Collier Schorr, Problems and Other Stories
Gallery / 4 images
Collier Schorr appears on FaceTime from her Brooklyn studio with one leg curled up on the couch and her phone propped up beside her. It’s a week out from the artist’s first solo exhibition in nearly a decade and her first ever display in Paris, opening at Modern Art gallery in the middle of the city’s fashion week. Over the last few years, the acclaimed artist admits, she lost interest in filling the white walls of galleries. Instead, she’s been working privately in her studio, experimenting with new mediums without any end goal in mind; “I’ve discovered that’s really the optimal way to make art.”
Schorr is, of course, best known as one of the most celebrated photographers working today – both in an artistic capacity and in the world of fashion, where she has brought an intimate gaze to countless magazine covers and portraits of everyone from Kristen Stewart to Iggy Pop. As for her art practice, the subjects of Schorr’s four-decade career are deep, human and unflinchingly interrogated by the artist. In global exhibitions and several seminal books, she has examined the boundaries of nationhood and masculinity, the intricacies of her desires, and the layered nature of queer cultural codes.
Her new exhibition, Problems and Other Stories, sees a marked departure from photography. Mixing video, collage, drawing, and images created over the past seven years, the show draws mainly from two bodies of work. The first is a series of drawings Schorr began during lockdown: naively rendered portraits of friends and queer artists such as Milo Cassidy, Tosh Basco, Constance Debreve and Nicole Eisenman. The second is a multi-channel video installation reimagining Chantal Akerman’s 1974 film Je Tu Il Elle as a ballet, directed and performed by Schorr after years of dance training. Both, she says, have opened her eyes to new ways of connecting away from the camera – to others in her world, and to the problems and pleasures of being an artist.
Here, Schorr speaks on becoming a dancer, using drawing to transcend gender binaries, and why we should learn to love our problems.
I loved your Pamela Anderson cover shoot for AnOther.
Collier Schorr: Thank you. When I was making that, I just had the most fulfilled feeling.
You see such a different side of her in those images.
Collier Schorr: I have this a lot where I feel like people are dying to be seen in some way. I think she had this motivation, these characters to play, and she felt I could see her as an artist. I think she sees herself as an artist, and that’s kind of hard-won for her.
Congratulations on the show in Paris. It’s your first solo exhibition in quite some time.
Collier Schorr: My last solo show was maybe ten years ago. It was a long time ago. I haven’t wanted to have a show at all.
So why now?
Collier Schorr: I stopped making plans for exhibitions, but I didn’t stop making work. Then Stuart [Shave] asked me if I wanted to do a show in Paris during Fashion Week. It made so much sense. I’ve never had a one-person show in Paris, but I have such a community there.
It’s interesting that the work wasn’t created with an exhibition in mind, and that it doesn’t focus on photography, which is what you are best known for. When did you start drawing?
Collier Schorr: I had done some drawing for a particular project called There I Was, which was about a car racer that my dad photographed who was killed in Vietnam. After that, I didn’t really draw again for a while.
Then Covid shut down all my fashion work. I started going to my studio and drawing a lot, like a job, but not a job that had any deadline. I began looking at my pictures and thinking about how to take them into another realm. In a weird way, I wanted to minus them from photography.
Minus them from photography. Why?
Collier Schorr: The funny thing is, they’re a complete couple – each drawing has a photograph in it. It starts from a photograph, but it then moves to another place. I do think I insert myself into it in this other strange way. It feels very magical for me, also because I never studied it.
Do you feel that with drawing, there’s maybe more room for your feelings about the subject to come through?
Collier Schorr: I remember talking to Nicole Eisenman about this. I had done a whole book of drawings of Nicole during Covid. When you’re a photographer, you share the work with every person who’s in the work. You can really test this with Instagram because some people are more popular than other people. If I get 1,000 likes on a picture and half that on another, is it a better picture? Or is it just a better person for people to look at?
That’s quite a sticky question.
Collier Schorr: With drawing, you sever codependence. It’s all me. It’s all my decisions, and it’s all kind of a fiction. What I think is really exciting is I get to experience the beauty and the intensity of taking a picture of someone, and then I can take that picture away and erase photography. I continue this conversation with that person, but alone.
So much of my work in the beginning was about forcing a certain kind of femininity onto men and punishing them in some way; punishing boys for what I thought was their freedom – Collier Schorr
Why are the drawings titled Androdynous Drawings?
Collier Schorr: The thing I got really excited about with the drawings was this title, Androgynous Drawings, as though a drawing could have a gender and then it could escape that gender. It’s this exciting place to drag things in, to drag bodies in, and to be free of the binary. In photography – regardless of hair, clothes or identities – we’re still trafficking in masculine and feminine. Even if it’s a masc trans man or a femme trans woman, there’s a concrete body. Drawings are essentially paper and empty space.
You just mentioned Nicole. This show also brings in other characters in your world, Constance Debreve, Tosh Basco, and Milo Cassidy. What is the thread between these people? How does the show explore your relationship to them?
