Collier Schorr in "Loss & Desire" - Season 2 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

I think there is this sort
of conflicting obsessions.

One is kind of twinship and
the other is opposition.

It's about people that look
the same but aren't the same.

It's about boys that look like girls

or girls that look like boys.

Or boys that look like soldiers in arms.

I'm trying to create tribes of people.

And I think that's why I was
so drawn to the wrestling.

You get there and there's this tribe,

and they do sort of look a bit similar.

They all have the same kind of bodies.

Their ears turn the same way
if they wrestle too long.

And when you have this kind
of twinship in opposition,

it becomes, I mean, it's a
kind of a metaphor for this,

you know, for the Jew and the German.

German Jews thinking that
they were the same as Germans

and being so different.

(upbeat music)

I decided to go back to high school 
and photograph high school wrestling.

I had never really seen my wrestling team

because no one ever had interest in wrestling.

And I was just really taken by the guys.

I loved the way the guys looked,

I loved that they were doing something 
that in a way made them small outcasts.

They were doing not a popular sport, 
not a sport that people watched.

A sport that, that was really difficult.

Particularly in practice it’s about partnerships.

And I just thought it was a really beautiful 
relationship that I had never seen before.

All at the same time I had heard about a guy,

a friend of mine I knew, who used 
to be a really big college wrestler.

He was sort of you know on the fringe art world

and we should get together sometime.

He’s been coaching me and kind of explaining

from the position of a wrestler what’s going on.

JON: Whenever we would go somewhere we would just

talk the whole time about wrestling.

And it was fun for me to try to, 
you know, answer her questions

because she would ask questions about 
things that were innate or something

I knew automatically from doing it for so long

but I would have to explain it and come,

you know, try to explain it to her…

she understands, you know, she catches on quickly.

For me, ya know, and I can 
only approach it as a woman,

but for me, from the outside

masculinity has sort of been depicted 
in very black and white terms.

There’s just, there never seems to be a,

a wide range of emotional definitions of men.

–Are you guys twins?

–No.

I love when I’m shooting wrestling,

particularly in practice to see 
two guys throwing some moves

and then being careful that 
they didn’t hurt each other.

You know pushing as hard as 
they can but then pulling back,

making sure that they’re okay.

Talking about how to do it better,

All that kind of stuff I think is is to me a rich,

a rich part of, of masculinity.

See, this is the classic wrestling guy.

I just love this guy—St. 
Eds—He won his match so fast.

And then the newer pictures are like this

I’m looking for introspection.

I’m looking for the moment 
before the guy goes out there.

The moment when he comes off

either exhilarated because he won or
devastated because he lost.

I like devastation.

I like exhaustion.

I, I really like seeing someone 
that I know can’t barely get up

The thing about a wrestling practice is the

coach will really get every 
last bit of energy out of you.

And there’s a peacefulness in 
that moment that I really love,

to see someone who’s just used their entire body.

As much as you explain to someone that you want to

show all sides of it,

no one who lost wants a flash on their face.

–Oh, sorry..

But having a woman approach them is different.

I think most of the people in the 
wrestling world are, are guys.

–You wonna draw a picture from these pictures?

–Ya, okay, I'll do it if 
you'll make a trade with me.

Teenagers’ sexuality belongs to themselves.

If I catch a glimpse of their sexiness,

it’s a sexiness they’re playing 
with and they’re practicing,

but it’s not something I’m asking for.

I’m aware that it’s there,

I’m aware that other people might see it,

but I’m interested in the life 
I would have had if I was a boy

and this is one facet of it.

Gender, religion, nationality, they’re all sort of
things that are in flux in my work.

Um, and they all build on each other,

this idea of you’re not 
sure what you’re looking at.

You’re not sure what you are,

you’re not sure what someone else is.

In the Helga pictures,

I set out to create a total 
portrait of a young man

using Andrew Wyeth’s Helga 
paintings as a template.

To explore how one defines someone in images.

And also using a description of 
femininity to describe a man.

You start to wonder with 
the Andrew Wyeth portraits

is it a feminine pose or is it an artists pose,

is it Wyeth’s pose,

is it Helga’s pose?

Helga reminds me so much of Jens,

this boy Jens, from Prague.

This was Jens when he was eighteen and a half.

And he was really quite similar in the physique.

And then he really changed here 
when he turned nineteen and a half.

He got slimmer.

You see the resistance of the 
boy Jens in playing Helga.

He’s playing this character,

and the only way he can pose in certain poses is

to know that everyone else knows he’s playing her,

that it’s not really him.

But you see moments where he forgets.

And they’re the poses he would call neutral poses.

And the feminine poses are the poses 
that he feels women perform for men.

It wouldn’t have been a successful project

had there not been an intense 
collaboration between Jens and I,

like both understanding we’re both doing this job,

and it was somewhat difficult and confusing,

and we had mixed feelings about it,

but it became a kind of ritual, 
like making these pictures,

and often we’d make the same 
picture over and over again.

