February 22nd, 2010 Mark Brown
Curator says first major exhibition devoted to British artist since 1988 will show that there is more to him than his female figures
Henry Moore, Britain's best known and most important sculptor, is often seen as a buttoned-up Yorkshireman whose work is as easygoing and safe as it gets. But a new exhibition opening tomorrow reveals his demons: this is a man much darker, edgier and more complex than we realise, say curators.
Tate Britain tomorrow opens the most important exhibition of Moore works for a generation. It hopes to surprise those who think they know Moore – and he is mostly known for his enormous postwar outdoor sculptures – as well as introducing him to a whole new audience.
More than 150 works, including stone sculptures, wood carvings, bronzes and drawings, have been gathered for what is also one of Tate Britain's longest exhibitions in recent memory – it will run for almost six months. A spokeswoman said it was "an experiment" and the hope was the show would attract more overseas visitors during the summer.
Chris Stephens, the show's co-curator, called it reassessment, or "a revisiting". He said the exhibition was setting out to show there is much more to the artist than his easily recognisable gently rounded female figures and abstract forms. Familiarity with the artist had almost bred contempt, he said. "We think we know Henry Moore because he is still so visible and recognisable and also still so popular."
Instead Moore was producing art that was informed by the trauma and horrors of the first world war. And when it came to sex, he was sculpting pieces that were wholly sexually driven and erotically charged. "The sort of things we accept without question about Francis Bacon or Picasso but they also run through Henry Moore's work as well."
Stephens believes Moore's first world war experiences – three quarters of his battalion died and was gassed at the battle of Cambrai – had a profound effect on his art. It brought a darkness and psychological complexity to his work.
Moore, son of a Yorkshire coal mining engineer, was always reluctant to talk specifically about what informed his art, he was from a class and generation who just did not go on about their emotions or their feelings.
After the war Moore became a superstar artist, creating huge works in places like Harlow and Stevenage that were emblematic of the new welfare state, of the reconstruction of Britain.
24 years after his death, he remains popular but not as regarded as some believe he should be. "The conundrum is that he is still incredibly popular, incredibly familiar," said Stephens, "and yet he somehow lacks a critical respect. We wanted to return to what was it about Moore that made him the most important sculptor of the modern age."
Moore may be one of Britain's greatest artists yet the last big show devoted to his work was a memorial show at the Royal Academy in 1988, two years after his death.
For exhibitions at the Tate – an institution Moore is bound up with and to which he donated a large amount of work – you have to go back to a drawings retrospective in 1977, his 70th birthday retrospective in 1968 and before that the 1951 Festival of Britain retrospective.
"It is a generation since his last major show yes and often it takes a generation," said Stephens. "You need a lapse in time sometimes, it allows you to bring new ideas and ways of looking at art."
Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation, said: "It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most important Henry Moore exhibition in the 33-year life of the foundation. It is true that we've done exhibitions in the last three decades all over the world, in China, Brazil, the United States but this is unquestionably the most important show in the last 30 years. It is not a retrospective and it's all the more exciting and intelligent for that."
The exhibition also asserts that Moore, as Official War Artist during the second world war, produced drawings – known as the Shelter Drawings – that he claimed were made from his own observance when, in fact, they were copied from photographs in Picture Post.
While this makes it seem that Moore was a dissembler, according to Stephens the revelations enhance Moore's reputation even more. He might not have wanted it known but by reproducing the photographs he was using mechanical reproduction techniques that artists such as Bacon and Richard Hamilton used.
• Henry Moore, Tate Britain 24 February – 8 August
Posted in Art, Culture, Exhibitions, Henry Moore, News, Tate Britain, UK news, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 22nd, 2010 Mark Brown
Curator says first major exhibition devoted to British artist since 1988 will show that there is more to him than his female figures
Henry Moore, Britain's best known and most important sculptor, is often seen as a buttoned-up Yorkshireman whose work is as easygoing and safe as it gets. But a new exhibition opening tomorrow reveals his demons: this is a man much darker, edgier and more complex than we realise, say curators.
