Freeway Balconies
Collier Schorr's Exhibition Project
at the Deutsche Guggenheim
In
"Freeway Balconies" at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Collier Schorr offers a
subjective insight into the contemporary American scene that, like
herself, works with performative means and strategies of reference. Her
work enters into dialogue with the works of newcomers as well as with
Bruce Nauman and appropriation artists such as Richard Prince. "Freeway
Balconies" shows an image of American reality that is as seductive as it
is disturbing; at the same time, it creates an associative self-portrait
of one of the most outstanding artists of the present day. Tim Ackermann
introduces the exhibition.
Ryan
Trecartin, I-Be Area (video still), 2007
©
Ryan Trecartin
Apart from the notorious Woodstock
mudbath, the year 1969 in the U.S. has remained in memory in light of two
incidents: one is the march on Washington, during which opponents of the
Vietnam War made their protest abundantly clear. And the other is a small
lane in New York called Christopher
Street, where drag queens and homosexuals defended themselves for the
first time against incessant discrimination at the hands of the police-and
did this so successfully that they virtually chased the uniformed men
away. A strong symbolical power radiates from these two political events:
1969 was the year when a young and politicized America took over the
streets. But it also heralded the struggle for a self-determined personal
identity beyond mainstream culture.
Collier
Schorr, US Soldier, 2004
Courtesy
303 Gallery, New York
The exhibition Freeway
Balconies at the Deutsche Guggenheim, curated by the New York
artist Collier
Schorr, owes its title to a line in a poem by the Beat poet Allen
Ginsberg: it feels like a road trip through American counterculture.
The balconies along the freeway that Ginsberg celebrates constitute
milestones along a journey in time back to the rebellious spirit of the
late sixties. At the Berlin exhibition hall, however, this journey takes
place on a street crossing filled with contemporary artists. The
invocation of the urban protest movements of the '60s and '70s often crops
up in connection with the question as to which possibilities political and
artistic resistance have today. Yet Freeway Balconies also leads to
a commercialized society in which radical gestures and subcultural codes
are recycled in the Internet at the speed of light and have become
subsumed as a part of the gigantic entertainment industry.
Matt
Saunders, Couples (Joe and Holly), 2004
©
Matt Saunders
In her works, Collier
Schorr not only investigates her own Jewish identity and the collective
German past, but also the possibility of slipping into other roles, of
absorbing foreign cultures. For a number of years, the Brooklyn-based
artist has been regularly photographing adolescents in a small south
German city. Her images oscillate between historical research, staged
arrangement, and performance action. Schorr dresses her teenagers with old
uniforms from the police, the Nazi Wehrmacht, and the U.S. Army and has
them pose in front of her camera. She often disrupts the motif by placing
essentially feminine accessories in the hands of the young men-a steel
helmet full of apples, for instance, or a feather boa winding around their
necks. In Freeway Balconies, Schorr's photos demonstrate the
discrepancy between the image and the image of self. Rather than
portraits, they are documents of youths in uncertain search of their own
identity.
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Adam Pendleton, Black Liberation Front,
2007
© Adam Pendleton;
courtesy
of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
and
Yvon Lambert, New York/Paris
One of the young
men in uniform, Dominik, is portrayed wearing heavy black makeup. At first
sight, the photo seems like a rehashing of the racist black minstrel show
of 19th-century America; actually, it aims at the exact opposite. Dominik
is an obsessive Hip Hop fan. The feminist philosopher Judith
Butler already demonstrated in 1990 that gender and sexuality are
constructed through a person's own ongoing performance. Logically, this
aspect of construct also extends to all other parameters of identity-hence
Dominik is black because he thinks and acts black.
Sharon
Hayes, In the Near Future, 6 November 2005
Once
a day, from 1 November to 9 November 2005,
the
artist stood on the street with a sign at nine different locations
throughout New York City.
Courtesy
the artist
People today create themselves
through their roles. Freeway Balconies is mainly dedicated to
subversive role-playing that questions sexual and social norms and cites
art history. A reference point for Schorr's black Dominik is Bruce
Nauman's film Art Make-up, in which the artist paints his face
white, pink, green, and black in succession; another are the works of
performance artist Adrian
Piper-who in her Mythic Being Series dressed as a male
Afro-American in the early '70s to act out stereotyped "black" mannerisms
of behavior in public space. Piper's goal was to hold up a mirror to New
Yorkers' everyday racism. A series of photographs shows the artist
gradually transform into the cliché of a formidable ghetto inhabitant
complete with afro, goatee, and pilot's glasses. Sharon
Hayes plays a similarly confusing game by having herself photographed
on a New York street with a sign reading "I AM A MAN". If you begin to
ponder on Hayes' performative gender, you've already fallen for the
artist's trick: for her one-woman demonstration, the artist adopted the
slogan the black sanitation workers of Memphis used during their 1968
strike.
Sara
Gilbert, Mexico City #9, 1995
Courtesy
the artist
Which brings us to the second
main theme of the exhibition: appropriation. Part of every successful
performance is always its reference to a famous role model. "I think
everybody's an appropriation, and so what we do is also an appropriation,"
says the artist Adam
Pendleton, who copies posters of the Black Liberation Front, album
covers from The Jam, and
photos of Patti Smith in black
acrylic paint. The global pop culture, which finds wider dissemination
through the media, provides the material from which fans choose the
behavior and ideas they need to perfect their personalities. It's also the
place where many artists in Freeway Balconies find their material.
Some of the works shown reflect the glamour, body cult, and youth craze of
pop culture by presenting it in a version that is just as glamorous: for
instance, Sara
Gilbert's photo series Mexico City from 1995 shows her friend Leonardo
diCaprio on a film set shortly before his final breakthrough as a
superstar. Her high-gloss pictures seem to better serve the image of the
charismatic actor than any authorized press photo could do.
At the
same time, Di Caprio's smile or Collier Schorr's photos of the teenager
band Tokyo
Hotel seem to illuminate the power potential of youth culture implicit
in the exhibition title. Because the stars are young, the world is still
open to them and they still have the chance to change it according to
their own ideas. Yet the attitude towards the rebellious sixties has
changed palpably.
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