Who’s Got Cojones and Who Don’t

On his March 15, 2012 episode, Steven Colbert ridiculed presidential wannabe and Alabama Republicans’ darling, Rick Santorum, for his Puerto Rico comments.  Though not asked to perform any marriage between this Spanish-speaking island and the Union’s mainland, Santorum visited the Puerto Ricans and welcomed the English-speaking ones to the Union.  Colbert sardonically remarked that

Folks, folks, it takes serious cojones to go to Puerto Rico and tell them to stop saying cojones.

 What Colbert failed to note is that the   behavior of both children and idiots may sometime seem daring when really it is just children and idiots behaving normally.

On the other hand, Cindy Sherman has cojones. In more ways than one.  MoMA’s exhibit of her work is strikingly presented and the result is spellbinding.  Sherman brings her many selves to each one of us as a personal mirror in which we view our follies and cultural pretensions deformed and dissected to the smallest detail.  She fundamentally alters Elia Kazan’s Carroll Baker as well as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Monica Vitti, to name only two of the shells we subconsciously choose to and are encouraged to emulate.

In the process she minces our visual images of femininity and innocence as well as our ideas about what turns on the Western male.  Superb is too weak a compliment for Sherman’s work.  She alerts our senses and questions our cerebral reconstruction of what moves us.

Sherman’s inquiries as well as her multiple cojones are up for grabs at MoMA until June 2012.