Tate Britain tomorrow opens the most important exhibition of Moore works for a generation. It hopes to surprise those who think they know Moore – and he is mostly known for his enormous postwar outdoor sculptures – as well as introducing him to a whole new audience.
More than 150 works, including stone sculptures, wood carvings, bronzes and drawings, have been gathered for what is also one of Tate Britain's longest exhibitions in recent memory – it will run for almost six months. A spokeswoman said it was "an experiment" and the hope was the show would attract more overseas visitors during the summer.
Chris Stephens, the show's co-curator, called it reassessment, or "a revisiting". He said the exhibition was setting out to show there is much more to the artist than his easily recognisable gently rounded female figures and abstract forms. Familiarity with the artist had almost bred contempt, he said. "We think we know Henry Moore because he is still so visible and recognisable and also still so popular."
Instead Moore was producing art that was informed by the trauma and horrors of the first world war. And when it came to sex, he was sculpting pieces that were wholly sexually driven and erotically charged. "The sort of things we accept without question about Francis Bacon or Picasso but they also run through Henry Moore's work as well."
Stephens believes Moore's first world war experiences – three quarters of his battalion died and was gassed at the battle of Cambrai – had a profound effect on his art. It brought a darkness and psychological complexity to his work.
Moore, son of a Yorkshire coal mining engineer, was always reluctant to talk specifically about what informed his art, he was from a class and generation who just did not go on about their emotions or their feelings.
After the war Moore became a superstar artist, creating huge works in places like Harlow and Stevenage that were emblematic of the new welfare state, of the reconstruction of Britain.
24 years after his death, he remains popular but not as regarded as some believe he should be. "The conundrum is that he is still incredibly popular, incredibly familiar," said Stephens, "and yet he somehow lacks a critical respect. We wanted to return to what was it about Moore that made him the most important sculptor of the modern age."
Moore may be one of Britain's greatest artists yet the last big show devoted to his work was a memorial show at the Royal Academy in 1988, two years after his death.
For exhibitions at the Tate – an institution Moore is bound up with and to which he donated a large amount of work – you have to go back to a drawings retrospective in 1977, his 70th birthday retrospective in 1968 and before that the 1951 Festival of Britain retrospective.
"It is a generation since his last major show yes and often it takes a generation," said Stephens. "You need a lapse in time sometimes, it allows you to bring new ideas and ways of looking at art."
Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation, said: "It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most important Henry Moore exhibition in the 33-year life of the foundation. It is true that we've done exhibitions in the last three decades all over the world, in China, Brazil, the United States but this is unquestionably the most important show in the last 30 years. It is not a retrospective and it's all the more exciting and intelligent for that."
The exhibition also asserts that Moore, as Official War Artist during the second world war, produced drawings – known as the Shelter Drawings – that he claimed were made from his own observance when, in fact, they were copied from photographs in Picture Post.
While this makes it seem that Moore was a dissembler, according to Stephens the revelations enhance Moore's reputation even more. He might not have wanted it known but by reproducing the photographs he was using mechanical reproduction techniques that artists such as Bacon and Richard Hamilton used.
• Henry Moore, Tate Britain 24 February – 8 August
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February 19th, 2010 Andrew Dickson
As quick as a gesture, as long as an eternity? While a play can go on for hours, some of the most memorable theatre happens in the blink of an eye
Forget that piece of string. How long is a piece of theatre? An act? A scene? A soliloquy? Aristotle reckoned you had to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Peter Brook, with the kind of chutzpah it's still possible to admire 40 years on, suggested it might be as straightforward as asking a man to cross an empty space while someone else watches. (Something, it has to be said, that sounds significantly more dramatic than his latest play, but that's another story.)
