Cindy Sherman still shooting herself, plus The Time of Others

Had some of Cindy Sherman’s works been made by a man, they would be considered outrageously misogynistic.

Detail from Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #462 (2007–08).

In art history, there are some useful devices for dealing with patchy information about individuals of distant or poorly documented periods. One of them is to gather works of the same hand under a temporary label, such as the Master of Frankfurt or the Port Jackson Painter. Another is to date the most active period of the career of an artist whose birth and death dates are unknown with the Latin verb floruit — he flourished, which can also be used as a noun.

Even when we know much more, it is often striking that a given artist can flourish at a certain point and then continue in a sort of afterlife in later decades. The accelerated turnover of art fashion, especially in the last century, has meant that artists frequently carry on working while half a dozen different styles have their successive moments in the sun.

In the case of Cindy Sherman, an American who has spent her whole career making staged photographs with herself as subject, it is clear her floruit was in the early 1980s. The work of this period is subtle and thought-provoking. She plays with nuances of feminine identity in a way that flies under the radar of obvious ideology and awakens curiosity. By the later 80s, her work becomes a bit more heavy-handed, and in the 90s she is drawn towards more extreme images evocative of sexual violence. But the work now at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane is from the turn of the century onwards, by when she was an established brand.

The production values have never been higher and we can see the works become increasingly polished as art commodities. The most recent ones, from this year, are very expensively produced luxury collectibles. But it is also clear that the inspiration has declined dramatically in the past 30 years, and the whole project of self-imaging has really been carried on well past its use-by-date.

The first room we encounter is in some respects quite shocking, especially for work that purports to express a feminist sensibility. It is a series called Head shots (2000-02), and represents what the artist characterises as a collection of “would-be or has-been actors”. Each woman is conceived as a type of desperate but futile ambition, begging us to look at her while repelling us with her vulgarity or ugliness.

Not one of these women is portrayed as dignified, graceful or deserving of our compassion, let alone admiration. All are conceived as part of an anthology of the undignified, the grotesque and the pitiful. Tired eyes and mouths rehearse sexual invitations that have become unseemly and even tragic; in several cases, Sherman wears a bust prosthesis to mimic the pathos of breast augmentations in older women. In another she dresses as an ageing hippie with huge but unsupported breasts collapsing under a hand-knitted jumper.

Had these works been made by a man, they would be considered outrageously misogynistic. As it is they express an extraordinary kind of loathing, which is problematic in multiple ways. In the first place, good art arises from sympathy, not from contempt and hatred. The fact that it’s the artist playing roles that are the object of contempt does not make it any better; if anything it makes it considerably worse.

To take so much trouble to make oneself ugly and grotesque and to repeat this process in a seemingly obsessive way implies a kind of self-hatred that we know to be the hidden face of narcissism. Perhaps it is the true face of narcissism, whose assertive mode is a hysterical compensation for the anguish of an inner void.

One of the reasons Sherman’s early work was so much better is that the narcissism, while always inherent in her use of her own image, was more nuanced, as well as balanced by tenderness, curiosity and erotic sensibility. It was able to reflect and illuminate the narcissistic condition which is partly instilled in women by their cultural and mediatic environment. But now it is as though the narcissism has become invasive, all-consuming and malignant.

This negativity poisons the whole exhibition, curiously letting up a little only in the latest works, some of which are relieved by hints of nostalgia and regret: but the fact these images evoke some kind of inner mental world only underscores the extent to which others, like the Society Portraits series of 2008, are all focused on desperately maintaining a social mask in the face of age and physical dereliction.

Perhaps most problematic of all is the Balenciaga series of 2007-08, the first in which Sherman used digital photography. This was a commission from French Vogue to model dresses by the fashion house Balenciaga. The result, with the usual grinning harridans thrusting their worn charms at the viewer, dressed in the luxury couturier’s creations, raises questions about the relation between a supposedly critical practice and money, and about the cynicism of the fashion industry.

