Go West!: The Contemporary West
Saturday, April 28, 2012 - Sunday, October 14, 2012
This second installment of "Go West!" provides a twentieth and twenty-first century response to and interpretation of the Western genre. Opening late April 2012, the presentation includes works in multiple mediums by Jeremy Blake, Ed Ruscha, Lordy Rodriquez, Luis Jimenez among others.
The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin presents "Go West! Representations of the American Frontier," an exhibition exploring the pioneering American West as both a physical terrain and an idea deeply rooted in the American psyche. On view January 14 through October 14, 2012, the exhibition features paintings, sculptures and works on paper made in, and about, the American West by Henry Farny, Charles Russell, Maynard Dixon, and other artists from The Blanton’s celebrated C.R. Smith Collection of Art of the American West, in the largest installation of this collection in over a decade.
Works of related content from the museum’s holdings by Jerry Bywaters, Frederic Remington and others, and a selection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century American prints supplement the installation, along with borrowed works from the university’s Harry Ransom Center and Briscoe Center for American History.
“Go West! presents works from The Blanton’s collection by some of the most illustrious artists of the period such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington,” states Blanton director Simone Wicha. “Visitors will learn about their lives, their artistic styles, the historical moments and subjects they depict, and come away with an appreciation of the rich heritage of the great American West.”
"Go West!" is organized thematically and chronologically, with investigations of the country’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century, including: contested territories and the ensuing battles of the U.S. Army cavalry, representations of Native Americans, cowboys and ranchers, ideas of Manifest Destiny, the industrialization and urbanization of the land, and the ever-changing American landscape as witnessed and portrayed by artists living and working in the Western United States.
Gallery TextThe Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin presents "Go West! Representations of the American Frontier," an exhibition exploring the pioneering American West as both a physical terrain and an idea deeply rooted in the American psyche. On view January 14 through October 14, 2012, the exhibition features paintings, sculptures and works on paper made in, and about, the American West by Henry Farny, Charles Russell, Maynard Dixon, and other artists from The Blanton’s celebrated C.R. Smith Collection of Art of the American West, in the largest installation of this collection in over a decade.
Works of related content from the museum’s holdings by Jerry Bywaters, Frederic Remington and others, and a selection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century American prints supplement the installation, along with borrowed works from the university’s Harry Ransom Center and Briscoe Center for American History.
“Go West! presents works from The Blanton’s collection by some of the most illustrious artists of the period such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington,” states Blanton director Simone Wicha. “Visitors will learn about their lives, their artistic styles, the historical moments and subjects they depict, and come away with an appreciation of the rich heritage of the great American West.”
"Go West!" is organized thematically and chronologically, with investigations of the country’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century, including: contested territories and the ensuing battles of the U.S. Army cavalry, representations of Native Americans, cowboys and ranchers, ideas of Manifest Destiny, the industrialization and urbanization of the land, and the ever-changing American landscape as witnessed and portrayed by artists living and working in the Western United States.
Jeremy Blake: The Winchester Trilogy
Jeremy Blake applied his training as a painter to digital animations he referred to as “time-based paintings.” In the Winchester trilogy (2002–04), Blake examined the mythology of the American West, the popular allure of violence, and the narrative of the gunslinger as imagined in relation to the history of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.
Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, became convinced that her family was cursed following the deaths of her daughter and husband. To appease the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles, Winchester embarked on a forty-year construction project to expand her eight-room house into a 160-room mansion. Blake described the maze-like mansion as, “more than just a monument to one person’s eccentric fears—it is the tangible outcome of a pileup of social and historical narratives.”
Throughout the three Winchester animations, Blake investigates the mansion as both a psychological and cultural space. In Winchester, the cycle’s first video, collages of colorful, abstract forms and shadowy gunmen haunt the screen, suggesting shifting states of consciousness. The video alludes to the violent process of westward expansion, in which the Winchester rifle played an integral role. The next video, 1906, navigates the interior of the Winchester mansion, highlighting the areas damaged by the great San Francisco earthquake of the titular year. Century 21, the final installment, contrasts the Victorian mansion with a trio of space-age movie theaters that have neighbored the Winchester home since the 1960s. Both the mansion and the theatres represent ideals of progress for their respective eras: Manifest Destiny and “the final frontier.” Blake presents both philosophies as simultaneously idealistic and violent.
