Film, 4'20", 2003 (Screened at various festivals)
I Love Cowboys couples a mythic character from the cinema and what that represents with an individual’s experience of it. Its style is bare and desolate, focusing on the individual cowboy, stripping away all else but the essential elements of the cowboy experience: one man’s struggle in a hostile land.
The representation of this mythic cinematic character takes on a distinctly voyeuristic tone in this piece. The cowboy is alone, shot from vantage points beyond his knowledge, his physicality transformed from function to decoration. His spinning and turning to shoot are done against a phantom foe, a non-existent enemy. He becomes a fetishized museum piece, situated in his eternal panorama of sun and scrub, a sound scape that accentuates the grandness of the myth along with the material reality of his place with the land. The voice-over narration hints at both the dangerous sexuality of the lone man on the frontier but also at the taming of this sexuality. “I love cowboys”, repeated in sexy, coy tones works to render and characterize the cowboy as sex object, while simultaneously undermining such a project.
The cowboy is shot and packaged in such a way as to render him an idealised and safe sex object. He is there to be observed from a distance, commented upon and summoned for the purposes of contemporary fantasy.
Soundtrack by Phillip Pietruschka. |
