"...The pictures I make don’t always veer that
far off from snapshots that guys who served in the army
would bring home or send home."
"Germany has such a hold when you’re a Jew and
you walk around in Germany. And I wanted to not stand in
its shoes, but to sort of see it from all sides."
"Young guys have been lined up for centuries and outfitted.
And some people fit into the uniforms and are soldiers and
some people don’t fit into the uniforms and aren’t
soldiers."
"The landscape is filled with relics and memories.
So many things are buried in the landscape in Germany. So
many uniforms and medals."
"I was simultan-eously interested in what it’s
like to censor your own history—what it’s like
to remove pictures from family albums—and what it’s
like to not know what people did in the war."
"So much of my work that has to do with war has to
do with waiting for one. It has to do with the fact that
it may never come."
"The avenues to desire are skewed. I wanted to make
work that spoke to as many people’s desire as possible..."
"...I was interested in the tradition of photographing
the landscape and finding a way to insert more tension into
it."
German Brutality and Roman
Sensuality: Pictures of Soldiers in the Landscape
ART:21:
How far off are the pictures
you make from ordinary German family photographs. Say of Herbert
and his family's photos?
SCHORR:
It depends what you know. There
are photographs not unlike the photographs I have taken in
family albums of this family. So there are pictures when the
family lived in the German part of Romania. There are pictures
of the uncle with three of his best friends when they were
in the Romanian army in the ’60s. There are pictures
of the father with his friends when he was in the Romanian
army in the ’40s and ’50s. People whose family members
served in the armed forces have pictures of army buddies hanging
out. And I think those were some of the pictures that I was
trying to remake.
ART:21:
Did you see the photographs first
and then restage them?
SCHORR:
It’s not that I had seen
the pictures and said I’m going to remake them. It’s
that the pictures I make don’t always veer that far off
from snapshots that guys who served in the army would bring
home or send home. You know, "Here’s a picture of
me in the trenches." People don’t send home the
pictures with their best friend’s head blown off or body
on fire. They send home pictures of arms draped across shoulders,
smiling for the hope that one day you’re going to be
home. And so those are the kind of pictures that I was interested
in making, and especially making them in Germany because,
for me, Germany has such a powerful military history.
Germany has such a hold when you’re a Jew and you walk
around in Germany. And I wanted to not stand in its shoes,
but to sort of see it from all sides. I always saw it from
the side of the Jew who felt victimized, or the Jew who felt
oppressed. And I was very comfortable in that role for many
years. But by being in Germany for a longer amount of time,
my experience changed and my relationship changed to the country.
And my curiosity about what it was like from the other side
opened me up.
ART:21:
The Nazi Uniform is such a powerful
symbol in your work. Could you talk a little about the various
uniforms?
SCHORR:
The use of the uniform is really
one of the reasons that my last show had three distinctly
different uniforms: current German/Bundesvar uniforms, Wehrmacht
Nazi uniforms, and Vietnam uniforms. I used three different
kinds of uniforms to illustrate how these bodies fit or don’t
fit into these clothes. Young guys have been lined up for
centuries and outfitted. And some people fit into the uniforms
and are soldiers and some people don’t fit into the uniforms
and aren’t soldiers. And some people pretend to be soldiers.
And I wanted to show that political causes change but soldiering
is really consistent and it’s really about putting young
guys in scary places and asking them to die for someone else.
Asking them to die for a cause they might not understand.
And I wanted to really talk about this history in Germany
that is so often not talked about in Germany and so obsessively
talked about by Jews.
The landscape is filled with relics and memories. 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 the fields. I really wanted to flush some of
that up, to dig some of that up. Almost as if 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 just a guy who fought,
just a guy who died. Just a guy who killed someone.
I was interested in confronting that guy rather than confronting
all the movies I had seen in Hebrew school and the books that
I had read, like "The Diary of Anne Frank." I needed
something less extreme in order to unpack my relationship
to Nazi Germany and my relationship as a Jew to the Holocaust.
To separate it so that my definition of myself wasn’t
due to a tragedy. That I wasn’t Jewish because of the
Holocaust. That I wasn’t more Jewish and that I wasn’t
a certain kind of Jewish because this thing had occurred.
It’s difficult to extricate yourself from that kind of
drama or trauma. But it’s an interesting exercise. It’s
interesting to try.
I was simultaneously interested in what it’s like to
censor your own history—what it’s like to remove
pictures from family albums—and what it’s like
to not know what people did in the war. I’m so used to
a culture where every story is retold and where anyone who’s
fought in a war is going to have war stories, except for Vietnam.
And that’s why for me, Vietnam was an interesting addition
to the scenario because—not to say in any way that
the guys who served in Vietnam were like Nazis or vice versa,
or that the Vietnamese were like Jews—but that these
were two groups of soldiers that came home to no parades.
They came home to a repression of history. They came home
to an erasure of an experience that they endured.
