Phoenix Art Museum's 'West Select' opens up new territory
Exhibit replaces cowboys with wider range
Is the West a place? An idea? A nostalgia?
Is the West urban, now that more people live in cities than in rural areas? Or are cities the antithesis of a West that remains in the interstitial areas of rock, cactus and dry gulches?
Certainly the West, where we all live, is central to our lives. Even in Phoenix, most of us have a sense of ourselves as Westerners. We live with the dryness of the region, the sense of independence fostered by the Western myth, the vastness of the land and the heat. Our salsa should not be made in New York City.
For decades, the Phoenix Art Museum has had an annual show of Cowboy Art, which had a singular vision of what the West was. It was cowboys and Indians, it was horses in bronze and it had more to do with Hollywood Westerns than it did with the world we inhabit today.
Now, the museum has taken a new path. With the departure of the Cowboy Artists of America, the museum has begun a replacement October ritual with "The West Select," an invitational show with more than 100 artworks by 31 artists who specialize in Western subject matter. But the range of styles, subject matter and vision are greatly expanded from the narrow range previously displayed.
The first thing you see entering the show are three large paintings by Ed Mell.
"This is not your father's cowboy show," says Jerry Smith, curator of American and Western American art for the museum.
It's as if someone opened a window and let fresh air in. This is still Western art, but it is open to many things the previous occupants were closed to: women artists, abstract techniques, contemporary subject matter, still life, photography -- irony.
The annual Cowboy Artists show had a uniformity of style: It was sometimes difficult to tell which artist painted which campfire with a remuda in the dusk behind it. There was a centripetal style they each converged upon.
That is perhaps the biggest change in "West Select." You can see the artist's vision and style behind the work. There is much greater variety to be seen. You don't respond to the work only by its subject matter, but also by its individual style.
The doors have not exactly been flung open wide: There are still limits. Most of the imagery remains rural. There are no cityscapes here, even though the majority of Arizonans live urban lives. There is no video art, no installation art, no performance art. No James Turrell, no James Luna.
The idea is to be familiar enough to appeal to the traditional cowboy audience, while being fresh enough to draw in a wider crowd.
"We wanted a show that would open up people's awareness a little, but without making it foreign to those who loved the Cowboy show," Smith says.
"Maybe we'll add videos in upcoming years."
So, you have such paintings as Don Stinson's "Emerson's Puddle," which at first seems like a standard Western snowscape. There is a barn, lots of whiteness and the low hills in the background. But there are also high-tension power lines running across the horizon and a boy shooting hoops in the distance.
Or, in Stinson's "Around the Fence: Sedona," with its high blue sky and red-rock buttes, there are also several small private airplanes taxiing and ready to take off. In Stinson's "The Roll Back: A Greener Speculative Reality Along the Edge of the Colorado Plateau," there is a land developer's paved street, installed before any housing construction has begun.
This is the reality of even the rural West, and the inclusion of these human infiltrations does not diminish the beauty of the land -- or what photographer Robert Adams calls the "redemptive" quality of landscape -- but in fact enhances it. This is our experience of the West, not a fantasy of it.
"We wanted to do an exhibition that still came out of a realist tradition, but did a better job of representing a range," says museum director James Ballinger, momentarily smiling at his double entendre. "Both a range of artists, coast to coast, and much more diversity with different views and opinions, and a range of mediums."
Other art in the show attempts to bring the last Modernist century back into the picture through other means. Louisa McElwain uses thick impasto, trowelled on with palette knife, to make landscapes that from a distance are quite real, but from close up disintegrate into something very close to the abstract art of a Willem de Kooning. This is really good painting -- with the emphasis on paint.
There are still lifes of Hopi pottery and weavings by William Shepherd that seem like Chardin meets William Bailey, with a jigger of William Harnett thrown in.
Among the sculpture, there are some really exciting and fresh ideas, including Kent Ullberg's "Preening Heron," which is geometric and a Postmodern take on Art Deco, and the smooth quasi-Brancusian rounds of Steve Kestrel, including his "Ripple Effect," which is a frog as round as a river cobble, sitting on wave-rippled mud. It has a secret, too: If you were to look underneath the frog, you would find its hidden cache of eggs.
Of course, not everything is new. Fans of the older art will find plenty of cowboys on horses, plenty of longhorn cattle and vast views of the Grand Canyon. These aren't necessarily bad -- it's hard to complain about Curt Walters' gigantic canyonscape, which is richly painted with a real craftsman's finish, or Merrill Mahaffey's characteristic inner-canyon views.
But there are some misfires. Tom Moyers skirts uncomfortably close to kitsch with his Mexicans and Indians. Good painting technique cannot save them. His wife, Terri Kelly Moyers, has a Mexican señorita hiding coyly behind her unfolded fan that flat-out is kitsch.
And the sentimental postcard Mexican architectural paintings of George Hallmark deserve their artist's name.
Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy. The level of craft is extremely high in the show. And it is hard not to be seduced by the painting of Howard Post, Arturo Chavez, Mell and Mahaffey, or the cattle-dotted plains of William Matthews that could almost be a cave painting.
The best in show, however, are the large-scale photographs of Jay Dusard. Blown up like the photos of Thomas Struth or Andreas Gursky, their very size is part of their meaning. The 64- by 78-inch "Abandoned Railway Coach Car, Rodeo, New Mexico" is a bravura piece of work, every topographic line of worn wood grain as clear as a microscope slide, and it serves not merely as a picturesque scene of the passing of the West, but as metaphor. Dusard places us inside the rotting car, not outside, looking on. We are it.
"Where do you draw the line on Western art?" Ballinger muses.
"Anything west of the 100th meridian," he says. "It's a state of mind, it exists in many forms with many definitions for different people, so there's no right or wrong answer to that.
"We're beginning this show from a more traditional base, but it will be interesting to see where we end up in four or five years."
Read more:
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/ae/articles/2011/10/22/20111022phoenix-art-museum-west-select-exhibit-cowboys-art.html#ixzz1mEdcujjA
Charles and Ray Eames House mock-up at the LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum & Art Gallery). As part of the California Design, 1930–1965: "Living in a Modern Way".
