As Rosalind Krauss has argued, the indexical became a primary characteristic of contemporary art in the 1970s, when the status of the photographic sign as the only evidence of “what has been” moved to center stage with the introduction of Performance [more] art, Body art, and Environmental art. In the 1980s, the phenomenological terrain of the index was leveled an important aesthetic and philosophical blow with the introduction of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80). While the body of Sherman the artist is always present in these photographs, there is a “she” that is also present who alludes to, while never being a precise index of, cinematic memory, gesture, and actual mise-en-scène. With the subsequent introduction of digital photography into contemporary art, as in Andreas Gursky’s photographic tableaux made from digitally implanted “real” imagery, the nature and definition of the index is further complicated. In other words, is the term “index” even correct when the referent itself has shifted from something “that has been” to something “that has never been”? Matthew Barney’s more narratively intricate CREMASTER films, sculptures, and photographs rely on the notion of an indexical trace that produces an entirely believable world of referents that have “never been.” In fact, Barney’s film cycle may itself be considered an index of the larger shift in 21st-century notions of presence and absence that has brought us up to the point where it is no longer necessary for an object to “have been there” physically to be a source of indexicality.