BERLIN.- At the invitation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, acclaimed American artist Collier Schorr, whose multimedia practice explores appropriated identities and performance, has created a group exhibition that is at once a self-portrait and a riveting display of some of the most vital trends in contemporary U.S.–based art. From her position as a visual artist, critic, and teacher, Schorr possesses a uniquely intimate perspective on current art production, which she has translated into this experimental exhibition project. The exhibition’s title, Freeway Balconies, borrowed from 1960s poet laureate Allen Ginsberg in a move that is both reverential and mischievous, refers to the meeting place of spectacle and voyeurism in American culture.

For Freeway Balconies, Schorr gathers an idiosyncratic mix of nineteen emerging and established artists, juxtaposing their works in complementary to antagonistic relationships. Her choices, arranged around selections of her own work, infused with a collaborative spirit, reveal her probing interest in slippages of identity and identification, cultural memory and forgetting, and the ways in which artistic action and production engage these issues. The exhibition shuttles between performance art and the cult of Hollywood, between the popular and the alternative. In a far more complacent present, when irony has replaced rage, Schorr searches for today’s (endangered) manifestations of dissent, often coyly disguised, but she also appreciates moments of reverie. The exhibition considers how identities are constructed rather than given, shaped as much by external information and influences as emanating from within—identity as a condition of multivalence rather than equivalence, awash in cultural ether. Embracing the simultaneity of multiple, seemingly incommensurate meanings, inspired by disjunctions between form and content, the capacity of appearances to deceive, Freeway Balconies is a roundtable discussion in exhibition form, addressing the problems that drive Schorr’s artmaking.

Freeway Balconies ranges in mediums from photography to sculpture and installation to video art. The exhibition explores the performative impulse so operative in today’s innovative forms while playing off a pop-infused, contemporary American vernacular. In doing so, Schorr acknowledges a select group of elders that includes Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, and Adrian Piper. Their deployment of performance and specifically the location of art on the site of the artist’s body can be observed in the works of a younger generation of artists represented by Francesca Woodman, Ryan Trecartin, and Aki Sasamoto. Sara Gilbert’s intimate photographs of her friend and actor Leonardo DiCaprio taken at an earlier moment of superstardom are joined to the high drama of Rachel Rabhan’s anonymous students and Elaine Stocki’s curiously choreographed strangers, with Leigh Ledare’s poignant images of his almost-famous mother hovering somewhere in between. Schorr shares the pop-punk band Tokio Hotel with Raymond Pettibon and actress Brooke Shields with Richard Prince. Shinique Smith’s fan mail to actor Johnny Depp, an attempt at closeness with her object of admiration, finds an analogue in Karen Kilimnik’s improvised cosmetic self-improvements to resemble other stars, while Matt Saunders’s videos provide yet another take on idol worship. In this arena, Rashawn Griffin’s lumbering garbage-bag bear stands a chance against David Altmejd’s monumental giant. Sharon Hayes and Adam Pendleton invoke the spirit of 1960s activism and rock ‘n’ roll, complicated by cultural amnesia as appropriations out of time.