Collier Schorr: Well, a lot of them are authors or artists themselves. They are people whose ideas and impulses I’m interested in. Creating a kind of community in the room felt really exciting. It’s almost like a group show.
So you’ve used your first solo show in years to stage a group show?
Collier Schorr: Even the structure is like a group show. In the last room, there’s a video of a friend named Theo Levide who used to be in a band called Telepathy. They’re a great early 2000s band. I asked them if I could film them doing a guitar solo as long as they could play it. It’s this amazing endurance performance shot in one take.
Around the same time I made that, I saw this Bruce Nauman show at PS1. There’s a great piece of him walking backwards, and I just remember thinking he has a lesbian’s ass. There’s something about the way that these jeans fit him that really hit me about the vulnerability of our behind space.
What do these videos say when placed next to one another?
Collier Schorr: It’s kind of a crazy pairing. I think so much of my work in the beginning was about forcing a certain kind of femininity onto men and punishing them in some way; punishing boys for what I thought was their freedom. Putting these two pieces together, to have this trans man playing guitar topless with this much slower, wading, durational male iconic artwork. It’s really a convergence of my interests – and my interest in collaboration and curation, and how to make a room with two things in it.
The show also includes collages and photographs from the making of your ballet adaptation of a Chantal Akerman film. Why did you make that work? Training for it must have been a big departure from your practice.
Collier Schorr: It was a huge departure. And honestly, I think it could only have happened by not imagining it as huge. I didn’t start with the impulse to make this full-scale adaptation of a Chantal Akerman film. It was more that I wanted to join a subject in the room. I want to kind of be vulnerable in the way that I’ve asked other people to be.
That particular film, which I loved, I just suddenly saw it as movement and performance. So I took dance lessons. I learnt how to deal with another body and how to fall. I started meeting with dancers that I knew or who approached me, and over five or six years, we danced every scene in the movie.
Are you still dancing?
Collier Schorr: The last time I danced was a year and a half ago and I broke my foot. I kind of thought to myself, well, at this point, I’ve danced all of the major acts in the story. The next thing would be to actually work with a dancer who would play me.
Wow, that’s very layered. It will give you a whole different perspective on the work, I’m sure.
Collier Schorr: Well, Chantal cast herself in that film because she thought a professional actress couldn’t be clumsy enough to play this character. That gives me permission. I’m surviving in the dance because I’m with very talented dancers – they get a lot of unexpected challenges because they don’t know where I’m going.
I’ve seen footage and I think you’re an amazing dancer.
Collier Schorr: I think that I’m amazing at doing the thing that I need to do, which is create a narrative in movement. I think it’s the same with drawing – it’s like I’m feeling someone with this hand-eye coordination. With photography, I’m touching someone with my eyes. In dance, I’m touching someone.
They are all ways of connecting.
Collier Schorr: Yes, and they’re always flawed. Because they’re never exact – they can’t be, especially in the dance. A friend who’s a dramatist said to me that when she looks at my dances, it’s clear that there’s no front. There’s no audience. It’s simply an interaction between two people that a camera is capturing.
I love the idea that this show is like a world. You go into that gallery, and suddenly you’re in somebody else’s identification – Collier Schorr
Can I ask about the show’s title, Problems and Other Stories? I know it’s from a John Updike collection of short stories.
Collier Schorr: I have the book in my studio. One day, I took the cover off, and on my desk was also this Kristen Stewart zine I had made. I put them on top of each other. Then I put that on top of the drawing. I just hung it in my studio for a year, this object. When I was thinking about doing this show, I kept on looking at that piece in the studio and thinking, ’Oh my God, it’s all about problems. Everything in this room is a problem.’
What are the problems?
Collier Schorr: Some of them start as a problem, and others are a problem for other people. Be it representation, be it permission, be it, ‘where does my authorship reside?’ The thing is, you have to love your problems.
I remember the critic Jerry Saltz coming to my studio in maybe the late 80s, early 90s, and looking at something I was doing and saying, ‘The thing is, you have no skills. The fact that you didn’t study art and you don’t really know what you’re doing means that something else will come out.’ That’s been true. There’s a point at which you allow yourself to make a mark, and that it’s legitimate as anything else.
I really loved the idea that problems is one of the stories, and then there are other stories, right? Then, three weeks ago, I actually read the [John Updike] story, and it’s so fucking misogynistic and absurd.
Oh no! How did that make you feel about the title? You kept it.
Collier Schorr: Well, my work has a lot to do with desire, and probably is informed by an inherited misogyny. I’ve had to learn to look at women, and learn to unlook at women over, and over, and over again. In my life, in my work, and, you know, in the ballet, there’s just a lot of intimacy. The whole film is about desire. The whole ballet is about desire. Bringing people into that, I think, is a celebration, and it’s also problematic.
What do you hope visitors experience when they are in the rooms?
Collier Schorr: I love the idea that this show is like a world. You go into that gallery, and suddenly you’re in somebody else’s identification. Maybe there’s a sense that I’m in the room, and I’ve looked at all these people, and like spent time thinking. What I hope is that you’re looking at somebody looking.