There’s a notion of—I think—

that I’ve always had in my work of 
trying to get very close to something.

You know trying to create as 
little distance as possible between

the viewer and the subject

and I think that the level of intimacy that 
Wyeth pursued was really familar to me.

Fourteen years ago I went to Stuttgart 
with a German friend from New York,

and ended up in this small town 
and met this amazing family.

I kind of just fell in love with the whole family

in kind of traditional, kind 
of country family setting.

And I guess about four 
summers into the relationship

I started photographing the 
younger members of the family.

It really became part of, I 
think, the summer experience,

that you know summer came with picture taking.

And it was this kind of big thing that 
happened, sometimes every day for a week.

I started shooting Herbert 
when he was nine years old.

And he doesn’t even remember 
the first time he was shot,

he has to look at pictures to, 
to say, oh yeah that was me.

HERBERT: We would go to the forest and kind of play soldiers with the uniforms at that time.

And play hide and seek.

Schorr: Here’s Karin dressed up as a guy.

Everything was so fake there.

There was a girl playing a guy,

there’s all these German boys playing grown men

and there’s Germans playing American soldiers.

And all this clothing was 
yours at that point right?

Herbert: Right.
Schorr: Because that is how I started doing army

pictures because you had all this stuff.

Herbert: Because of my army nerdiness.

Schorr: Yes, your army obsession.

HERBERT: I might have possessed 
like seven or eight U.S. uniforms

when I met Collier first.

We got the U.S. military uniforms 
pretty cheap at flea markets

because troops were leaving town at 
that time, or they were leaving Germany.

Schorr: But you always had this posse of guys

that for what was I paying back in 
the old days like 10 marks an hour.

Schorr: you can’t go to a lake 
with a bunch of teenage boys

and not have a plan.

You’ve got to have a plan.

When we’re kind of marching around the lake,

I may say, okay Herbert, you 
know hold Andreas’s shoulder.

And they’ll just kind of pose 
like that, and that’s a picture.

And it’s not a picture I planned, 
but it’s a picture I saw.

When you’re a Jew and you walk around in Germany,

it has such a hold on you.

And I wanted see it from all sides.

I always saw it from the side of you 
know the Jew who felt victimized,

or the Jew who felt oppressed.

And I was very comfortable 
in that role for many years.

But being in Germany for a longer amount of time,

my experience changed, my 
relationship changed to the country;

my curiosity about what it was like from 
the other side kind of opened me up.

So much of my work, especially portraits of,

of large, blond, strong guys is really 
about confronting a sort of Aryan myth

that terrified me as a little girl,

because I would read books 
like DIARY OF ANNE FRANK

and things like that and that 
was what you were scared of.

That was the Jewish girl’s boogeyman,

you know the big blond guy 
kind of coming up the stairs.

I mean I think all the boys really enjoyed 
playing heroes or playing good guys.

It was, it was strange to 
bring in the Nazi uniforms

because they were suddenly 
confronted with something

that they didn’t feel very positive 
about or they were afraid that…

to feel positive about.

And so I think those pictures 
have an interesting quality

that separates them from the other ones

because there’s a real uncertainty in 
their expressions, in their posture.

HERBERT: The German youth has some…

kind of um a torn apart relationship 
with this kind of stuff.

You won’t see a swastika anyplace 
because it’s forbidden by law,

it’s not legal.

And so besides of running the risk that

you can be punished for wearing a 
Wehrmacht and S.S. uniforms in public,

you are simply not used to it 
because you would see this stuff,

not even in museums.

Probably you would see it in a,

in a feature film from that time,

in an American feature 
film, not even a German one.

So many things are buried 
in the landscape in Germany.

So many uniforms and medals, 
and you hear stories of people

coming upon buttons and helmets in, in the fields.

And I think that I really 
wanted to flush some of that up,

to dig some of that up,

and to almost that some of these soldiers 
seemed to have come up from the ground.

So that if you were walking in 
the field and you saw a helmet,

it was as though the soldier 
rose up with that helmet.

And he didn’t rise up as the ultimate villain

and he didn’t rise up as the ultimate victim,

he rose up as, as just a guy you 
know, who fought, just a guy who died.

Um, just a guy who killed someone.

Schorr: I like the relationship 
between this current Joa,

this current solider with these Nazis

because it really looks like to me that

he represents the whole German 
Army that sits in the woods

and maybe daydreams.

If the forest is the pride of Germany,

then you know let’s talk 
about what actually happened

in the forest rather than 
just showing the forest.

I’m not making something that’s about the façade,

I’m making something that’s 
about removing the myth,

and then being left with 
something that is more human.

There’s not a single intention that 
I want people to walk away with

when they look at the body of work.

I wanted to make work that spoke to 
as many people’s desires as possible,

be it a sort of maternal desire,

or a fraternal desire…

the desire to revisit your youth,

the desire for romance.

For me there is no progress 
unless you put things forward,

unless you sort of unveil, you know, desire,

unless you unveil uh, repression.