Heroes, Villains and Wide Open Spaces
Michael F. Brady
Brent Spaulding presents the essence of the cowboy in a series of towering silhouettes. Dwarfed by these imposing nine-foot images, the viewer may be romanced by their mythical grandeur or seduced by the implied violence of the scene unfolding. Whatever the case may be, Spaulding forces us to confront this quintessential American icon in a political way, without the overt drudgery of politics.
Cowboys recall a certain historical irony. Their legacy as a classical American icon has far outlived their actual moment in American history, a facet of the cowboy that makes him all the more remarkable. In reality, the cowboy was a blip in the temporal radar of the 19th Century, located somewhere between Jacksonian Democracy and the closing of the frontier and ultimately rendered obsolete by the railroads. As Spaulding’s work suggests, in the world of images the cowboy’s historic reality is not nearly as important as its symbolic power, a force that some 200 years later continues to define the American character at home and abroad.
Once the cowboy embodied a national spiritual purpose, the manifest destiny of a nation growing westward into its own God-given skin, but today the meaning of the symbol lives on in a more contested way. Politicians might attach themselves to the image for the sake of power or critics might subvert the cowboy’s cultural significance to pass judgment on male heterosexual identity, but Spaulding’s silhouettes do not define, redefine, mythologize or demythologize the cowboy, and this is exactly the point. Like a half-dazed traveler collapsed on the desert floor, the viewer squints up into a hazy semiotic drama unfolding. Suspended in time and draped in the sun’s blinding yellow light, the cowboy appears in a seamless mirage of horses, guns, smoke, dust and cigarettes. The figures may be in the process of forming or disintegrating, they may be real or imagined, they may be villains or they may be heroes. Nothing is for sure.
Even though so much of Spaulding’s work is predicated on a timeless landscape existing outside of history, it is firmly grounded in reality. This is because the symbol of the cowboy draws attention to its divergent meanings. For a native Texan, the cowboy might evoke moral certainty, bravery and stoicism, for a Native American the cowboy might reflect violence and genocide, for a feminist, sexism, for an Arab, military and cultural imperialism. For any combination of these identities, the cowboy might be an equal combination of the good, the bad, the pretty and the ugly. Like Rorschach’s psychoanalytic inkblots, the silhouettes emit little of their own identities, thereby becoming mirrors into our own personal and political souls. The viewer must read, decipher, define and explore these symbols to ultimately assign their own meaning to them. Spaulding does not force this showdown and in the end it’s the viewer’s decision to join the posse, fight or run away.
This is not to say that Spaulding’s work is particularly neutral and one thing that certainly is out in the open is power. This is evident in the size and anonymity of the cowboy silhouettes but it also creeps into the landscape, exposing the immense power of history, the elements and time. As a native of the southwest, Spaulding is no stranger to the physical pathos of the desert. The endless monotony of sand and rock and the tabletop mesas that drop off into nowhere, define a western landscape that evokes the terror of open spaces. This is power of another kind, the type that Jack London called the "white silence," and one that Spaulding captures in the opposite biome of the desert tundra. Materials have everything to do with this. Using paper, and occasionally wood, instead of canvas, the medium becomes as much a part of the scene as the images. By opening his work to the elements, Spaulding constructs a careful rendition of geologic time. The paint pools, the paper, buckles, wrinkles and cracks, becoming part of the windswept desert landscape he portrays. For this reason, Spaulding’s work also seems to say that the cowboy, as powerful as the image may be, is also a tragic figure, a disintegrating artifact in time.
Today, the west is more a montage of crowded mini-malls than lovely desert hues and track homes encroach further into the once-hallowed territory of the cowboy. This too is the power of history, awesome or terrible, depending on what you make of progress. Spaulding’s work won’t confirm or deny your politics on these matters, but he will make you think about where you stand.
