"I wanted that confrontation with a viewer"
Collier
Schorr on Freeway Balconies, her show at the Deutsche Guggenheim
New
York based artist Collier
Schorr is primarily known for her photographs, in which she portrays
German youth in U.S. Army, Bundeswehr, or even Third Reich uniforms.
Although people may initially find such works shocking, they are actually
sensitive studies of the emotional worlds of adolescents. Christopher
Bedford recently talked to Schorr about her role as curator for the
exhibition Freeway Balconies at the Deutsche
Guggenheim. Christopher Bedford is art historian and curator at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Schorr’s photographs of high school wrestlers will appear in Bedford’s
upcoming LACMA exhibition Hard Targets - Masculinity and American Sports
in October 2008.
Collier
Schorr, New York 2008
Photo: Joe
Tomcho
Christopher
Bedford: Given the commitment to
appropriation, masquerade, and performance that cuts across your
photographic practice, and the fact that you drew on similar ideas to
select and organize the work you included in Freeway Balconies, I
begin our conversation by recasting a statement by Matt
Saunders, quoted in the catalogue, as a provocation directed back at
you. Saunders notes: "Across the aisle, fandom strikes me as too
fleet-footed, consuming the actor as a public figure, instead I am
thinking of an intense interaction with the document, the way the
performance itself becomes an actor in my life." This statement strikes me
as an elegant summation of your objectives in images like Night Porter
(Matthias) (2001), or An image and a likeness (2003), where you
make the subject available to the viewer’s imagination. Does a similar
idea inform your practice as a curator, too?
Collier
Schorr, Night Porter (Matthias), 2001
Courtesy
303 Gallery, New York
Collier Schorr:
When I made the portrait of Matti as the Night Porter, it was a
conglomeration of identities. Charlotte
Rampling was as much a presence as her character (the Jewish camp
survivor), as well as the Dirk
Bogarde character and who he was in various films I had seen. The
power that Rampling has as a sexual being and the way she is ravished by
the audience as she is tortured, the way we are brought in and engaged by
this performance, is a thread I pull and then sew up with Matti. I
remember reading something a long time ago about who one identifies with
in a film, the male or female protagonist. I think I identify with the act
more than the actor. Maybe that is what Matt is getting at, though I bet
he has a higher resistance to traditional cinematic narrative structures
than I do. I certainly don’t have a sense of myself as a curator, but I do
have a good sense of who I’d like to share a stage with. In putting
together Freeway Balconies I felt more like a director than a
curator — Robert
Altman comes to mind, if that isn’t too ’70s-centric.
Collier
Schorr,
Another Jarhead (Peter
Sarsgaard), 2006
Courtesy 303
Gallery, New York
A lot of your work
relies on external referents for its critical currency and you trust that
the viewer is able to conjure a range of associations to animate and
enhance the work. Regarding Freeway Balconies, much
the same thing can be said about your work as a curator. But how do you
feel about the alternative model, namely the rise of what might be called
"new formalism" in photography, wherein artists have again begun to bear
down on the medium of photography itself, eschewing external referents and
conventional indexicality?
I’m more interested in the ways
photography has been used (i.e. documentary, pornography, reportage,
portraiture), than I am in photography as medium. When I look at painting
that is about paint, I get bored, regardless of any initial seduction.
Photography is at its most viable when it bleeds in content rather than
just plays with itself as a form based on light hitting emulsion. Perhaps
this is because I think the medium itself is just too limited. I also find
scale an overused trope used to wow the viewer. I’m aware that I may err
at times on the side of subtlety, but there is no place to hide in such a
smooth surface. I am thinking about Karen
Kilimnik’s paintings that offer textures and shapes derived from
previous attempts to make a painting. Perhaps, the "hidden meanings" can
function as under painting, something one can sense but no longer read.
Collier
Schorr, Joachim (Resister), 2001
Courtesy
303 Gallery, New York
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The idea of a body of work that only fully reveals itself
after some time is different than an index, which is an organization of
concrete thoughts. The exciting thing for me about this show was being
able to expound upon my ideas through juxtapositions. When I first started
to make art, I used text to make my intentions clear. Later, I hid text
within sculptures, dissatisfied with the didactic nature of image-and-text
works. But, then again, the clarity found in Sharon
Hayes’s I
AM A MAN piece (part of the In the Near Future
performances, 2005) is just earth-shattering to me. It is so open and out
in its agenda, I felt myself gravitating toward it, and then came the idea
that an Adrian Piper
next to a Richard
Prince could re-activate a kind a trauma in Prince’s early
identity-probing works. I can’t fathom a situation in which the use of
"untitled" as a title would be advantageous. If I could, I would probably
put a bumper sticker on a frame, just to be sure people knew I was for or
against something. The only reason I ever started making artworks was
because I wanted a confrontation with a viewer. The thrill of curating is
getting to have it with other artworks as well.