And so I wanted to compare those two things and to think about
how this country has changed its relationship to the Vietnam
war over time and how Germans are in a sense trying to accomplish
the same thing. They’re trying to rescue their Wehrmacht
from the SS. They’re trying to create a way in which
someone’s grandfather’s picture can be in the photo
album. It’s a difficult endeavor because it’s hard
to know who’s really guilty and who’s just a little
guilty and what you should be guilty of.
ART:21:
What did the family think when
you first started dressing the younger members in Nazi uniforms?
SCHORR:
If I had dressed them up as
Nazis the first year I arrived, I think it would have been
problematic. But I’ve dressed them up as so many other
soldiers that it was almost as though it wasn’t a surprise,
as though I was working towards this the whole time. And I
wouldn’t be able to visit with this family were their
history such that I felt like it was a betrayal of my own
history. I did investigations, and like any family, they had
one or two guys that were in the SS, but nothing that close
to this nuclear family. And they were in a German part of
Romania during the war and so at the same time Jews were fleeing
the Germans, they were fleeing the Russians and went on this
huge march to Austria to escape. So they had their own devastation
to deal with.
I think that when you take out a Nazi uniform in Germany a
couple things happen really quickly. People are scared and
somewhat excited. It’s like this kind of forbidden thing.
I remember unpacking the uniforms and the grandmother of the
family, I asked her, "Oh, does this shirt look like it’s
from that time period?" Because I wasn’t sure if
I was holding a reproduction or not. And she said, "Oh,
I haven’t seen that since the ’40s." And I
said, "Well there you go..." Clearly, these were
things that she recognized from when she was like eight years
old or nine years old.
I think they’re also very supportive of what I do. I
think they trust that what I’m doing has a point beyond
exhibitionism or shock. They see the pictures. I was struck
when Herbert's grandmother saw one of the pictures on my invitation
card of Herbert in a Nazi infantry uniform and she said, "Oh,
I want a copy of that for the living room." All she saw
was her grandson dressed up as a soldier and it reminded her
maybe of something in childhood. And I think she felt that
I had given her some kind of permission to look at that and
not turn away. And that was interesting to me. Scary, but
interesting. For me, there is no progress unless you put things
forward, unless you unveil desire, unless you unveil repression.
If you have a question, ask it. And that’s the exact
opposite of life in Germany. So when I’m in that family
I ask all the questions. People were shocked to find out that
the family knew Jews because no one asked. But I asked, "Well
how many Jews were there in your village? And what did they
do? And what happened to them during the war?" And things
like that.
ART:21:
Do you feel that you're in some
way exorcizing your own demons?
SCHORR:
I think I’m creating a
German soldier that I have control over. So much of my work
in terms of wrestling and sports, especially portraits of
large blond strong guys, is really about confronting a sort
of Aryan myth
that terrified me as a little girl. 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 coming up the stairs.
And so I had been courting that, getting closer and closer
to it, to find out if it’s really what I built it up
to be and to make it more accessible somehow. It is about
control. It’s about recreating a scenario that would
have been extremely threatening and emasculating it in a sense.
ART:21:
How did the uniform project start?
SCHORR:
The first soldier pictures I
took were of Herbert and his friends. They all collected army
stuff and they would go on camp outs and play army and raid
each other’s bunks. And I was really surprised to find
that all the army stuff was American and they were basically
dressing up as Americans in a territory that was in fact occupied
by American soldiers who were driving all over town in jeeps.
And so I asked him, "Well, how come you’re dressing
up as Americans?" And they said that that was what was
available. But also, I think more importantly, that was what
was cool or fun. It was cool gear and they were gear-oriented.
So my first pictures were really to put the guys in their
German landscape and have them play out this occupation that
I was watching from afar when I would drive by the army bases.
As much as the Americans were present in the town, they were
also very much in their barracks and there were gates. So
you couldn’t really access them. You might see them in
town, but they were really kind of doing stuff in their own
world that you would pass by. By dressing Herbert and the
guys up I was able to play out my own idea. To make it some
kind of a strange little Mount Everest that they were conquering
in the most lazily fashion.
So much of my work that has to do with war has to do with
waiting for one. It has to do with the fact that it may never
come. That you’re kind of preparing, almost leisurely,
for something that might not happen. And that preparation
is almost like organized sports. It’s almost like being
on a football team or the wrestling team. It’s drills
and practices and uniforms and camaraderie. And so I just
wanted to create for myself this presence. Not an army that
was occupying from within it’s barracks, but an army
that was really occupying the land.
ART:21:
There's an androgynous, and moreover,
ambiguous quality to those pictures of Herbert and his friends.
SCHORR:
Well I think when you shoot
thirteen or fourteen or fifteen year-olds, none of the boys
have hair yet on their faces. Everyone’s very soft and
some guys are thin. Herbert was really thin and another friend
of his was really kind of curvaceous.
Gender, religion, nationality are all in flux in my work.
