Paul Hasegawa-Overacker’s new documentary, Guest of Cindy Sherman, begins with a spiraling, vaguely meta voiceover that later plays out onscreen between the director and two female New Jersey disc jockeys. The women rehash what’s already been discussed onair for their just-joined listeners, à la “so you’re an artist…making a movie about another, more well-known artist…who happens to be your girlfriend…” H-O’s paramour is Cindy Sherman, and lately his subordinate, +1 status has become unbearable. The women tell H-O he’s got “Famous Girlfriend Syndrome.” The diagnosis only solidifies his feelings of inadequacy. “I know what it feels like to be the wife now,” he tells them.
The DJs quickly brand him a chauvinist. “Did you think it was going to be really fun, and then you’re like, ‘this sucks?’” they chide. In H-O’s defense, he had, at that point, essentially lost his sense of identity: as artist, TV host, provider, equal. That he resorted to talk radio to air his dirty laundry underscores a sense of desperation and powerlessness.
The existential dilemma isn’t specific to men of course, only more widely-publicized (and critiqued) when a man voices his discontent. H-O and co-director Tom Donahue don’t mire themselves in self-indulgent angst, however. The tone remains light, though never quite happy, throughout–maybe because we know how the story ends.
Ironically, H-O lost himself to a woman who, beyond her art, remained enigmatic, reclusive and undefinable. Publicly at least, Sherman didn’t have a persona. She only ever had personae. As former ArtForum editor Ingrid Sischy explains in the film, “Who is she? You don’t know her. People know her from so many identities.”
What we do get from H-O’s footage is this: Sherman is shy, girly, self-deprecating, and uniquely, undeniably talented. Shooting her for his public access art scene diary, Gallery Beat, H-O initiates what ultimately becomes a mutual attraction. We see Sherman muss her hair, bite her lower lip, lower her gaze and flirt back. “I need some breathmints,” H-O tells her. “I need some ChapStick,” she replies.
Interviewer and interviewee become friends, then lovers. H-O is stoked, albeit a little nostalgic about leaving his Brooklyn digs to move to Sherman’s loft. There’s surfing in the Hamptons. Movie premieres. Art world parties. Sherman’s openings in New York, L.A. and London. H-O is initially happy to be a part of this surreal new life, though gradually the pressures of being Cindy Sherman’s oft-unrecognized other half gradually eat away at his ego.
No longer producing art himself, and having failed to revive Gallery Beat in a newer incarnation, ArtLike, H-O becomes depressed and seriously ill. His sickness, eventually overcome, seems to have been psychosomatic.
H-O uses a few cases to illustrate the dominant/subordinate conceit. Actress Molly Ringwald’s husband, Panio Gianopoulos, confesses that he, too, feels somewhat emasculated as the lesser of the pair. Ringwald claims that she didn’t know it really bothered him until relatively recently. “That’s the crux of the dilemma,” Gianopoulos says. “You think you should be above this.”
Artists and spouses Eric Fischl and April Gornik fared better, perhaps because their relationship was gender normative as well as a byproduct of the decade. As a woman in the male-dominated, go-go 80s art scene, Gornik, a landscape painter, received less attention than male artists like her husband–part of a media-annointed, bad boy collective that included Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo.
In the most blatant example of effectively rendering another person nil, David Furnish, partner to Elton John, relates the humiliating, albeit common practice of cropping a dinner or party guest out of a photo at the last minute–in many cases, him. H-O suffered similar indignities on more than one occasion. Though cumulatively degrading, that wasn’t, as H-O puts it, “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Being seated tables away from his girlfriend at a fancy gallery after-party with the namecard “Guest of Cindy Sherman” was.
Sherman got final approval over the scenes in which she appeared, but has neglected to either see or discuss the documentary, according to H-O. Interestingly, the character that emerges is never really cast in a negative light–perhaps because, in a way, she’s also never really there. The portrait is intimate, yet Sherman remains characteristically elusive. We do not know how she feels nor are we likely to anytime soon. The role, like so many before it, has already been discarded.
Guest of Cindy Sherman, now showing at Cinema Village in Manhattan and The Film Center, Santa Fe.
+Sarah (sarahsfones@gmail.com)
03/30/2009 at 6:24 pm
Thank you, Cody ( Sarah?)
Best graphic layout of any review we’ve gotten. How things are chosen and arranged can have a significant subtext.
Paul H-O