DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
When I first started investigating this project, I kept thinking about the difference between expensive images and important images.
Cindy Sherman has made some of the most commercially successful images ever made. She is in a very small group of artists whose photographs have reached an enormous market value. That matters to me. Not because money is the meaning of the work, but because it tells us something about the power of the image. These are not disposable images. People have found meaning in them in a very particular way.
When I interviewed Cindy, I wanted to understand her process. I wanted to understand her life experience around turning fifty. I wanted to understand what she was making in that period and what it meant to keep working at that level.
But I also wanted to get closer to the reality of the work itself: Cindy made images that became valuable because they are strong, strange, resistant, and emotionally exact. They survive the systems around them.
We live in a world where images are being made and processed constantly: through advertising, through social media, through the way our lives are consumed, reposted, branded, and turned back into material. I think this has made us confused. It has also devalued images in a real way. So many images are now already connected to advertising, even when they are pretending not to be.
Cindy’s work does something else.
Any Cindy Sherman image with a logo placed on top of it becomes a very confusing image. It does not easily turn into an ad. Even when Cindy has participated in advertising, the images remain unstable. They resist becoming simple product images. That resistance became important to me.
For me, this became a marker of what art can do, and what the job of the artist can be: to process the world around us and make images so strong that they cannot be easily absorbed, flattened, or co-opted.
That is an extreme level of technical skill, emotional skill, and lived process. It is not just an idea. It is work.
This is where Bad Liquor for Bag Ladies sits for me.
The film is both a tribute to Cindy’s work and an experience of trying to make an image that good. It is about the pressure of making an image inside a commercial system, and what happens when the image starts to refuse the job it was made for.
Chloë Sevigny plays Cindy Sherman inside a fragrance campaign called CINDY. The scent does not exist yet, so the production starts using Cindy instead.
The film becomes an attempt to make an ad that can hold everything: the artist, the actress, the product, the public image, the private body, the market, the joke, the horror, the beauty, and the work.
By the end, they make the ad.
It may be the best ad ever made, but it might not be able to sell anything except itself.
When I first started investigating this project, I kept thinking about the difference between expensive images and important images.
Cindy Sherman has made some of the most commercially successful images ever made. She is in a very small group of artists whose photographs have reached an enormous market value. That matters to me. Not because money is the meaning of the work, but because it tells us something about the power of the image. These are not disposable images. People have found meaning in them in a very particular way.
When I interviewed Cindy, I wanted to understand her process. I wanted to understand her life experience around turning fifty. I wanted to understand what she was making in that period and what it meant to keep working at that level.
But I also wanted to get closer to the reality of the work itself: Cindy made images that became valuable because they are strong, strange, resistant, and emotionally exact. They survive the systems around them.
We live in a world where images are being made and processed constantly: through advertising, through social media, through the way our lives are consumed, reposted, branded, and turned back into material. I think this has made us confused. It has also devalued images in a real way. So many images are now already connected to advertising, even when they are pretending not to be.
Cindy’s work does something else.
Any Cindy Sherman image with a logo placed on top of it becomes a very confusing image. It does not easily turn into an ad. Even when Cindy has participated in advertising, the images remain unstable. They resist becoming simple product images. That resistance became important to me.
For me, this became a marker of what art can do, and what the job of the artist can be: to process the world around us and make images so strong that they cannot be easily absorbed, flattened, or co-opted.
That is an extreme level of technical skill, emotional skill, and lived process. It is not just an idea. It is work.
This is where Bad Liquor for Bag Ladies sits for me.
The film is both a tribute to Cindy’s work and an experience of trying to make an image that good. It is about the pressure of making an image inside a commercial system, and what happens when the image starts to refuse the job it was made for.
Chloë Sevigny plays Cindy Sherman inside a fragrance campaign called CINDY. The scent does not exist yet, so the production starts using Cindy instead.
The film becomes an attempt to make an ad that can hold everything: the artist, the actress, the product, the public image, the private body, the market, the joke, the horror, the beauty, and the work.
By the end, they make the ad.
It may be the best ad ever made, but it might not be able to sell anything except itself.