Untamed by

1. Does "the subject is a picture for the gaze of the world" mean " the subject is simply a picture in front of the gaze of the world" i.e. " the subject is a picture gazed by the world"?

2. Does "Sherman moves from the distance of the subject as picture and attends to the image screen itself" mean "Sherman Moves from "subject as a picture" (that is distant) to "the image screen" (that is a step closer)"?

3. Does "that is unmediated by language" mean " that is not mediated by language"?

4. What does "The real is the dimension of the evil eye" mean?

5. Does "an eye untamed by a mediating screen" mean "an eye not tamed by a mediating screen"?

6. Is the difference between three groups of Sherman's artworks that in the first group the subject is on the picture, in the second group the subject is on the screen, and in the third group subject is directly in front of the gaze?

Context:

Foster makes a rough division of Cindy Sherman’s oeuvre into three phases and maps these onto the three main positions of Lacan’s diagram of the eye and the gaze. He says that in the early work, Sherman’s film stills and centrefolds from 1975 to 1982, the subject is caught in the gaze, the woman is captured on display like an animal caught in the headlights. Rather than thinking of Mulvey’s male gaze here, Foster maps this onto Lacan’s notion that the subject is a picture for the gaze of the world. In the middle work, from 1987 to 1990, which includes the fairytale illustrations, the art-history portraits and the disaster pictures, it is as if Sherman moves from the distance of the subject as picture and attends to the image screen itself: bodies start decomposing in the pictures, whether milk leaking from a prosthetic breast or the use of horror-movie prostheses to create a repulsive abject body where the subject is invaded by the gaze. In her work after 1991, Foster claims the subject is obliterated by the gaze, becoming instead an obscene object that has no protecting metaphor to pacify our desire but exposing a kind of raw intransigent realism, Lacan’s notion of the real, an impossible realm of being that is unmediated by language. The real is the dimension of the evil eye, an eye untamed by a mediating screen. It is the obscenity of this eye that Foster maintains glistens through the abject matter in Sherman’s later work, and which he views as being a further attack on the narcissistic ego who resides at the geometral point of perspective. One might think here of Frankenstein’s first encounter with his horrible creation in Mary Shelley’s novel, when he sees the dull yellow eyes of the monster open (Art and Psychoanalysis by Maria Walsh).