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Preparing for Our America
We'll be sending regular updates about the exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art which opens next fall on October 25, 2013. In this post, one of our summer interns, Orquidea Morales, writes about Raphael Montaņez-Ortiz's 1958 recycled film Cowboy and "Indian" Film, a recent gift from Gary Wolkowitz which will be one of the earliest works featured in the exhibition. I didn't know much about Montaņez-Ortiz previously, and was fascinated to learn how he "recycled" the original film to create this piece. Below is an excerpt, visit the blog for the full post.
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Raphael Montaņez-Ortiz Deconstructs the Western
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Still from Cowboy and "Indian" Film
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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, artists from around the world began making art by reworking existing films and using other moving image technologies like video. One pioneer of this new art form is Raphael Montaņez-Ortiz. In the mid-1960s Montaņez-Ortiz became a leading figure in the avant-garde movement of Destructivism. This little known movement consisted primarily of the destruction of objects by artists, usually in a staged public performance. Montaņez-Ortiz typically destroyed household objects like chairs, mattresses and perhaps most famously pianos. At the Destruction in Art Symposium in London in 1966, he performed seven destruction acts and screened several "recycled" films. For me, the "recycled film" is one of the most interesting concepts that evolved out of this movement because it allows artists, some of whom might not have access to film-making technology, to alter existing films and create something new that plays with genre and questions stereotypes.
In his Cowboy and "Indian" Film, Montaņez-Ortiz literally de-constructs the 1950 film Winchester '73 directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart and Shelley Winters. The original film was titled after the rifle that had "won the West" and is a classic example of the Western genre in American film. This genre has historical roots in the late 1800s early 1900s, and relates to the idea that the United States was inevitably destined to expand across the continent. To create his work, Montaņez-Ortiz obtained copies of the film and then used a tomahawk to splice it into pieces. As if performing a Native American ritual, the artist placed the chopped filmstrip pieces into a "medicine bag," shook its contents and chanted as he re-constructed the film irrespective of its original order. Once projected, Cowboy and "Indian" Film is a blur of moving images, some of which are backwards and upside down. By deconstructing the film in this way, Montaņez-Ortiz physically and conceptually changed how we as an audience think about this Western. Visit the museum's blog Eye Level for the full post, and mark your calendars to see the film in the Our America exhibition next year (October 25, 2013 -- March 2, 2014). |
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