I wonder. I was wondering on Saturday night when I was at a theatre event in a converted warehouse just behind the Arcola theatre in east London. It was rather seductively entitled Live Art Speed Date, but in the end – phew – there was rather more in the way of live art than speed dating, for all that it had a Valentine's theme. Though the whole shebang was pleasingly anarchic – one of the first things you saw when you walked in was people gyrating to the DJ in orang-utan costumes – the timetable was strict. You got yourself issued with a number and a map, acquired an envelope telling you your timetable, and marched between mysterious appointments with artists sitting at tables, behind desks and in private booths. Over the course of three hours I clocked up a bewildering array of assignations: a private duet with a xylophone-wielding Elvis fan; a waltz with a dancer and her tame Italian violinist; a text conversation with a couple auditioning their new flatmate; a personal performance of a piece bravely scored for bass guitar, trumpet and homemade theremin.
This wasn't an event, such as Ontroerend Goed's Internal, meant to make you ponder deeply on the pleasures and perils of encountering a stranger one-on-one – no obvious setup; no anxious, faintly illicit collision between hope and desire. Instead, these were more like games: literally so in the case of the football obsessive (wearing her boyfriend's strip, apparently) who tried to persuade me into a game of adapted keepie-uppie. Some of the shows worked better than others. The one constant was time: an announcer gave us a countdown to start, a klaxon-blast to finish. Four minutes each. The time it takes to boil a kettle, or toast a couple of slices of bread.
I confess to being a great believer in theatre happening fast: for all that Tynan wrote somewhere that all great art contains an element of boredom (annoyingly, I can't find it today – anyone?), surely there's no quicker way to lose an audience than making them conscious of things they'd rather be doing. A play may take hours, but theatre surely happens in moments as tiny as a glance, a word or a gesture. Something as small as an embrace; something as big as a murder. If they're done well, those moments make long hours spent at the theatre worthwhile. So I guess I went in looking for the self-enclosed miniature, the beautiful four-minute riddle, the haiku-like piece with all the concision of a Raymond Carver short story or a finely tuned pop song.
In fact, in this feast of fragments, the pieces that lingered – well, wanted to. One was a conversation with an artist cheerfully offering herself as a temporary muse. She steadfastly refused to perform until I'd revealed something I hadn't told anyone else – which, to my surprise, I did. It opened into a discussion far larger than four minutes would allow, as good a demonstration as any of theatre's curious ability to open up truths that otherwise remain untouched. But the one that has really stuck was performed by artist Tiffany Charrington, who offered a speeded-up version of an art project called I Shall See Your Houses, which (at least in its abbreviated form) featured recordings of people talking, simply but movingly, about home. It was an attempt to live out what a French thinker I'd long forgotten about, Gaston Bachelard, called the poetics of space. As the voices unspooled over headphones, Charrington placed a series of tiny model houses on the table between us: a small ritual, delicate and somehow rather beautiful. But the best bit concerns the envelope she presented as I left, which it's now up to me to fill in with my own thoughts on home, so that the chain of recorded memories can continue – who knows, for ever. Best of all: I can take my time.
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February 19th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
A look at the life of Henry Moore, whose curvacous, modernist sculptures created a new British bronze age
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February 19th, 2010 Maev Kennedy
From office blocks to shopping streets, Moore's sculptures are part of the fabric of Britain – so much so that we no longer notice. A new Tate retrospective wants to make us look again
As a new Tate retrospective prepares to open, it can be difficult to judge the reputation of Henry Moore, in his own lifetime one of the most famous and wealthy artists in the world. It's not that Moore has vanished from the public stage in the years since his death in 1986 – far from it, in fact. Moore's problem is that he has become so ubiquitous as to become near-invisible.
Stand on London's Bond Street, just beneath a massive work by Moore – the four-panel Portland stone Time-Life Screen, installed in 1953 as part of the building of the same name – and you guess that of the thousands of people who pass by every day, barely one looks up, still less admires. The nice American couple I found waiting to have their photograph taken on a park bench between a bronze Churchill and bronze Roosevelt looked startled at being asked what they thought of the Henry Moore. "But that's not by him, is it?" the man said in surprise. "Isn't Moore the guy who punches holes through everything?" If only they'd looked up. Like so much of Moore's work, the Time-Life Screen has become so familiar as to disappear into the background texture of 20th-century British urban life.
