Avant-Garde and Experimental Westerns: The Frontier at the Limits of the Moving Image

Abstract

The Western is typically regarded in scholarship as falling clearly and nearly exclusively into the realm of popular culture. Instantiations of Western films may achieve the cinematic version of high art, as John Ford’s Westerns are often understood to do. But, in fact, there is also an avant-garde history of/in Westerns that goes back, in one version, to Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys (1968) or, in another, to The Great Train Robbery (1903—when all cinema was still in an experimental phase). These films are outside of mainstream practice, but their concerns may not be. In an avant-garde or experimental mode, the Western’s aesthetics are allowed to expand, and the critical register of any given text can be as powerful a critique, and use, of the genre’s past (and its future) as any feature film. Here I concentrate on two key works in an experimental mode that represent important tendencies and questions in the avant-garde/Western interface: Mandy Morrison’s video work Desperado (1999), and Rebecca Baron and Douglas Gordon’s digital work Lossless #3 (2008). Mandy Morrison’s Desperado (first seen widely when it was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial of 2000) uses the medium-specific aesthetics of video art to think through masculinity and sexual identity using Western semantic codes and a destabilized version of Western narrative.