James Drake: Juárez/El Paso
James Drake engages themes of life and death on the United States–Mexico border in this series of prints. Drake lived for many years in El Paso, Texas, the largest border town in the United States. There, he bore daily witness to the dramatic cultural and economic differences between El Paso and Juárez, Mexico, which lies just across the Rio Grande River. In this series, Drake humanizes the statistics of violence related to the drug trade, gun trafficking, illegal immigration, and prostitution along the border.
The artist refers to El Paso as “the zone of desire,” alluding to how the town functions as a site of economic aspiration for many living on the border; the term also evokes the city’s darker substratum of exploitation. Drake’s work brings to light the plight of immigrants who enter the U.S. in search of work and experience danger and degradation in the process. The palette chosen for the prints simulates the lurid neon glow of Juárez bars. Drake incorporated newspaper photographs that illustrate the nocturnal cross-border economy of prostitution, in which sex workers, often transvestites and transsexuals, doubly risk their personal safety: first by crossing the border and then by soliciting strangers on the other side. He counters the marginalized status of his subjects by representing them at heroic scale. Drake constructs steel frames to house the prints, giving the images the weight and presence of sculpture. Titles, like Let’s Kiss Like We Were Really Lovers, acknowledge these exchanges of intimacy and money.
Luis Jiménez: Progress
Luis Jiménez’s sculptures, prints, and drawings view the history of the American West through the lens of personal and collective experience. Jiménez dedicated much of his career to creating public art that could be seen and appreciated by every one. This commitment to accessibility and social commentary aligns Jiménez with American and Mexican muralists of the Depression era, while his bright colors, industrial materials, references to popular culture, and depictions of those typically excluded from the American cultural narrative root his work in the Chicano movement. His monumental sculptures can be found today in public settings throughout the United States.
One of Jiménez’s first monumental works, Progress II, depicts a vaquero, or horseman from the Southwest or Mexico, as he wrangles a raging steer in a dynamic, gravity-defying composition. Jiménez’s treatment of his materials further generates a sense of momentum. Constructed from fiberglass and painted with automobile paint, the sculpture has the ultra-slick finish of a hotrod. Exploring themes of technological progress and westward migration, Jiménez depicts various modes of transportation. Horse, stagecoach, car, train, and airplane appear in The Progress Suite, a series of four prints made as companions to the sculpture.
“I am a traditional artist in the sense that I give form to my culture’s icons,” Jiménez once stated. “In the past, important icons were religious; now they are secular.” Icons of the American West—cowboy, “Indian,” horse, buffalo, steer—feature prominently in the sculptures and prints that comprise the Progress series. The theme of capture is also ubiquitous: the vaquero ropes a steer, a Native American hunts a buffalo, and a stagecoach whisks off a damsel in distress. Underneath the main components of the sculpture exists a smaller pursuit: an owl stalks a mouse. Jiménez depicts Manifest Destiny as a series of relationships between predator and prey that contributes to humanity’s march towards “progress.”
On the Road
Opportunities for cross-country travel proliferated across the American landscape during the early twentieth century, thanks to the development of automotive technology and a complex infrastructure of roads and highways. Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, On the Road, granted the road trip a mythological status that would inspire future generations. This installation takes its name from the iconic novel and considers the road trip as a distinctly American way of engaging with, traveling through, and viewing the landscape. Additionally, On the Road considers how American artists working after 1960 have used the car as a medium for making statements about America’s physical, cultural, and political landscape.
In the mid-1950s, Edwin Ruda’s weekly road trip between El Paso, where his fiancée lived, and Austin, where he taught at the University of Texas, inspired him to create paintings that simulated the experience of moving through the landscape. The blue lozenges that flank the corners of his twenty-foot diamond-shaped painting, Reo Reo, are meant to engage the viewer’s peripheral field of vision and invoke the sensation of moving down a road. Ruda crafted such dynamically shaped canvases to evoke a sense of velocity.
Edward Ruscha’s purely descriptive photographs provide a contrast to Ruda’s geometric abstraction from the same time period. The thirty photographs on view originally appeared in the artist’s book Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, also displayed here. Hiring a helicopter and a commercial photographer, Ruscha commissioned overhead views of Los Angeles parking lots before the daily onslaught of cars arrived to fill them. Motor oil stains upset the geometric regularity of the parking spaces and communicate a sense of disorder within the carefully standardized lines.