It's the same story just down the road in Millbank, where smokers shelter behind the gigantic bronze Locking Piece, and use it as a windbreak. Half a mile away there's another thumping great bronze, the two-section 1962 Knife Edge, opposite the House of Lords – a site chosen by Moore for its high visibility. Half a mile again, and you find Moore's very first public commission, made when he was a teacher at the Royal College of Art, the singularly un-airy West Wind high on the facade of the London Underground block over St James's Park tube station. Take a train to Stevenage and you can locate his first family group – one of many made after the death of his mother and the birth of his only child, Mary, named after her – outside a school, and another that used to be out in the precinct but now takes refuge in the civic centre in Harlow.
An elegant interactive website maintained by the Henry Moore Foundation lists scores more works on public display across 30 sites in Britain alone, from the 1944 Family Group in Aberdeen Art Gallery to the memorial to his friend Christopher Martin in the grounds of Dartington Hall, and even more all over the world, in stone, plaster, bronze, wood, on paper, in tapestries – around 800 works in all.
As the Turner prize-winning artist Simon Starling writes in the catalogue to the new Tate show: "From the beginning, Henry Moore seemed omnipresent – a state-endorsed, global player, the first of his kind perhaps. His huge bronzes seemed to drop from the sky in great meteor showers and felt to my young mind rather clumsy and anachronistic, even provincial." Starling, who won the Turner in 2005 for pieces including Shedboatshed – the shed he dismantled, built into a boat, paddled down the Rhine to a museum and reconstructed as a shed – has also made work directly responding to Moore's, and not necessarily with an admiring eye.
In 2006–07, Starling created a work called Infestation Piece for the Toronto Art Gallery of Ontario, a museum and a city with a complex relationship with Moore. In the late 1950s, a go-getting mayor, Philip Givens, commissioned a major Moore sculpture, The Archer, for its new City Hall. Starling's Infestation Piece is a Moore replica, lowered into the lake until it became encrusted with an invasive species of mussels: a hint that the sculpture itself is a form of alien in the landscape.
The Toronto Art Gallery is the Tate's partner in organising this exhibition. Both museums have world-class collections that were acquired in Moore's lifetime, but Toronto's is much the larger – and the story of how that happened is a fascinating insight into attitudes to Moore in his lifetime. Moore donated major sculptures, drawings, maquettes and other works to the Tate, of which he was a trustee. In the late 1960s, there was discussion of creating a special Henry Moore wing at Tate Britain, which would certainly have attracted many more donations – but the project was seen by some artists as memorialising Moore himself, and attracted bitter criticism. One of the show's curators, Chris Stephens, has written of the episode in an article for the Tate magazine, and of what he terms the "final insult" when in 1968, the year of Moore's 70th birthday, a letter appeared in the Times condemning the proposed wing. It was signed by 41 artists, including his former studio assistants Anthony Caro and Phillip King; not much of a birthday present. Moore donated more than 900 pieces – including some of the works he must have intended for the Tate – to Toronto in 1974, before eventually making another donation to the Tate with no strings attached.
In much the way that his public art now seems commonplace, it is easy to see Moore as invincibly nice and decent: the seventh of eight children of a Yorkshire mining engineer, a scholarship boy who never forgot his working-class roots, whose work speaks of home and family, peace and plenty, a man with socialist sympathies and a pacifist heart. When their London home was damaged in the blitz, the Moores moved to a modest two-storey rented farmhouse, Hoglands, at Perry Green in Hertfordshire – still a surprisingly remote and rural corner of the home counties. They eventually bought the house and the surrounding fields. Moore added workshops no grander than his neighbours' farm sheds, and extended the house slightly, but it has none of the grandeur you might expect of an artist who became a millionaire many times over while he lived there. Indeed, the Henry Moore Foundation, which now maintains the estate as a museum, archive and outdoor sculpture park, was established not just to ensure his legacy but to mop up some of the millions he would otherwise have spent in tax.
