by Hilary Dow
A project on the side I am working on for my internship with contemporary artist Suzy Lake is to do research on Lake’s career for a forthcoming article on her influence on feminist body art in the '70s and the resurgence of her work in the mainstream Canadian art world from the mid-2000s to the present.
Throughout her career, Suzy Lake has been compared to the American-based feminist photographer Cindy Sherman. Sherman’s work was popularized by the British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman”, who argued that her Untitled Film Stills series (1977-1980) was drawing on her concept of the “male gaze” from her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Sherman’s photographs have been interpreted as subversions of the male gaze and they critque notions of female beauty in representations of women in film, photography, art, and media.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #7, 1978, Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 9/16" (24.1 x 19.2 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Sid R. Bass
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #10, 1978, Gelatin silver print 7 5/16 x 9 7/16" (18.6 x 24 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Laudel.
Sherman left an international legacy on contemporary artists dealing with issues of the gaze, gender, identity, and beauty. However, Sherman was influenced by Suzy Lake and adopted many of Lake’s approaches, techniques, and themes in her early work. This is an interesting topic in researching Lake’s work, considering how influential the figure of Cindy Sherman is in art historical narratives that herald her as the most influential artist of feminist photography in the 80’s and 90’s.
The fact of the matter is, Cindy Sherman was heavily influenced by Suzy Lake and this influence is largely ignored. Her influence is particularly evident in the case of Sherman’s serial photographic piece, Untitled #479, which is regularly cited as being inspired by Lake’s work from 1973-1974 titled A Genuine Simulation of… . Both works depict self-portraits of the artist's transition from states of plainness, and in Sherman’s case, androgyny, to images of their faces adorned with excessive makeup. Both works comment on constructions of beauty, gender, and appearance, although Lake’s treatment of the subject is far more subtle and nuanced than Sherman’s.
Cindy Sherman,Untitled #479.1975.Courtesy of MOMA.
Suzy Lake, A Genuine Simulation of ..., 1973-1974. Dhromogenic prints dry mounted. 159.2 x 129.8 cm; image: 159.2 x 129.8 cm
Gift of Jared Sable, Toronto, 1993. Courtesy Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (no. EX-93-399) *Predated Sherman by 1 year.
Suzy Lake was making feminist body art and self-portrait photography long before Cindy Sherman. A scholar of Cindy Sherman who has worked with Suzy Lake often mentions Lake’s influence on Sherman. As a result, many exhibitions and articles written about Sherman include discussion of Lake, which I have been unearthing in my documentation of Suzy Lake’s publication history.
Technically, Lake is an America-Canadian artist, as she is American-born and much of her initial training and political influences were shaped by her experiences of second-wave feminism in America. Suzy Lake was born in Detroit in 1947 and moved to Canada after riots in her home town broke out. Part of the explanation of Sherman’s widespread popularity and Lake’s period of marginalization may be explained by the dominance of American culture (Americanism) on the feminist movement. Most feminist art and voices made in Canada in the period of second-wave feminism were ignored until the twenty-first century. Despite this, Lake has stated that the primary reason she remained in Canada was because the nation had more forgiving policies towards Womens’ rights in the '70s and '80s.
In 2006, a major exhibition about the development of feminist art in the 1970s in Canada was organized, titled “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution”. Lake played a significant role in this show and her work was featured as the opening piece in the exhibition. It was not until quite recently that Suzy Lake came to be considered one of the most influential Toronto-based Contemporary artists. She is now iconic within the Canadian art establishment, and recognized internationally as a significant contributor to the earliest developments of feminist art worldwide, evidenced by her inclusion in the current touring European show "The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s", organized by the Sammlung Verbund in Vienna.