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Author Topic: American western myth
Contrarian
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posted 28 June 2005 06:25 PM      Profile for Contrarian     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Annie Proulx reflects on the cowboy mythology.
quote:

How the west was spun

As an exhibition exploring the heroic myths of the American frontier opens in the UK Annie Proulx, who lives in Wyoming, reflects on the grim reality behind the enduring fantasy of the lone ranch hand...

...Today, at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, an exhibition opens called The American West, which aims to explore the heroic myth from the days of the trappers to today's political and corporate cowboy culture. Curator Richard William Hill, of Cree-Canadian descent, describes his skittering, kitsch-gathering trip through the American west in search of cowboy and Indian culture for this exhibition as "Gonzo curating". It's good this exhibition is happening in Warwickshire: if it were somewhere in the real American west, not many local people would be interested...

...Richard William Hill writes in his exhibition catalogue essay that ". . . by the time we got to Wyoming I knew that LA was really the hub of all this nonsense. It was Hollywood that taught cowboys how to be cowboys, that took an unglamorous working-class job and turned it into an iconic identity". It seems more likely to me that the technology of film simply took over where Remington and the other white western painters left off...


Etc., it's well worth reading the whole thing.

Bear in mind that the American West and the Canadian West had some major differences, as well as some connections. Canada mostly avoided the vicious Indian Wars on the prairies, because mass land settlement here happened long after Indians had settled on reserves; and the law arrived in the form of the NWMP, so you didn't have the lone marshall cleaning up the wild town; some of the ranching society was American-oriented but some was British-oriented; etc.

[ 28 June 2005: Message edited by: Contrarian ]


From: pretty far west | Registered: Jul 2004  |  IP: Logged

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