Residency Report No. 5: The Spectacle
spectacle noun (spek-ti-kəl): something exhibited to view as unusual, notable, or entertaining
With the work I’m making in this residency, I am spending a lot of time with the idea of spectacle. How the concept of our realities is shaped by visual presentation and the pageantry of performance.
The rodeo represents a dynamic entry point to this motif because it presents a critical element of Western lore, and one that has been used visually to tell stories about who we are for hundreds of years. In popular culture, cowboy stories have often been flattened and exaggerated to fit agendas, and through the enduring mythology created by film, books, and TV, the picture of who and what a cowboy was/is has been pliable.
Screens are the medium through which spectacle can crystallize as culture. With our phones, this is as true as ever. That’s why I felt this shot of a barrel racer on a Jumbotron— which I took at the Fort Worth Rodeo, on my phone— was intriguing as a glimpse into performance and presentation. In this piece, I wanted to capture the slightly distorted and pixelated look that a Jumbotron image has; even when the action of spectacle is right in front of you in the arena, I find it nearly irresistible to not look first at the large screen. If I’m not careful, I might watch the entire show that way.
I find this urge emblematic of the force of spectacle. We are drawn to entertainment because it succinctly packages information as a way to delight our senses without losing our attention— one proven way to do that is by telling stories which reinforce our understanding of reality. Social media algorithms are the latest iteration of this phenomenon, and they deliver spectacle quicker and ever more refined by the day. In a way not dissimilar to how the cowboy as an American hero was anglicized to fit a certain ideal of American exceptionalism, screens emit a version of reality to keep us engaged based on preferences. This painting tied these ideas together for me as a way to illustrate how the delivery of spectacle may change, but its core tenet as an engine of culture remains the same.
The value of aesthetics is often characterized as the icing on the cake— superfluous— in a society that claims to prioritize utility over all else. I see this intent demonstrated by the heavy emphasis today put on STEM learning and the frequent defunding of arts education nationwide. And yet, as I’m finding in my exploration of spectacle, it’s precisely aesthetics— the physical appearance of things— that forms the foundation of what society values most. It’s the pull of spectacle and the hollowing of substance that explains how we find ourselves in a so-called post-truth world; the contradiction of appearance and substance being misaligned only works if the appearance is able to function as the actual substance.
As I continue to make art in Fort Worth, a city known, among other names, as “Cowtown”, and whose motto is “Where The West Begins”, I am compelled to study how contemporary artists have explored, and in some cases, subverted Western tropes. American David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) is an artist I keep returning to. Wojnarowicz’s multimedia work documents his personal trauma with and anger surrounding the AIDS crisis, and he has a mixed media piece titled The Death of American Spirituality (1987) which includes a cowboy riding a bull. The scene in its entirety is hellish and dark— there’s fire, smoke, a bleeding skull with a snake in its mouth— and in the lower third a cowboy is in the full throes of bull-riding.
In fitting with the overall societal critique of the piece, the rider, a symbol of American strength and masculinity, is himself a victim and perpetrator of the scene— his arm thrown behind his head by the force of the bucking bull has a vein wrapped around it, and a trio of sharks circle below him. The bull has its back legs ready for a kick, but his fate is similarly bleak— what looks to be blood runs below the front half of its body. I could write a lot more about Wojnarowicz’s piece and how his use of Western imagery confronts the divide between who we are and how we see ourselves. It’s that divide which spectacle exploits, and I’m eager to explore that terrain in my own work.
I entered this residency at the the beginning of the year not really knowing what themes I wanted to speak to in my work, given that I first needed to experience the rodeo and digest a new setting for my practice. Now that I’m in my fifth month here— and starting to understand Western themes on a more intimate level— the universality of performance and how we regard spectacle is emerging from the fray. I am delighting in taking in every morsel of the cake— icing and all.