In Patty Jenkins' film Monster, Charlize Theron plays a prostitute who kills her clients out of a desire for revenge on life, which quickly turns into a sordid financial motive. Fitted with false teeth and having gained a few pounds, the actress, whose physical appearance is more in line with Californian aesthetic standards, is unrecognizable. With greasy hair and a stocky figure dressed in shapeless men's clothes, she embraces the principles of the Actors Studio and truly transforms herself into a crude provincial serial killer. This disappearance of the face of a famous perfume brand into the body of another woman made a big impression on the popular media, which was quick to praise her performance. There is undoubtedly something appealing about the reciprocity of this phenomenon, which suggests that if Charlize Theron can look like an average American woman, then perhaps there is a Charlize Theron hidden within every average American woman. Otherwise, why use this glamorous actress instead of another actress whose physical appearance would have immediately matched the character? Simply because it was necessary to imagine, in the guise of a rather rough character, the Barbie doll that Charlize Theron is in the reality of the media.

One can experience a similar feeling when viewing the retrospective that the Jeu de Paume is dedicating to American artist Cindy Sherman. This chronological exhibition, which spans two floors of the building, displays almost the entirety of a photographic body of work based on the presumption of the presence in the image of this American artist born in 1954. Alongside the Untitled Film Stills, which brought the artist fame, are other photographs, some better known than others, presented in sections that correspond to the formal evolution of the images. The exhibition is accompanied by texts by Régis Durand, which shed light on the different facets of this work, which has already attracted a great deal of commentary. Finally, the hanging, which follows the numbering that the artist gives to each of her untitled photographs, is broadly chronological. Readability is therefore the watchword of this exhibition, which, while not exciting, is remarkably exhaustive.

Anarcisse — Sherman's work raises an initial paradox: that of being centered on herself without being narcissistic. Unlike Claude Cahun, the French artist who, fifty years earlier, explored the question of gender through cross-dressing self-portraits, Sherman's work does not openly address the artist's identity. Indeed, as Arthur Danto points out, “she is no more the subject of the photographs than a model for a painting is the subject of a painting, even though the painting undeniably represents that model.” This is all the more surprising given that the process of taking the photographs reproduces a series of symbolic stages dear to psychoanalysis. In the photos taken in the studio, the artist poses in front of a mirror, trying out different poses until an “other” appears, which she captures through photography. However, the device is primarily practical rather than symptomatic: by using herself as a model, Cindy Sherman has a malleable person who can perfectly meet all her staging requirements. This anecdote, repeatedly recounted in various texts devoted to Cindy Sherman's images, is nevertheless part of a process of doubling between the artist and her model: the shift from “I” to “she” avoids any suggestion of self-portraiture. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that, in the context of a retrospective, Cindy Sherman's “true” face is a blind spot around which the playful mechanism of the exhibition revolves.

“n” times Cindy Sherman — From her earliest black-and-white works, the artist has created an inventory of characters by dressing up in disguise. Since the inventory required defining a framework in which to work, the artist limited herself to one location: public transportation for Bus Riders (1976–2005), and one context: a film for Murder Mystery (1976–2000). The setup is minimal: a chair placed in front of a neutral wall and a flexible trigger that the artist activates with her foot. In this absence of decor, reminiscent of a mime show, it is up to the artist to bring this gallery of characters to life by combining costumes and attitudes. With Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), Cindy Sherman refocuses on the embodiment of female characters who are no longer mimed but played. Shot outdoors, this series, steeped in the cinematic atmosphere of film noir, entrusts the setting with contextualizing the action and allows the artist to deploy a more subtle palette of attitudes and emotions. These photographs from the set of a film that does not exist, copies without an original, show a series of heroines playing out the stereotypical emotions of a scenario in which men do not appear, except in the form of the projective eye of the camera. The following series explore two aspects of this work, to which the artist owes her fame.

The cinematic reference is clearly the subject of the color photographs in the Rear Screen Projections series (1980): a canvas onto which an image is projected serves as a backdrop for the artist. This process, known as transparency, creates an aggregative space that plays on the boundary between the depth of perspective and the flatness of the screen. Film is used as an illusionist technique, with photography showing and editing a fiction. The Centerfolds/Horizontals series (1982) explores the female figure in greater depth. In it, Cindy Sherman plays young girls who are subject to intense emotional situations under the controlling eye of the camera.

So far away, yet so close — Since the 1970s, photojournalism has trivialized the depiction of horror, while the tabloid press has dramatized everyday life. The joys and sorrows of celebrities fill the media space and elicit empathy from the public. Visibility guarantees fame, and we can see in celebrities the appearance of a loved one, however distant they may be.

This sense of closeness and empathy is undoubtedly what makes Sherman's images so effective. Her work is so closely linked to her presence that it even haunts the photographs in which she does not appear. Thus, the evocative power of the Disasters series (1986-1989), in which, for the first time, the artist is no longer physically present in the image, rests largely on the assumption of the violent disappearance of this now familiar body. This break in the link that had previously united the work with the artist's visible presence paradoxically maintains this presence in the background, in the form of residues, debris, reflections... All traces that make the disappearance of this body even more striking. In this same series, plastic bodies, half-mannequin, half-doll, appear for the first time, and their use becomes increasingly frequent thereafter. I would venture to suggest that the appearance of these mannequins is a way for the artist to explore nudity without exposing herself. Indeed, in Cindy Sherman's entire body of work, none of the characters portrayed by the artist in front of the camera are depicted naked. Of course, the early series often have an erotic atmosphere in which the viewer takes on the role of voyeur, contemplating young girls in their private moments. This voyeuristic effect is often reinforced by a gap in the foreground of the image, through which the viewer's gaze slips. In any case, Cindy Sherman never portrays her characters naked. When sexual anatomy is depicted, it consists of prosthetics attached to the artist's body.

