Artist tracks "end of cowboyism"

Not Arizona, but Death Valley... Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

An installation by the artist Ibrahim Quarashi uses the iconic American highway to track what he calls "the end of cowboyism."

Quirashi, described as a Pakistani now based in Europe (Berlin and Amsterdam) was born in Nairobi, according to the web site of a gallery that represents him. The "enigma of the Western cowboy" is said to have long been one of his obsessions.

His "Dreaming of Arizona" installation dates from 2009, when it was first shown in Amsterdam, but it has recently been mounted in Massachusetts.

It is yet another example of the many ways in which people around the world are caught up in the mythology of the American West and the Frontier; with the "highway" often playing a mystical as well and mythical role, redolent of all sorts of symbolism.

In Dreaming Arizona, Quarashi states on his web site

a metaphoric journey through the legendary Highway 64 is created to expose the end of cowboyism through a series of 7 films within 7 different time frames and 7 sets of photo prints.

It seems to me that he may actually mean legendary Route 66, since, coming from the east, Highway 64 stops at the Arizona border. Oddly enough, an article about Quarashi and the installation in the North Adams Transcript refers to -- and quotes Quarashi as referring to -- the highway at Highway 67, which in fact runs north-south and also does not enter Arizona....

The article, by Jess Gamari, quotes Quarashi as saying:

In Dreaming Arizona, I aim to simultaneously expose the structures that influence how we see the codes of an American Cowboy, with references from to Spaghetti Westerns, homo- eroticism, and pop culture like Andy Warhol [...] It gives a sense of how travel is so connected to the desire of an ideal that is perhaps never reached in the world of modern cowboys. I suppose Dreaming Arizona is a metaphoric journey through the legendary Highway 67 to expose the end of cowboy-ism through a series of seven films within seven different time frames, structure and inner sequences.

The exhibit, he added

looks at "the spatial analysis on the structures that influence how we see a world, a particular space wanting to metaphorically indulge in the illusions of a cowboys' hyper-masculinity without any of its real responsibilities," he said. " [Traveling through the American heartland] is a contemporary metaphor for an endless road trip that hold a very religious resonance is definitely subconscious but always present in the psyche.

Gamari writes that in 2007, Quarashi rented a white Bronco and traveled through Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Texas and Colorado, and later took a closer look at Mexican cowboys in Yucatan, Veracruz and Oaxaca.

Here is a video of the installation, from Quarashi's web site -- the text at the beginning and end of the film is also interesting as a description of the project.

Autry Museum's New Installation on early 20th Century Images of the West

"Chavez Ravine" by Misha Askenazy, one of the new canvases in the Romance gallery (Photo: Autry curatorial staff)

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Autry National Center has announced the opening of a new and fascinating installation as part of its "Romance" of the West exhibit. It is An Unspoiled Space: The West in the Eyes of Early 20th-Century Artists and it deals in part with how idealization and longing/desire influenced how artists saw -- and painted -- landscapes and cityscapes in the West.

Focused on the unique, regional landscapes of the desert Southwest and coastal California, this installation explores the people and places that artists were drawn to as they sought to redefine the West by looking at who, what, and where artists chose to paint following the close of the historical frontier.

Artists often saw life in the West in terms of its differences from the Eastern cities where they had previously lived. Whereas city life often left a person—as D. H. Lawrence put it—feeling “dead, dark, and buried,” the Southwest seemed to possess an uplifting visual aesthetic that enhanced daily living. Many believed that Pueblo Indian culture was driven by an innate artistic spirit, and their paintings of Native people reflect this belief. While Indian life preoccupied many artists in New Mexico, blossoming resort communities from Santa Fe to Southern California also became subjects. In Southern California, some artists documented the burgeoning social scene of Los Angeles, from the docks of San Pedro to the downtown plaza, whereas others celebrated the unspoiled beauty of the coast. As they created images that touted the visual landscapes and cultural life of these Western destinations, they promoted ideas about place that remain embedded within their modern identity.

In addition to the landscape of the West, artists were fascinated by its people. The Pueblo Indians and Hispanic families of Northern New Mexico were represented in individual portraits as the visual personification of their respective geographical settings. By focusing on Native and Hispanic cultures as immersed in traditions of craftsmanship, artists believed they were capturing values lost in the quest for industrial progress. The quest for a life spent in harmony with nature also fueled creative production across Southern California, where artists’ groups from La Jolla to the Bay Area created a supportive environment for art. Unlike their counterparts in New Mexico, however, California painters often overlooked the Native population in favor of a more exclusive focus on the private gardens and ocean resorts in works of landscapes and leisure that conveyed the relaxed, stylish qualities that California continues to export to the world.

