I always took Thoreau's "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" literally - he meant people with penises as far as I was concerned. He was talking about men trapped in society's expectations, unable to express their own creative and authentic selves - slaves to the role of husband and provider. It seemed to me that somehow he managed to predict the modern white collar world ... the cubicles, the office politics, the slow, soul-destroying tediousness of ambition for middle-management and beyond. Or a blue-collar world, on the factory assembly line or down a mine with no way out except the grave.
But feminism has taught us that women have traditionally had their own kind of desperation, which was born from a powerlessness solely defined by marriage and motherhood, whether it was wanted or not. But in the contemporary world, women have joined the rat-race and can participate in both its rewards and its punishments. Ironically, the pressures of modern-day economics mean that a dream of being a mother at home with her children is unattainable for many women who long for that life.
This afternoon I visited the Cindy Sherman exhibition's last day at City Gallery, and what struck me most yet again - and what has always drawn me to her - was the work that explored the sheer desperation of the suburban housewife in middle age, her looks fading in a world that only cares about youth. Sherman's self-portraits have an incredible range, and I'm simply astounded that beyond the irony and the layers of artifice, the emotional core is so strong. For every haughty socialite secure in her place in the hierarchy, there's another one who is no longer certain in a world that no longer reveres her. Any self-confidence the subject subject once had is fading.
But self-doubt isn't only about the loss of power by the privileged. For the suburban housewife, it can simply be a diminishing of her youth, and this I think is probably close to home for Sherman herself. Her interview with the Domion-Post last year was revealing:
"I think about maybe doing some plastic surgery, like a neck lift. I mean I toy with these things in my head and I'm, like, reticent to do any of it. I mean I've done Botox, things that are temporary. Well, I don't do it when I'm working, I need my expressions when I'm working."
She trails off momentarily, then says: "It's rough being a woman and ageing in this day and age."
Sherman's work grapples with the complexity of feminism, as can be seen in the wide variety of women that she plays. It's all very well to take a doctrinaire stand for a set of beliefs and say that looks don't matter, but the nuances of being human remind us that what we feel on an emotional level can be at odds with our professed values. Insecurity and anxiety aren't suddenly erased by ideology.
That every Sherman photograph is a self-portrait - or at least a portrait of Sherman in character - is a testament to her powers of empathy, even when a portrait is not designed to be sympathetic in itself. She is a chameleon who is the subject for as long as she poses for her camera. In the pieces that I love most, she shows us that the mid-life crisis isn't the exclusive domain of the male. We've seen that in exhibitions of local photographer Jenny O'Connor. Her "Visible: 60 Women at 60" takes this idea even further down one path, but it's a celebration of the women who have embraced their age. In Sherman's uneasy characters, you see their inner world powerfully externalised.
So often I see or read about photographers who call their work fine art, but it doesn't say anything about the world we live in or the artist's relation to it. My personal definition of true art means that it has to boldly engage what it means to be human ... even when the genre is landscape.