"I'm really just using the mirror to summon something I don't even know until I see it"
About this Quote
A mirror is supposed to confirm who you are; Cindy Sherman treats it like a séance. "I'm really just using the mirror to summon something I don't even know until I see it" frames self-image not as discovery but as production: an act of calling up a persona from the cultural dark, waiting for it to cohere under light. That verb, "summon", gives the game away. Sherman isn’t looking for an authentic self behind the glass. She’s staging the conditions where a self can appear - and implicating the viewer in believing it.
The line clicks because it describes the core mechanism of her work without the usual art-world mysticism. Sherman’s photographs, especially the Untitled Film Stills and later grotesque or hyper-stylized series, operate like experiments in how femininity gets read. The mirror becomes a tool of rehearsal: try on a posture, a wig, a lighting cue, and watch the world’s codes rush in to finish the character. "I don't even know until I see it" is less coy than diagnostic. Identity, in her universe, is feedback: you become legible by meeting your own image as if it belonged to someone else.
Context matters: Sherman’s rise alongside late-70s/80s feminist critique and postmodern suspicion of authorship makes this feel like a quiet rebuke to the myth of the artist confessing a stable interior. Her intent is to show how the camera - and by extension culture - manufactures "types" that pass for truth, and how easily we mistake recognition for knowledge.
The line clicks because it describes the core mechanism of her work without the usual art-world mysticism. Sherman’s photographs, especially the Untitled Film Stills and later grotesque or hyper-stylized series, operate like experiments in how femininity gets read. The mirror becomes a tool of rehearsal: try on a posture, a wig, a lighting cue, and watch the world’s codes rush in to finish the character. "I don't even know until I see it" is less coy than diagnostic. Identity, in her universe, is feedback: you become legible by meeting your own image as if it belonged to someone else.
Context matters: Sherman’s rise alongside late-70s/80s feminist critique and postmodern suspicion of authorship makes this feel like a quiet rebuke to the myth of the artist confessing a stable interior. Her intent is to show how the camera - and by extension culture - manufactures "types" that pass for truth, and how easily we mistake recognition for knowledge.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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