They build on each other, on the idea that you’re not
sure what you’re looking at, what you are, what someone
else is. The avenues to desire are skewed. I wanted to make
work that spoke to as many people’s desire as possible—maternal desire, fraternal desire, desire for romance,
for youth...
I think also, particularly with the guy stuff, I wanted to
be in a fraternity that I never was. When I take pictures
of guys who are wrestling, or when I take pictures of guys
who are dressed up as soldiers and running around, it’s
not the feeling of when you watch basketball and you see someone
hit the basket but it’s close. It’s like you’re
running with them. You’re not maybe doing it, but you’re
running with them. You know, my heart rate goes up. It’s
like being in the center of something that’s so different
than female friendship. For me, female friendship was always
an intense thing. And boy friendship was always like the more
the merrier. You know, thirty guys packed in a basement room
listening to Black Sabbath and dancing and not knowing who
they’re even talking to. They’re just a bunch of
guys.
I think I bring a certain fantasy to masculine adolescence.
I don’t know for sure what it was like, but I’m
interested in preserving or recreating moments from it because
I think the pictures show a wider scale of emotional life
for men. And particularly, the wrestling and army stuff is
really about physical contact and danger and support. And
so 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. Pushing as
hard as they can but then pulling back, making sure that they’re
okay. Talking about it, talking about how to do it better,
giving each other advice. All that kind of stuff I think is,
to me, a rich part of masculinity that I think dissipates
when guys get older, because priorities change and you know
they pair off and they enter into a different world. But for
me, it’s just this really interesting rich place.
ART:21:
Could you talk a little about
why it was so important to have the boys occupying territory
out in the German landscape?
SCHORR:
The Beckers, Gorsky, Ruth, Struth—you
can trace that sort of description of Germany to August Sander,
who I would say was sort of the precursor of the Düsseldorf
school of photography. There are Nazis in Sander's book. I
mean his project was fascinating because it described everything
or so much of what was going on in Germany, including the
Nazis and Jews and the gypsies. And I’ve always felt
that the 1960s-80s Dusseldorf school chose sections of the
Sander project. And I think I set out set out to choose the
sections of the Sander project they didn’t really choose,
which is that I’ve taken pictures of Jews and I’ve
taken pictures of Nazis. I think that Dusseldorf approach
to the landscape was very traditional. You can go to any flea
market and you can find old photos or old drawings of the
German landscape and they all look like Sander pictures of
the landscape. Just kind of beautiful, picturesque, slightly
romantic, slightly vacant—there’s actually not a
lot going on.
The thing with the Germans is they love their land. They love
pieces of their land to be uninhabited and so they can relate
to a photograph of nothingness in land in a way that I think
Americans don’t. Maybe we have that with our pictures
of prairies, but I don't think it’s quite the same kind
of obsession. So when I look at some old German landscape
pictures, they’re beautiful but they’re nothing.
Because that’s how parts of the land are in Germany.
They don’t have anything on them but nature. And I think
that artists in the latter part of the last century were trying
to keep to that traditional, cool, detached view of the landscape.
But I was interested in the tradition of photographing the
landscape and finding a way to insert more tension into it.
So that if the tree, 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, rather
than just showing the kind of family gathering. I wanted to
bring to the surface a lot of what made it so important. What
made it so important was the violence, was the defense of
the land. Was the sort of anti-Roman sensuality. If any artist
has been influential to me, simply because of what I read
about with one of his paintings, it would be Anselm Kiefer.
Reading about the battles that took place in the forest between
the Romans and the Germans. My work has always been about
the battle between German brutality and Roman sensuality and
the fact that you can’t have cultivation without sensuality.
When the Germans left the forest they had to take on some
of the ways of Roman life. I think it was around 900 AD or
something. The conservation of land in Germany was actually
started by the Nazis as a way of protecting the monument
that is the forest.
ART:21:
So the forest is like a repository
of the German soul?
SCHORR:
Well, I think that’s where
they draw their strength. They see that they came from this
place. So many other cultures look away from their brutality
and more towards their civilization. The Germans seemed very
comfortable looking at their brutality and seeing that as
a civilization. Seeing that kind of wholesome, woodsy life—that I don't think was brutal as a sport—but
I think was brutal in terms of survival. In a sense there
is a defense against modernity. There was a defense against
sensuality and against femininity. Against poetry in a way
and in favor of athletics and self-sufficiency and a kind
of "pure living."
ART:21:
It's remarkable how much the
past, even the ancient past, is latent in your work.
SCHORR:
I started reading after I made
the work because my agent told me about this Simon Shama book
"Landscape and Memory." And I remember reading about
the Nazis' march into Italy, trying to find this codex and
trying to reclaim this history of Arcadia.
I’m not making Leni Riefenstahl’s pictures. You
know? I’m not making something that’s about the
faČade. I’m making something that’s about
removing the security. Removing the myth. And then, being
left with something that is more human and more approachable.
