| This dissertation examines the work of a select group of artists active in New York City from the 1970s to the 1990s—Sylvia Sleigh, Joan Semmel, Cindy Sherman, Adrian Piper, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jimmie Durham—who explored issues of authorship and authenticity, gender and race, through the representation of a self. In four chapters I will argue that each of the artists—by exploring, exploiting, and subverting the traditional decorum of self-portraiture—challenged the genre's entanglements with a rhetoric of exclusivity and mastery. By pressuring the genre and asserting their own self-conscious agency, they reinvented and expanded both the discourse and the forms of “picturing” a self.;Chapter One examines the works of Sleigh and Semmel, artists who drew upon the historical authority of painting as they appropriated and reformulated the existing forms of self-representation. In Chapter Two I examine the early photographs of Cindy Sherman, an artist of a younger generation who seemed disinterested in projects of revision and reformation. Sherman re-enacted cinematic images of female identities, which constituted a set of those very types from which Sleigh and Semmel had sought distance. Her double-directed and ironic restatements contrast with the emphatic paintings of Sleigh and Semmel. Chapter Three analyzes the photographic work of Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as the paintings of Emma Amos, as they placed race as well gender in tension with self-representation. Chapter Four turns to the work of Jimmie Durham, an artist of Native American descent, who challenged conventional expectations of authentic Indianness in his self-portraits. Through parodic invention he moved beyond the apparent impasse of repetition, reversal, and substitution.;With humor as well as critical insight, these seven artists manifest the complexity of negotiating their identities within the terms of a traditional genre. This dissertation concludes that the shift from self to subject offers unique possibilities for the exploration of identity in a culturally diverse world. |
