Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff & Frank Montero: 1000 Faces, 0 Faces, One Face
Text by Gerardo Mosquera, Douglas Crimp, Diana Cuéllar, José Miguel G. Cortés.
1000 Faces/0 Faces/One Face unites two great contemporary artists who have interrogated constructions of identity with an entirely unknown late-nineteenth-century photographer named Frank Montero. Its thesis runs as follows: in Cindy Sherman’s manipulations of generic casting we encounter a face that produces all faces; in Thomas Ruff’s proliferating but depersonalized portraits, we all encounter all faces reduced to a zero degree; and in Montero, we encounter a face that plays the role of itself, throughout the inscriptions wrought upon it by time. Montero’s work, seemingly made without artistic intentions or ambitions, and published here for the first time, provides a sort of Rembrandt-like counterpoint to the identity arguments made by Ruff and Sherman’s work, and alongside them makes for the most fascinating panorama of the absolute constructedness of the photographic portrait and the eerie artifice of identity itself.
FORMAT: Hbk, 8 x 10 in. / 156 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $60.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $70 ISBN: 9788415303152 PUBLISHER: La Fábrica/Fundación Telefónica AVAILABLE: 10/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD Excl LA Spain
Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff & Frank Montero: 1000 Faces, 0 Faces, One Face
Published by La Fábrica/Fundación Telefónica. Text by Gerardo Mosquera, Douglas Crimp, Diana Cuéllar, José Miguel G. Cortés.
1000 Faces/0 Faces/One Face unites two great contemporary artists who have interrogated constructions of identity with an entirely unknown late-nineteenth-century photographer named Frank Montero. Its thesis runs as follows: in Cindy Sherman’s manipulations of generic casting we encounter a face that produces all faces; in Thomas Ruff’s proliferating but depersonalized portraits, we all encounter all faces reduced to a zero degree; and in Montero, we encounter a face that plays the role of itself, throughout the inscriptions wrought upon it by time. Montero’s work, seemingly made without artistic intentions or ambitions, and published here for the first time, provides a sort of Rembrandt-like counterpoint to the identity arguments made by Ruff and Sherman’s work, and alongside them makes for the most fascinating panorama of the absolute constructedness of the photographic portrait and the eerie artifice of identity itself.