Visitors to Perry Green can tour the house, the handsome antique-filled dining room, the bright drawing room with Scandinavian-design modern furniture where grander visitors were received – and the claustrophobic sitting room where the Moores actually spent most of their leisure time, a space filled with rickety furniture that you wouldn't be surprised to see in a charity shop. The house reflects the popular image of the artist as "an easygoing, avuncular figure who produced an equally easygoing form of modern sculpture", as Stephens says – an image which the exhibition will attempt to destroy. There is, the curators aim to show, a lot more to Moore than monumental decency, despite his undergoing the national beatification which befell John Betjeman and has almost smothered Alan Bennett.
The exhibition will bring together more than 150 works, from the early white marble Dog carved in 1922, to a Reclining Figure in seductively polished elm, completed in 1978 when Moore was 80. There will be works in stone, bronze and plaster; working drawings and finished works on paper – including the famous blitz sleepers in London's Underground – and his cramped and contorted miners, who are given an archaic grandeur by the artist. Stephens sees anger, darkness and violence in many of these works – born, he believes, from the first-world-war experience that marked Moore for life: the artist was gassed at Cambrai and was among just 52 survivors from a 400-strong battalion. There is a sinister edge to many pieces, he argues, and a raw sexuality in all those holes and protruberances.
The elm reclining figures are exceptional. Moore himself never saw them together: the first was begun in 1935, and in his lifetime they were scattered across different collections. The surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who bought the 1939 version of the sculptures, wrote: "I felt that I was in the presence of the mother earth goddess." The critic David Sylvester was one of many who saw something almost menacing in its form – "the sacrificed and resurrected god of a fertility rite". Such views are a timely reminder that the artist was once seen as so threateningly modern that Roland Penrose's neighbours reacted in outrage when he put a Moore Mother and Child in his Hampstead front garden. And when an Essex new town commissioned a work entitled Harlow Family Group, it provoked a public demonstration by people fearful that the sculpture was an obscene jeer at Harlow's "pram town" nickname.
"In contrast to the dominant idea of Moore, we propose that he presented the body as abject, erotic, vulnerable, violated and visceral," Stephens writes. "They are part of a wider challenge to reason, of the redefinition of the human body as discontinuous, fluid and driven by deep unconscious forces, and of a world characterised by apprehension and anxiety, the uncanny and the absurd. Moore's is a troubled and troubling art that digs into the very essence of modern experience." That would be news to the tourists in Bond Street and the Millbank smokers – but maybe it is indeed time they looked again.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, Henry Moore, Heritage, Sculpture, Tate Britain, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Ackermann's exhibition at White Cube references century-old techniques but feels thrillingly contemporary
Recently I moaned about the abuse of the term "modern art" to describe the art of today. The joy of working as a critic is that every theoretical notion you may have is going to be contradicted by empirical reality. And lo and behold, I walked into an exhibition yesterday afternoon that proves art is still able to rise in an ambitious and intelligent way to the challenges posed by modern life.
Franz Ackermann (born 1963) lives and works in Berlin. His current exhibition at White Cube, Mason's Yard in London is a whirligig of ideas and impressions. If cinema director Michael Haneke tries to trace the connections of a globalised world in fractured narratives, Ackermann captures the fissions and fusions of our unmoored age through an art of kaleidoscopic energy.
At first glance, his paintings and the playground-like installations in which they are displayed are so bright and hard you begin to dismiss them as just another pop contrivance. But stay a moment. The gallery upstairs is given over to a spectacular, fizzingly theatrical installation where your mind finds it hard to settle on anything: to register the subtlety behind it you need to go downstairs where his paintings are more conventionally displayed and there's enough quiet to assimilate their complexity.