Collier
Schorr, A.F.R. (Jane Fonda), 2007
Courtesy
303 Gallery, New York
The word that
occurs throughout your discussion of your photographic practice is
archaeology. When I say archaeology, I am invoking the term to describe
both a principle of conception (really digging into an image and/or idea)
and the conditions of reception (the mandate to perform research, or dig,
after having viewed an image). Does this idea resonate for you?
I
really like the idea of borrowing terminology or precepts from other
fields. In part I would say this comes from an ’80s education
over-determined by deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory. What has
remained is the intensity of a viewer’s desire to puncture the surface of
a work, to demand of it an explanation or to suppose that the artist wants
to be “read” or deciphered. For the longest time I liked to relate to work
through the study of comparative literature, meaning, in the most
simplistic terms, that I was taking two texts, two languages, and
intertwining them. Within that field, I was excited by possibilities of
mistranslations, dual meanings, and of trying to make one culture speak
through another, be it a photograph speaking about a painting (like the project
I did with Andrew Wyeth’s Helga
pictures) or an American voice to a German body.
Collier
Schorr,
She Loves You, She Loves
Everybody (Brooke Shields), 2006
Courtesy
303 Gallery, New York
Skimming Mikhail
Bakhtin, I referenced the idea of a secondary text, or a "discovered"
text that might further define a character.But going back to your
question, at some point in my study in Schwäbisch Gmünd, I grew less
interested in carrying on a kind literary/biographical study, and more
engaged by the idea of a meta-physical relationship with the landscape.
The idea of being an archaeologist makes a lot of sense in a place that
has so much buried, and it certainly is evoked in one of my favorite books
— Simon Schama’s
Landscape
and Memory (1996). This of course also leads back to
psychoanalysis, where one is constantly digging, not necessarily for the
truth, but for an understanding of one’s desire.
Although
you have moved in different directions since, I first got to know you and
your work through your photographs of high school wrestlers (1998–2005),
which remain very important to me. Many of these photographs evoke a
subjectivity "not yet" understood, which I think is a very powerful
gesture when achieved in relation to a subjectivity conventionally
understood as lacking depth and complexity, understood as already known.
In closing, can you talk a little more intimately about how you achieved
that effect in these images and, perhaps, in subsequent bodies of work?
Collier
Schorr bei einer Fotosession im Mai 2008
Photo:
Joe Tomcho
I don't think I even
understood those pictures when I first met the subjects. These were not
the kind of boys I knew when I was in high school. In a way they were just
as foreign as Germans. When I was in college I hung out a bit at CBGB
on the Bowery in New York and I remember loving mosh-pit
dancing — those bacchanalian, violent kind of movements. The wrestlers
were all shot in a big practice room. Perhaps 50 kids were present at any
given time. I would bob and weave between some 22 pairs of wrestlers,
always within inches of being knocked over. Moving around in that 100ºF
room, I could almost feel like I was mirroring their activity, so the very
act of photographing felt like dancing or fighting. In that body of work I
was trying to position the viewer within the situation rather than outside
it. But when I edited the work, I was also trying to remove the subjects
from the reality of wrestling and place them in the realm of religious
painting, because I saw that in order to survive such intense physical
training, they had to undergo some kind of transcendence that would appear
to be almost visionary. The performers in that project were wrestlers but
they were aware of the camera’s ability to further activate the heightened
sense of reality in the room and the abstract ways in which they
experienced space and motion. I titled one of those pictures Lives of
Performers, after an Yvonne
Rainer piece. In it a kid named Romano is doing a stretch called a
bridge, but the photograph for me is about a kind of ecstasy experienced
by someone who is experiencing any kind of transformation. Rainer speaks
eloquently about the way in which the spectacle of the dancer’s body was
something she wanted to demystify. I think being mystified is something I
would rather probe than banish. But I am drawn to the desire to humanize
the performer and to erase the great divide between the stage and the
audience.
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