In December 2024, my article “Les corps sans organes de Cindy Sherman” (The Body without Organs of Cindy Sherman) was published in Políticas y narrativas del cuerpo 2 (Politics and Narratives of the Body 2), directed by Lucía Caminada and Fernando Gonçalves chez Ledizioni. This study explores how Cindy Sherman’s work interrogates and deconstructs representations of the body through her photographic stagings.
Reference :
Jessica Ragazzini, (2024), “Les corps sans organes de Cindy Sherman,” in Políticas y narrativas del cuerpo 2 / Politiques et récits du corps 2 / Politics and Narratives of the Body 2, under the direction of Caminada, Lucía, and Fernando Gonçalves, Ledizioni.
Deconstruction of the Body and Otherness in Cindy Sherman’s Work
Examined through the lens of the Body without Organs theorized by Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, the work of Cindy Sherman transforms the visual and sensory apprehension of the body into a series of fictional characters that are at times motionless, expressive, living, or reified. Toward the end of the 1980s, Sherman progressively replaced her own image with mannequins, exploring themes such as sexuality and suffering. She endowed these bodies without organs with emotions and sensations, thereby creating an ambiguity between the human and the object that challenges conventional conceptions of modern humanism. Following the events of September 11, 2001, Sherman’s self-portraits disguised as clowns further illustrate this fusion between the human figure and the character’s grotesque theatricality. Rather than reducing the body to an object, this approach invites viewers to perceive the human and the object as equivalent, generating for the spectator a strange and ambiguous sense of life.
An Interdisciplinary Work on Body Politics
Políticas y narrativas del cuerpo 2 (Politics and Narratives of the Body 2) offers a collective reflection on how artistic practices, social sciences, and humanities intersect to shape our understanding of corporeality today. The work discusses the mutations and resistances of the body in response to contemporary discourses.