🏴Cindy Sherman’s work post her 1970s film stills and 1980s abject landscapes feel a little repetitive. It can be argued that that is the point, or that she entered Versailles and couldn’t find the exit. Her earlier work is searching and angry. Artist Robert Longo, who was Sherman’s boyfriend at the time of her earlier work, said she made the abject works as a response to the art market’s preference for her male counterparts, like Longo. In 2016 “Untitled 1987” sold for USD 413,000.

So what we get is vomit and half-eaten muffins with the ever-present Cindy Sherman self portrait, a mere screaming face reflected in a pair of shades.

For Rosalind Krauss, Sherman's photographs — in particular “Untitled 1987” — deal “a low blow to the processes of form", what Julia Kristeva called “abjection” in “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” (1980), in which Kristeva “draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist criticism and queer theory.”

Those stills though🏴

📸Cindy Sherman, Untitled (#175), 1987, colour coupler print mounted on foamcore, 121.9 × 181.6 cm

2. Untitled Film Still #4,1977, Gelatin silver print, 92.1 × 108.6 × 5.1 cm