Pulses of colour that resemble computer graphics are interrupted by drawn perspectives; broken images of buildings and city squares judder across storms of energetic random marks. The aesthetic is new and yet it has a history: it responds to the confusions and liberations of contemporary urban life with techniques of fragmentation, explosion and juxtaposition that go back a century, to cubism.
Go back upstairs after taking in his paintings and you can properly appreciate the power and excitement of his installation called Wait. Its hybridisation of painting, sculpture and kinetic art amounts to a street-cultural grotto containing the possibility and menace of modern life: the modern life that we are living, now.
Ackermann's dynamism and colour capture something about the contemporary. Is the exhilaration he depicts that of a new democracy or an impenetrable chaos? It's a great place to visit, Franz Ackermann's 21st century. But would we want to live there?
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February 19th, 2010 Nosheen Iqbal
Animal Collective's forthcoming installation at the Guggenheim comes from a proud tradition of pop mash-ups with the art world
It's better than copying Jackson Pollock and more ambitious than pretending to be full-time robots. The only surprising thing about Animal Collective taking over New York's Guggenheim museum is that nobody thought of it sooner. But the Brooklyn experimental pop crew are collaborating with video artist Danny Perez on a site-specific installation for the museum's 50th anniversary.
The idea is to "transform the rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment". From the sounds of it, the piece – Transverse Temporal Gyrus – could beef up the band's future live shows considerably. Ticket-holders are promised video projections and visual abstractions; I'd count on at least a couple of ethereal black-and-white film shorts and Cy Twombly-ish swiggles projected on the walls. The band won't be performing in the space, but the three-hour show will include recorded music composed for the event.
The Guggenheim's curators have pulled off a neat trick. Of all the Brooklyn-based bands experimenting with art rock, this lot are the best choice to fill the space. Just imagine their bass bouncing through Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic space, their blissed-out rave-pop sliding down the spiral walls.
Animal Collective are not the first to try the art-pop mash-up, though. Plenty of bands have played live shows in galleries or museums. Blur's comeback started with a gig at the railway museum in Colchester. Pet Shop Boys have also played in several modern art institutions. And seeing the Strokes perform among 50ft dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum in 2006 is probably one of the most surreal gigs I've been to.
However, artistic intervention in a public institution, mixing musicianship with modern art, is a little less common. There's the Velvet Underground getting it on with Andy Warhol, and Kevin Shields curating and soundtracking an exhibition of Patti Smith's polaroids. Similarly, Massive Attack's 3D and UnitedVisualArtists worked on Volume at the V&A, another site-specific piece. The former built the sounds, synchronised to fit a luminous installation of columns in the foyer of the building in 2005. The audio-visual sculpture could only be triggered by visitors moving inside and around the piece, like a Dan Flavin show crossed with Kraftwerk.
Last year, David Byrne of Talking Heads brought his museum piece, Playing the Building, to London's Roundhouse. Originally staged in Stockholm's Färgfabriken gallery, Byrne's interactive installation was a sublime bit of mechanical doodling. Visitors were invited to the show to play an organ connected by trailing tubes and wiring to the walls, girders and beams of the building. Bizarre, but properly seductive. As I'm sure Animal Collective will be.
Posted in Animal Collective, Art, Blogposts, Culture, Electronic music, Indie, Museums, Music, Pet Shop Boys, Pop and rock, The Strokes, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Sean Michaels
For one night only, the feral indie crew are to transform the esteemed art institution into a 'kinetic, psychedelic' jungle
Animal Collective are to take over New York's Solomon R Guggenheim museum, transforming the art gallery into a "kinetic, psychedelic" installation. The Brooklyn trance-pop gang will collaborate with artist Danny Perez for a one-night-only exhibition, Transverse Temporal Gyrus.
