystallized at the time. All those ideas that came down, and continue to come down--I never really gave a thought to them until I read them. In the later '80s, when it seemed like everywhere you looked people were talking about appropriation--then it seemed like a thing, a real presence. But I wasn't really aware of any group feeling. It was a pretty competitive time. It wasn't just photographers or appropriation artists versus painters; there were so many different factions--the Mary Boone artists versus the Metro Pictures, the neo-geo...

I did feel I was working alongside the Metro artists: Robert Longo, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Troy, Jack. And what probably did increase the feeling of community was when more women began to get recognized for their work, most of them in photography: Sherrie, Laurie, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Ess. I felt there was more of a support system then among the women artists. It could also have been that many of us were doing this other kind of work--we were using photography--but people like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer were in there too. There was a female solidarity. That feeling still exists; we have good friendships.

DF: What about women artists from the '60s and '70s? Did you form friendships with them?

CS: I was more in awe of those women. Jennifer Bartlett, Lynda Benglis--artists like that were very influential in terms of there being a female presence in the art world.

DF: Influential as presences, I can imagine, but your work is very different from theirs. Did you feel you had any aesthetic precedents to follow?

CS: I felt like I wasn't following in any tradition. Maybe Diane Arbus, as a woman photographer who made some disturbing imagery, but she was really a straight photographer, a traditional photographer. I certainly respected artists like Eleanor Antin, who used their own selves in their work, but I felt somehow removed from them at the same time. So no, though Benglis and people like that were role models.

DF: You say that you didn't think about ideas like appropriation until you read about them later, but along with the Image that some younger people seem to have of the '80s--of a time when there was a lot of money in the art world, when artists were rich and famous and ate out a lot--the decade also produced a great deal of critical theory. Your own work generated a healthy body of that writing. That didn't influence you at all?

CS: There were times when I would read something and I wouldn't understand what the hell they were talking about or where they got that idea; there were times when I'd say, "Oh yeah, that's right," though I wasn't thinking of it when I was doing it. I work without really pondering what I'm doing. The only time critical writing really affected my work was when it seemed like someone was trying to second-guess where I was going next: I would use that to go somewhere else.