On the Road, continued
Twentysix Gas Stations is a photographic portrait of the road between Ruscha’s family home in Oklahoma, and Los Angeles, where he has lived and worked for the past fifty years. The series represents the twenty-six gas stations he encountered while driving this route. In another photographic book project exhibited here, Ruscha photographed every building on the iconic Hollywood road, Sunset Strip. The resulting book is comprised of a single sheet of paper that unfolds to a length of 25-feet to mimic the horizontality of the road. Influenced by Ruscha, Stephen Shore—a member of the “New Topographics” group, a loose affiliation of photographers working in the 1970s whose work traced human interventions in the American landscape—created An Alley Off Sunset Strip.
Photographer Lawrence McFarland has spent most every summer of the past four decades on the road exploring the western United States. He sets out with no agenda or route in mind, in search of sites of historical significance that have disappeared from social consciousness, such as the dry Searles Lake in the California desert depicted in Dave’s Van. Charles Manson lived in this remote area of Death Valley in 1969; McFarland’s dog plays unaware of this association. Lordy Rodriguez evokes a road map with his small print Non-Interstate. Rodriquez’s working process begins with a road trip and culminates with a fictional map created from his subjective experiences of the places traveled.
Emily Jacir and Luis Jiménez’s works complicate our assumptions about the road trip as a leisurely pursuit by introducing contemporary border politics into the conversation. In Jiménez’s sculpture, a man carries a woman on his shoulders, while the woman bears an infant in her arms. The title, Border Crossing, suggests their passage over the border between Mexico and the United States. The family’s huddled composition communicates the difficulty of their passage, yet the momentum conveyed by their posture implies a will to keep moving.
Jacir’s installation from Texas with love depicts an hour-long video shot from the front seat of a car as it moves through the West Texas landscape. The video is accompanied by a soundtrack from which viewers may select which songs they would like to hear. More than a standard road trip mixtape, this soundtrack is laden with contemporary political significance. Jacir asked fifty-one Palestinians to choose the songs they would listen to if they could drive for an hour, without having to face the interruptions of Israeli checkpoints. Jacir places the viewer in the position of the driver and asks us to reflect upon our freedoms in light of those around the world whose movements are impeded by politics.
The West Abstracted
“They were still landscapes of a sort but reduced to a horizon line dividing earth and sky with usually a band of color moving across the sky.”
—Jack Boynton
When we think of the art of the American West, we often imagine realistically rendered landscapes and scenes like those depicted in Go West!: Representations of the American Frontier. After World War II, however, both the American landscape and the painterly techniques used to describe it underwent dramatic changes. The West Abstracted features four paintings from the mid-twentieth century. Carl Holty and Jack Boynton paint the desert landscape of the American West in an abstract style, while Stephen Rascoe and Donald Weismann take the industrialized landscape of the oil field as their subject.
Working in Paris and New York immediately before World War II, American-born Holty painted in a variety of abstract styles: his work at this time was associated with cubism, biomorphism, and Abstraction-Création. Upon his return to the U.S., he became a founding member of American Abstract Artists, a group that sought to develop an American abstraction that differed from both European abstraction and the then-popular style of American regionalism. Red Desert, the painting included here, comes from later in his career, when the artist was exploring a more organic abstraction in which amorphous planes of color interact and overlap to create washy fields reminiscent of light as it plays off the land.
The other three artists spent all or most of their lives in Texas, where abstraction was slow to develop because of the state’s strong regional vernacular, established by Jerry Bywaters and other members of the Dallas Nine, whose works can be see in the final section of Go West! Boynton, Rascoe, and Weismann studied art during the 1940s and 1950s and were influenced by the distinct brand of American abstraction promoted by artists such as Holty. These Texas modernists often included representational elements in their paintings to tether their abstractions to reality. Weismann’s inclusion of a system of tiny white circles reads as the lights of an oil drilling station in an otherwise abstracted field. Titles like Rascoe’s Oil Field Lights also provide points of reference. Landscape, here, is used as a vehicle to experiment with color, technique, and texture, as with Boynton’s Outpost, where he mixed a sand-like grit into his pigment to give the painting its rough surface.