However, following a wave of censorship targeting American artists, Cindy Sherman began the Sex Pictures series (1992), in which she decided to tackle the representation of sexual acts head-on. Of course, she is absent from the images and uses anatomical mannequins, no doubt to put the censors in an awkward position. This series, which followed History Portraits / Old Masters (1988-1990), once again draws its strength from the idea that the mannequins, sometimes adorned with hairpieces, are used as substitutes for the artist's body. This underlying presence of Cindy Sherman's ever-concealed body is undoubtedly what provokes the disturbing humanization of these fragmented plastic organisms. With this combinatorial play of generic organs, a link can be made with Untitled Film Stills, one of whose themes concerns the representation of Woman. The capital letter here emphasizes an identity close to the cliché of “eternal femininity,” as defined phallocentrically by the mainstream media of the 1950s and 1960s. Stereotypes, because they immediately produce familiar images, are a process on which the work relies in a way that is not systematically critical. Here, the Sex Pictures series, which uses stereotypical body parts to mimic sexual acts, refers doubly to this idea of cliché: through the organs and through the poses.

Thus, the paradox that drives Sherman's work is as follows: linking the identity of the work to the presence of the artist while ensuring that this presence never asserts itself as identity. Another example of embodied stereotype is the Civil War series (1991), whose fictional images of the American Civil War avoid the apathy that yet another depiction of the horrors of war would elicit, by once again insinuating this link of identification between the fragments of corpses represented and the absent body of the artist. Whether concealed or substituted, the latter must therefore always be at the heart of the work in order to activate its various mechanisms. Thus, in order to maintain this body as an object that supports appearances and avoid making it the subject of the work, Cindy Sherman immediately places her nudity as the horizon of the work.

Hey, doll! — However, sometimes the artist's body no longer plays a central role in her work, as is the case in Horror and Surrealist Pictures (1994–1996). In this series, which once again features mannequins, double exposure and blurring effects disrupt the legibility of the image. Body parts are often distorted and no longer function in an archetypal way, but instead tend toward expressionism. Notes by Cindy Sherman indicate that the intention here is to mock the Surrealists' idealization of women. But this remark is contradicted, to say the least, by the other reference to Hans Bellmer's doll, a sexualized object whose body, ready to contort itself to any fantasy, is more disturbing than seductive. Aiming at a stereotype without embodying it, this series, which is conventional to say the least, lines up the clichés of the museum of horrors, somewhere between Chucky the blood doll and Frankenstein. The Broken Dolls series (1999), which repeats on a toy scale the motifs already present in Sex Pictures and Horror and Surrealist Pictures without really exploring them in depth, seems to signal certain impasses in the work. Even if it is possible to draw links between the tortured dolls and the short film Doll Clothes (1975), presented at the beginning of the exhibition.

Costumes — In the series Mask (1994–1996) and Clowns (2003–2004), costumes are the subject of the exhibition. In the manner of the Surrealists, who liked to wander around flea markets in search of chance encounters with eclectic objects, much of Cindy Sherman's work consists of hunting for costumes to use in her images. Her body thus becomes a space where different meaningful elements of clothing come together, a veritable fashion system. At the request of several clothing brands, she has also produced several fashion series, which are presented in the exhibition. In order to question the symbolic added value on which luxury brands rely to promote their designs, the artist portrays a series of characters whose clothes fail to transcend the grotesque. The Clowns series, which concludes the exhibition, operates a curious reversal, because here it is no longer just the presence of the artist that links the different figures in these garish photographs, but a disguise beneath which different personalities emerge. However, the balance between the artificiality of the clothing and the personality of the character embodied is not always in favor of the latter.

Thus, the History Portraits series is more akin to performance, as Arturo Brachetti understood it, than to the “happening” as defined by Arthur Danto. The poses are frozen from the outset, and the work is based on the identification of more or less explicit pictorial references. Beyond this postmodern game of identification, the total absence of narrative deprives this series of scope. It is not until the Hollywood/Hampton Types series (2000-2002) that fiction reemerges around these characters, whose formal proximity to the works in Andres Serrano's America series is striking. For this series, Cindy Sherman uses as her fictional basis the representation of Los Angeles residents who have been left behind by the film industry and are applying for jobs. The interest of these images lies in the gap between the strong individuality of each character, who is fictionally obliged to present a positive image of himself, and the artist who embodies this multitude. Unlike the History Portraits, where the artist represented figures, here we are dealing with characters. The “figure” refers, symbolically, to the identification of a common cultural heritage, while the “character” elaborates a fiction in allegorical mode. Allegory, because it is narrative and functions through reinterpretation, is almost consubstantial with Sherman's work. The Untitled Film Stills, the series against which her subsequent work is judged, bear witness to this. The various avenues explored thereafter have continued to fuel the different hypotheses formulated around this early body of work.

Ultimately, the Jeu de Paume retrospective raises questions about the place of a body that is not the subject, but rather blends into Cindy Sherman's work. It is fascinating to note how this presence, which establishes itself very early on as a fundamental element of the work, circumvents the question of identity. It is, of course, regrettable that this position of withdrawal is accompanied by a theoretical silence that ultimately leaves the work open to all interpretations. The absence of titles, which is consistent throughout the work, functions as a void that needs to be filled. This position of detachment, which underpins the work, sometimes leads us to wonder whether, for Cindy Sherman, being a woman is not already too much of an identity.