#77 FIELD GUIDE TO AI

The artist’s life used to be sorted into three parts: emergent, mid-career, and established. The reality, of course, is murkier: Andy Warhol emerged from an erased past, motherhood “skipped” Louise Bourgeois’s mid-career, and Philip Guston renounced his established art – to say nothing of posthumous revisionism. How, then, can we take the measure of what an oeuvre adds up to?
In a thousand guises on as many sets, the personae in Cindy Sherman’s pictures document an unfolding of the self, leaving a half-century’s oddities and fantasies exposed. Visiting the debut of her latest works, she and Kunsthalle Zürich’s Daniel Baumann unpack her interest in the grotesque, ways of abstracting ageing, and a conviction that what’s scary can also be very funny.