About the gender, simulations and sustituations

There a lot of artist that they been working about how represent a multiplicity of gender in a only one person, some of these most representative artist are Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura and Nikki.S.Lee. And apart of talking about the gender they talk about the simulation, frequently issue in the contemporary art.
The appropriation-imitation of the ordered forms of the feminity seemed to be the first passage of separation to gain critical distance of which it was being criticized. The imitation determined as the only possible form of critic values, as comment Judith Butler in the Genger trouble, when comment about the parody seem to be the only way to act. Indeed, it will be of this obvious representation of the cultural essentialism of where they are going to arise "the more deconstructive" strategies from the feminine identity and the agreements stereotyped from the sort on the image and experience from the woman from the later decade, and between which it will emphasize by Cindy Sherman.

The simulation of multiple identities in its appropriation of the cinematographic photograms of the films of the Fifties that it develops in his series Untitled Stills of end of the seventy, for example, does not make but destabilize the traditional schemes paid attention on the woman. She try demonstrate the simulated character of an existence recreated on signs, emblematic expression of value-forms in the consumption culture, introducing at the same time an intense reference to the men spectator . Sherman in this series reconstructs photo grams characteristic of these films, but taking control only of its appearance. As a whole it is detected that an only author has made them, although inspected one by one would seem falsifications of frames of Hitchcock or Fellini. Usully produce a strong sensation of familiarity, them to have seen before somewhere. In fact, Peter Schjedahl observed in an occasion that the photograms of Cindy Sherman seemed so familiar at first time and the spectators were safe of to have seen the film which the photogram belonged, although that, evidently, not outside possible.



This series of Sherman, however, is first of all, a critic to the representation, a weakening of the consecrated fiction of the unitary subject that proposes the theories of the School of Frankfurt or the Postestructuralism. This series ironically reveal the excess of dependency of the social systems and the cultural practices of a paid attention concept of identity. The imitation of given representations and seizures since done of the nature is, nevertheless, threatened by a dangerous ambiguity at the time of being interpreted: for Ingrid Calame, for example, the series of Cyndy Sherman Untitled Stills, in the context of the exhibition Hall of mirrors: Art and Film since 1945 in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, seemed to fetishism the classic cinema more than to raise a critic of it. In any case, the strategic resistance seems send the system its own logic being duplicated it, to reflect, like in a mirror, the meaning without absorbing it. That absorption of the meaning does not cause that this relation cannot be confused with imaginary and symbolic the description which we could do the modern exposition like projective universe where the person / object opposition still significant age. These works force the glance logic of the abstract, fungible and reducing meaning.

As far as the critic of the mythical structure of the masterpiece and the representation in the history of the art via simulation strategies, the iconografics appropriations developed by Sherman in their series History Portraits"(1989) and by Yasumasa Morimura in their series of 1990 are specially interesting.

In relation to the History Portraits de Sherman we can affirm that they recover, parody it, the fiction of a concept of traditional representation. They are, really, attempts to use the representation against itself to challenge his authority, its claim to really have something or epistemologist value. This series implies, as well, an explicit critic to the history of the art and its methods of understanding and interpretation. In them, their self portrait of the author assuming itself, of an evidently parody way and with the prosthesis elements that characterize the production of Sherman, the identities of the portrayed ones in each one of the reconstructions, either are women or men. As Rosalind Krauss proposed, the prosthesis elements play with the generation of a false image of mask or veil, that in their fragmentary would aim at the hermeneutic dimension of the art work, the idea that it has an inner truth or meaning.

In certain way, work ironic abstractions of the past, those images seen infinite times from the childhood in scholastic books under epigraph of "masterpieces". Paintings which photography in fact always they have been for the culture of the technical reproduction, but simultaneously distorted, ironic are now respect with our memory of the past, replaced its historical gravity by the real presence of the false thing, exaggeration and grotesque.

A game in the distance between memory and truth that, together with the effects of deformation, distortion and deceives, it implies in a reflection on concepts and forms of interpretation around the subjects of sex and the sort. A fact which also we can appreciate it in works of other many authors of the age , but that is specially well-known in the old work appropriations that the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura carries out.

In the self-portraives of Morimura personifying to the infants painted by Velazquez, the idols pop as Michael Jackson or Madonna investigates themselves in the absorption processes and influences vice versa of the forms of representation of the western culture on the part of the Eastern culture and for, even, to get to raise the affirmation of his than more probable equivalence. Images that at any moment, journey by that other line of the permanent non-identification. Neither Sherman nor Morimura never appear like they themselves, always are acting, representing, parodying, replacing.