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Dreamers,
lovers of freedom, seekers of gold - all have followed, and still
follow, the siren call of desire that leads West to a new Promised
Land beyond the shores of the mighty Mississippi. The
American West: a land of dream and mirage, a land of cowboys and
Indians, a brawling expanse larger than most nations where an
entire mythology of good and evil has played itself out. All
these dreams, both real and illusory, and even, once, the
historical belief of Manifest Destiny, the notion that the United
States had a divine right to expand across the continent, from
Atlantic to Pacific. The West is an idea -
in Russia the West is sometimes East (Siberia) and for most of the
world the West is America. It is the dream of a far-away
land that one journeys to, a dream of hardship and courage, of
being tested, and all perhaps to find fame, fortune, and that most
elusive thing of all - happiness. And so of course, the West
is an image, a chimera in the mind's eye.
Into
the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West explores
how the medium has shaped and determined this moving target of an
image in a show of 120 photographs from1850 to 2008. It's a
breathtaking mixture of old and new that sometimes gets ahead of
the curation: Larry Sultan, John Baldessari, David Hockney,
Dorothea Lange, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston,
Philip-Lorca diCorcia….
In
Richard Prince's very large (40' x 30') 2003 Untitled (Cowboy)
a re-photographed Marlboro Man spins his lasso in circles as he
seemingly dances in the air. This image-of-an-image explores the
duality of the idea of the West, and Prince emphasizes the
contradiction inherent in 'the virile image of the cowboy' at a
time when the tobacco industry was increasingly coming under
fire. And then there is the inherent falseness of his
photograph - that it is merely a reproduction of a photograph for
an ad. Yet there is something sublime about this cowboy as
he dances with his shadow in the expanse of empty land, the deep
blue of shirt and jeans picking up the sky's azure beyond.
Here, in an image where the lasso captures nothing but the
ephemeral, Richard Prince captures it all: our desire for unlimited
freedom, the folly of our choices, the beauty of the eternal human
struggle.
The
exhibit is being held in conjunction with the film exhibitions The
Old West: Myth, Character, and Reinvention and The West: Myth,
Character, and Reinvention by Andy Warhol.
Joan
Didion in her 2003 book of essays "Where I Was From"
explores the myths and realities of the California she grew up
in. Didion's sharp pen is a perfect foil to MoMA's ambitious
exhibit.
See:
Into
the Sunset, MoMA
through June 8, 2009
Read:
Where
I Was From,
Joan Didion
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