Richard Prince "Cowboys and Girlfriends" 1992
Straw is the title of my never to be made feature film. It was to be a country and western alien abduction love story. The plan was to go up to some country town and just film for the weekend. The loose script was about a ruddy old cowboy named "Straw" who had been away for twenty years or something and comes back to town where nothing is quite the same (cue amazing eerie music)..ie: the town has been taken over by sexy aliens!..although the audience remains in the dark about whether it is Straw causing all the supernatural disturbances or the weird townsfolk. There was to be a whorehouse and homo eroticism and shootouts and other Western motifs. I wanted it to be set in Sofala.
its perfect and quite famous because of the Drysdale painting (i didn't want to put a picture of that in this post because, even though i quite like it, I've seen it in really muddy, browny reproductions too many times) Unfortunately Andy Warhol had kinda done the same thing before with his quite great and sometimes alarming "Lonesome Cowboys"(although not with aliens involved...this could lead to an interesting segue about the 1980's film "Liquid Sky" involving junky's and aliens..but its too long winded and not particularly related)
An earlier and perhaps more interesting "Western" was Horse, produced by Warhol and written by Ronald Tavel (who also wrote/conceived many of Warhol's earlier films and was also notable poet/writer himself) Shot entirely in the Factory it was composed of three long take scenes with four characters- Kid,Tex,Mex,Sheriff and a real life horse. It centres around their fairly cruel interactions involving amongst other things- drinking milk,"making love" to the horse,feeling each others "privates" and slapping each other around. Tavel noted "what i really wanted to say was how easily a group of people under pressure could be moved to sadistic acts: to be genuinely inhuman to each other and perhaps a horse".
Of course although the film was written by Tavel, the blase and affectless tone of the film is very much Warhol's. Warhol himself was always fairly disinterested in notions of individual agency and authorship ("Everybody looks alike and acts alike and we're getting more and more that way" or "I think everyone should be a machine, i think everybody should act like everybody")so it always is odd to cite a "Warhol" sensibility. I guess Warhol's disinterest in authorship, or perhaps a greater interest in the absent,coolly detached one, is in itself a subtle defiance against the swaggering macho culture heroes ,of the not just the Hollywood Western in this case, but of the whole modernist art tradition.
Juan Davila "The Arse End of the World" 1994
Anyway enough about Warhol and Westerns lets come back to the arse end of the world and our own culture heroes! Jeez Juan Davila's really nuts isn't he? I would love it if they sold postcards of this in souvenir shops at circular quay. We've always had bit of a tough time in Australia in our relationship to our mythic frontier haven't we?-..America's seems so much more exciting. Ours is summed up nicely in this painting- buggered, futile,sordid and harsh.
Anyway might end this on a more dreamy note where the world is inhabited by floaty Japanese women and spots and horses and theres no borders or frontiers at all
Yayoi Kusama "Horseplay" 1965
........although that might get a little disturbing too