As far as the first question is concerned, one thinks of the apocryphal story of Bernard Shaw and a socialite who agrees to go to bed with him for a million dollars but is outraged when he suggests five. “We’ve established the principle,” he is supposed to have replied, “now we’re just haggling about the price.” As for the second question, the fashion people evidently feel that the glamour of celebrity is more important than the content of the work; and yet the irony is that the work reveals part of the sordid truth of the fashion industry.

Upstairs at GoMA is a mixed contemporary exhibition put together by and travelling between several Asia-Pacific regional galleries. Like all such exhibitions, it is a mixed bag, but there are a number of things that are much more appealing than the Sherman exhibition, which can be seen quite quickly since it is so intellectually and aesthetically barren.

The theme of the group show, The Time of Others, comes from a Japanese phrase that invites us to contemplate not so much the phenomenon of time as the different experience of other minds. Both are evoked in one of the first works, a selection of the famous date paintings by On Kawara, the Japanese conceptual artist also known for sending out telegrams with the message: “I am still alive. On Kawara.” Sadly, he passed away two years ago.

Also explicitly connected to time is a series of calendar pages beginning in the year 2020, adorned with photographs of locations in Singapore the artist has managed to snap when there were no people about. Some of the most interesting work comes from Vietnam, including a couple of very fine black-and-white photographs from the Vietnam War, although they are rather tendentiously captioned: the communists were not fighting for freedom but invading the previously independent south.

Also from Vietnam is a surprising and touching work: a letter from a young French missionary to his father in 1861. Under a new edict suppressing the preaching of Christianity, he is to be executed, but he writes that he is otherwise being kindly treated and that his jailers are upset about his impending fate. He begs his father not to grieve and promises they will be reunited in the next life. This letter was copied meticulously in beautiful handwriting by the father of the artist, who cannot read French and thus does not understand the words; and yet the care with which he has copied the text and made it available for us to read is in itself moving.

A conceptual work by Bruce Quek stands out, too. You enter a corridor-like space lined with what appear to be blank clocks with hands moving at different speeds. At the outset, you press a button and a machine prints out a barcode. Then as you approach the clocks you realise that the faces are blind-embossed with words: each one refers to the rate at which various disasters, deaths, crimes and so forth are occurring, in real time, in the contemporary world.

It’s worrying enough as you make your way along the wall, reading each embossed title and looking apprehensively at the rate at which the needle is creeping forward or, in the most extreme cases, racing around the face of the clock. At the end you scan your barcode and a second machine prints out a ticket listing the number of deaths and so on that have taken place during the real time of your visit: thus in the course of the almost 2½ minutes it took to inspect the row of clock faces, 12 people had died of heart attacks, 10 of stroke, one had killed himself, one had been raped and five girls had been genitally mutilated.

This is the most sobering work in the exhibition, but the most impressive is a film devoted to the career of the Malayan Communist Party leader from 1939 to 1947. Lai Teck was a complex and elusive figure, a double and triple agent who was Chinese-Vietnamese by birth and was known by as many as 50 different names. He was a British agent in a time when Malaya — which still included Singapore — was a British colony, and it was partly by informing on party colleagues and having them eliminated that he made his way to the top by the outbreak of war.

Later, when the Japanese invaded and he was arrested, he once again managed to survive by collaborating with the new regime. When liberation came and he was called to account, he escaped with the party’s funds. Apparently he was eventually murdered in Thailand.

Ho Tzu Nyen has produced a kind of meta-film by editing together fragments of several features made about Teck’s life, the antihero embodied by different actors. The subtitled voice­over is tightly scripted, evoking the multiple layers of his personality and the legends that accrued around him in which he becomes something like a magician or demon: the film is even projected in parallel rooms in Vietnamese and Mandarin. Ambiguity is rooted as deep as language: in which did the mysterious double-dealer narrate his story to himself?

Cindy Sherman

Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until October 3

The Time of Others

Gallery of Modern Art, until September 18