The 4 March event is part of the Guggenheim's 50th anniversary celebrations. After gigs by Yeasayer and Paul Banks last autumn, and one whole day with free museum admission, the gallery will now see its rotunda turned over to the architects of Merriweather Post Pavilion. Their creative partner, film-maker Danny Perez, worked on the band's videos for Who Could Win a Rabbit and Summertime Clothes, and directed their new art-film, ODDSAC.
"One of the things that you notice almost immediately in the jungle are the birds," Animal Collective wrote about the installation. "What are they saying? Does each variation serve a purpose? Why are there repetitions? Is there a pattern or is that just your imagination?" Over the course of Transverse Temporal Gyrus – and across space and time! – the group aim to provoke similar questions. To this end they will use video projections, costumes, props and original recorded music.
"As New Yorkers we are all familiar with the everyday noise around us – the car alarms, the subway trains braking, the music in bars ... Do we not realise how these sounds are affecting us? How they make us feel or act? With this in mind we wanted to create an environment where people could take some time to listen to other kinds of sounds and get away from those familiar sounds of the city. Keeping in mind the birds of the jungle, we've created an array of sounds with Animal Collective's music that is seemingly random – or is it?"
Visitors to the exhibition will be free to explore the group's "mysterious hideaway", wandering over the museum's ramps and across its open spaces. All this, Animal Collective promise, will help to "to unite [our sounds] with the inside of your brain". We just hope it doesn't hurt.
Tickets to the exhibition go on sale this morning at 10am EST.
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February 17th, 2010 Skye Sherwin
Behind Schorr's seductive photographs of beguiling, budding manhood lie politically pointed themes
Collier Schorr's photography sets out to seduce. Young athletes sweat and strain in machismo display. A teenage boy strikes an apparently girly pose. Adolescents play dress-up in soldier's uniforms. As attractive as this visual feast is, it asks serious questions about how identity is performed and framed. Schorr, who is an American-Jewish lesbian, typically photographs people who appear to be her exact opposite.
Perhaps Schorr's greatest voyage into the unknown has been her project in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a town in southern Germany. She has travelled there every summer for the last 18 years, photographing the life of a small town whose history could scarcely seem more alien. While many of these images feature pastoral idylls and dreams of regeneration, others push notions of otherness to the extreme. Among her series depicting boys dressed as soldiers, one image – entitled Traitor 2001–2004 – is a winningly romantic portrait of an angel-faced, flaxen-haired young man in Nazi uniform. He is, of course, the artist's invention: a present-day German teenager in costume for the camera. The picture might enable Schorr to address the country's painful past, but it also connects with Germany's present, where it remains illegal to display Nazi insignia. Just as significant – if no less troubling – Schorr shows us an image of youthful innocence, far from a movie-stereotype ogre.
While boys are her favoured subject matter, Schorr blurs the boundaries in beguiling if unsettling ways. Her boys frequently look girlish, while girls are to be found masquerading as boys. In Schorr's politically pointed photographs, ambiguity piles up.
Why we like her: Schorr's 2007 exhibition, There I Was, focused on drag-racing star Charlie "Astoria Chas" Snyder, who had been photographed by her father – who worked as a photojournalist – before dying in Vietnam. Seeking to engage with Snyder's life, Schorr turned to drawing, sketching imaginary scenes from a life that was cut brutally short.
Strangers on a train: One of Schorr's most celebrated series happened entirely by chance, after she met a German teenage boy on a train and asked him to model for her. The images that resulted, Jens F, explore the artist/muse relationship through the filter of American artist Andrew Wyeth's paintings of his German neighbour, Helga. Schorr's photographs, created over several years, feature the boy restaging Helga's poses.
Where can I see her? Collier Schorr's exhibition, German Faces, is at Modern Art gallery in London from 19 February to 20 March 2010.
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February 17th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
A new London exhibition brings together works by artists tuned into JG Ballard's surreal, dystopian universe
Posted in Andy Warhol, Art, Art and design, Culture, Ed Ruscha, Editorial, Exhibitions, Installation, JG Ballard, Jeremy Deller, Painting, Roy Lichtenstein, Sculpture, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off