Guest of Cindy Sherman is a dense and fast-paced portrait of one man’s loss of innocence at the hands of his beloved –– at least, as far as “innocence” can be taken as synonymous with “unpunctured ego”, and “beloved” can be taken to refer to the big bad art world in addition to, and perhaps ahead of, the famous photographer namechecked in the title. Co-directed by Tom Donahue and Paul H-O (shortened from Hasegawa-Overacker), the film trails the latter’s self-engineered insinuation (based on a formula of 2 parts brattiness, 1 part careerist ambition) into the social scene surrounding the Soho art scene of the 90s, which eventually took over his own social life when he began a five year romantic relationship with Sherman, which in turn absorbed his personal and professional identity. The premise alone sounds too navel-gazing by half, but at its best Guest offers H-O’s story as a parable for the universal loss of self that every long-term relationship portends. The film also plays as a kind of easily digestible time capsule of several decades worth of contemporary art, tracking a move towards mass market mania and concurrent, undeniable bleeding of personal idiosyncrasy. Paul H-O enters the story as a party crasher; by the time he exits, it seems there’s no longer a party to crash.
Blending archival footage into new interviews at a rapid clip and yet taking their time to get to the juicy part of the narrative, Donahue and H-O devote nearly the entire first half of their film to placing both members of the couple in their appropriate historical context. Already an art star when she meets Paul in the early 00’s but seemingly ever ascendant, Sherman began to build notoriety and market cachet with her breakout Untitled Film Stills series, which questioned traditional female roles as dictated/reinforced by Hollywood movies, and which happened to coincide with the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1970s. She then tread water through the next decade, as the macho boy painters of the age –– Eric Fischl, Robert Longo, Julian Schnabel –– hogged the media spotlight and attracted all the Wall Street cash. When the market fell in 1987, the male artists associated with the boom fell out somewhat out of fashion, and Sherman’s work emerged at the height of her boldness.
H-O, at one time a mixed-media sculptor whose work was largely influenced by his passion for surfing, joined up with friend and Art in America editor Walter Robinson in the early 90s to produce a semi-regular local cable access show called Gallery Beat, in which the pair filmed each other stumbling into gallery openings, asking pointedly pedestrian questions in a gleeful attempt to deflate pretensions, even as they clearly coasted on charm. In the film, Robinson throws out the label “Beavis and Butthead go to the art world” to excuse (and appreciate) both the show’s barely-there production values and the duo’s harmless enfant terrible attitude; in archival Gallery Beat footage, Julian Schnabel calls the show “a masturbatory exercise in stupidity.” Schnabel’s somewhat uncreative dis, even as it misses the irony of Gallery Beat, somehow gets its mission exactly right: as one talking head in the film puts it, the art world revolves around “one blow job after another.” In filming its denizens, even in a way that allows for some measure of mocking, the Gallery Beat gang fed into the figurative fellatio.
By the time he drifted into Sherman’s orbit, Paul H-O had years of experience using his camera as a path to the charming of artists of various degrees of power and prestige, and he’s got the footage to prove it, as when his happenstance flirtation with Tracy Emin becomes the subject of a Gallery Beat episode. Documentation of his relationship with Sherman actually takes up very little screentime in Guest, which seems like a wise move; as with any romance, beyond the moment of consummation Paul and Cindy’s loses some of its appeal. But the most compelling footage in the film documents their courtship, from a couple of gallery run-ins to a series of one-on-one interviews Paul conducted with the famously press-shy artist in her home studio. It’s in the footage of the ostensibly formal interview sessions that we watch them both fall into … something H-O doesn’t break down Sherman’s defenses, exactly — he seems as surprised as we are that she’s letting him in as far as she is. And yet it doesn’t *look* like love, even at the heady outset. The vibe is a classic push-pull, but we never forget that in the pecking order, Paul is a fan and Cindy is a star.
Paul and Cindy were able to forget that, at least temporarily, but soon enough Gallery Beat starts to fall apart as the art world (which he’s no longer a full-on interloper to, thanks to his girlfriend), becomes more elitist and closed-off to amateur documentation. When he tries to produce a higher-gloss spin-off of Gallery Beat that retains the old show’s cheeky spirit, it’s a massive failure. With no work of his own to stand behind, H-O feels reduced to Sherman’s consort, tagging along increasingly bitterly as she’s being honored at museums and galas, as photographers are nudging him out of pictures. After channeling his feelings of inadequacy into both a one-man one-night-only show and an appearance on his favorite radio show, H-O decides his struggle to assert himself in the shadow of his art star girlfriend is the perfect subject for his next work of art.
This is where Guest starts to trip over its own meta a bit. Collecting testimony from other second-banana love interests to famous creatives (Elton John’s husband, Molly Ringwald’s husband, Eric Fischl’s wife), H-O half-heartedly makes a case that Celebrity Boyfriend Syndrome is an epidemic about which the star watchers of the world should be concerned, and of course in his case, we’re to read a certain poignancy into the irony that his own identity has vanished under the towering presence of a woman who, in her work, takes all pains to hide any genuine identity of her own. But then he and Sherman break up, and H-O’s identity crisis suddenly seems easily solved. He retreats from the art world, surfs, moves on. The film we see him working on within the film seems to resolve in anti-climax.
But the directors regain the reigns in the clutch. Far more interesting than his personal ups and downs is the way Guest reveals the art world as an increasingly fast churn, one which lures the starry-eyed as ever, but is increasingly efficient at chewing up their dreams and spitting them out. Guest of Cindy Sherman ends with a rumination on how art as commerce has evolved into a ever-higher stakes business in just the couple of decades since H-O took up his first camera. As the co-director/star comments in a final-inning voice over, he’s watched through his prosumer lens as the art sales have expanded from intimate exhibition spaces to giant marketplaces, “critics don’t seem to matter,” and the individual, idiosyncratic artist has seemingly shrunk off into oblivion. Sound familiar? Substitute “artist” for “auteur”, and you’ve got a fair parallel to the film industry.
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