The Autry blog has a very interesting discussion with Amy Scott, the Autry’s Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator of Visual Art.

“This is about how artists are orienting themselves within a changing West, settling into certain communities, working with the landscape and its native, sometimes its Hispanic, residents to develop visual ideas about place,” Scott said. “Not only did they settle there permanently, but often they brought their families, they raised their kids there, they developed local artists’ organizations to exhibit and promote their work. So they’re really embedded within these communities in a directed and organized way.”

As these painters looked to express their vision amid the ferment of the times — this was the time of World War I, the Roaring 20s and then the Depression — they moved out West, or at least spent significant periods here, in search of a more “authentic experience.” The result was colorful canvases that used the blocky, pared-down visuals of modernism, cubism, surrealism, and impressionism, but applied to the austere landscapes and the indigenous people of the West, like the Navajo (Diné) and the Hopi.

“In the twentieth century, part of the allure of places like Santa Fe and Taos, or Los Angeles and La Jolla, is the fact that they seem to be separate or operate differently from the modern, industrial centers of New York and D.C. and Philadelphia, which sort of form the bedrock of American modernism,” Scott said. “Many of the artists, particularly those who settle in Taos in the early twentieth century, like Blumenschein, are in search of a distinctly American art and distinctly American subjects by which to distinguish their work from the more Europeanized abstraction that is coming out of the East Coast.”

Of course, authenticity is a loaded concept. The artists sought honest representations of American life, and they believed they found them in images of Indigenous people and Southwest desert landscapes.

But some might argue that is still a view from the outside, because the Indigenous people in the paintings were still merely subjects, not necessarily collaborators in the forging of their images. This even though the artists considered the Pueblo Indians they were painting highly artistic, integrating art into their everyday objects and leading lives that had been essentially unchanged for hundreds of years.

“Not only are the Pueblos considered to be inherently creative and artistically gifted people,” Scott said, “but they are one of the few groups of Native people who are seen to be — and of course this is all the perception of Anglo and European artists coming from the East Coast — they’re perceived to be living in manners that are relatively straightforward and consistent with the way they’ve always done. They are not tainted or corrupted too much.”

Eventually, even maverick artists like Blumenschein and Sloan would themselves become the establishment, and they would inspire a reaction in another direction from their successors in the 1940s and 1950s, like Georgia O’Keefe. But at least at the dawn of the century, they and their colleagues formed part of an effort — cyclical in art — to both appropriate new influences and return to “genuine” images and concepts.

“The longing to experience the West as it truly is and as it truly was is part of what (was) pushing these artists into these places,” Scott said. “It’s part of a longing for a more straightforward, what they considered to be more honest representation of American landscapes and American life.”

"Iesaka Waken," by Maynard Dixon, one of the new 20th-century works in the Autry's Romance gallery (Photo: Autry Collections)

(Geographically off-topic) -- Native Americans in Art and Architecture

Sculpture in Syracuse by Luise Kaish. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

My brother Sam Gruber has posted a thoughtful reflection about images of Native Americans used in art and architecture in Syracuse NY, on his blog about central New York state. He posts a selection of photographs showing Native Americans as heroic and submissive.

This month there are several local exhibitions related to art by and representations of Native Americans. New art of Haudenosaunee artists is on view at the Everson Museum in the exhibition Haudenosaunee: Elements. Popular and especially commercial and advertising images American Indians fill the walls of ArtRage Gallery in an exhibition of the collection of artist Tom Huff, entitled Tonto Revisited. Tom, a Seneca/Cayuga artist living on the Onondaga Nation, has been collecting “Indian Kitsch” for over 25 years.

Images of Indians are hardly new in Syracuse, a city situated in the center of the Onondaga Nation at the heart of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. These exhibitions should make people even more attentive.

Read full post HERE

Prague -- The American Frontier in European Imagination

An exhibition in Prague illustrates (literally) early images of America -- the Frontier -- in the European Imagination. Dinah Spritzer reports in the New York Times:

European graphic artists depict the drama of colonization in the exhibition “Savoring America: The New World in 16th- to 19th-Century Prints,” at the quiet Schwarzenberg Palace (Hradcanske namesti 2), a recently restored Baroque gem a short walk from the castle gate. Displayed in a single room, the prints reflect the initial perception of the New World as a savage land, hence the darkly comic pun in the exhibit name.

Seems that the exhibit focuses on the Land of Savagery image, rather than the Land of Promise (as described in Ray Billington's great book, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (which can be read online).