The other side
of the cowboy myth
Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
Friday June 24, 2005
The Guardian
Jimmie Durham couldn't face it himself, so he sent his co-curator Richard William
Hill to tour American cowboy museums, hoovering up images of heroic cowboys
riding into the sunset, gunning down buffalo and galloping in the nick of time
to save the cowering white woman from being scalped - not to mention the Colt
revolver specially made as a present for John F Kennedy, and a photograph of
Richard Nixon cuddling up to the Lone Ranger.
The resulting exhibition, The American West - the first of its kind in Britain
- which opens at Compton Verney in Warwickshire tomorrow, sets the heroic myth
of the strong, simple cowboy, embraced by generations of American politicians,
against the view from the other side, represented in archive and contemporary
works by Native American artists. It is not entirely what the cowboy museums
might have hoped for.
Mr Durham, a writer, artist and lifelong political activist, is Cherokee; Mr
Hill, a Canadian museum curator, is Cree, and kept wondering if alarms would
start wailing as he entered places such as the Ronald Reagan Museum, dominated
by a vast bronze statue of the president as a cowboy.
To Mr Durham many of the loans are testaments to genocide: "They are the
ammunition of the mythology. This is not just historical rhetoric. The cowboy
mentality goes on. You can see it now in the rhetoric of the war on terror."
Kent Monkman's paintings offer something different. His canvases borrow from
the American school of huge, romantic 19th century landscapes, but with his
own alter ego inserted. Miss Chief Eagle Testicle wears a chieftain's head-dress,
high heels and not much else - an outfit inspired by one of Cher's more flesh-baring
costumes - and in one scene is painting the portrait of a cowboy photographer,
stripped, tied to a tree and skewered with arrows. In another Miss Chief is
mourning over the grave of his white male lover, while a Christian priest looks
speculatively at his half-naked body.
