ions, one-night performances, ideas as art, masochistic gestures as art, earthworks on distant deserts, and so on. Painting was disallowed, and sculpture was calculated to oppress. Artists pushed aesthetic experience on the basis of obedience to arcane, restless, reductive logics, and the result was a form of sheer self-consciousness. Sherman and her contemporaries developed their orientation not by rejecting conceptualism but by bringing images to it:
They subjected the inundation of images in which they had been raised to an exacting investigation. In so doing, they stumbled upon mechanisms of incredible power by which self and society, in our age, are visualized, encoded, and even created. The young artist became fascinated by the way any image at all, simply by being presented, activates a mysterious charge--neither subjective nor objective, but some unstable emulsion of both--of represented content.
Sherman's first important body of work was the black-and-white photos noted above and shown in 1977-1980, and these were inspired by some so
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