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29/2/2008

Print the Legend

The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

curated by Patricia Bickers

This group exhibition brings together diverse and challenging works by contemporary artists from Britain
and Northern Europe in an exploration of the ongoing European fascination with the Western. The gap between the fantasy and reality of the West is invoked in the exhibition’s title – a quotation from the 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’.

Curated by Patricia Bickers, editor of Art Monthly, the exhibition includes work by Adam Chodzko,
Peter Granser, Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Mike Nelson, Cornelia Parker, Simon Patterson, Salla
Tykka and Gillian Wearing.

The Fruitmarket Gallery’s major spring exhibition is a group show which presents a selection of northern European sculpture, photography, installation and film in the context of the western and its role in the creation of the myth of the American West.

Curated by art historian, lecturer, writer and the editor of Art Monthly Patricia Bickers, the exhibition has its origins in her long-standing fascination for westerns and takes its title from a comment in the film The Man who Shot Liberty Valance: ‘Sir, this is the West. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’. Arguing that the western is a key component in the construction of the myth of the American West, and that this myth is as politically and culturally relevant now as it has ever been, Bickers uses the western as a lens through which to look at work by Adam Chodzko, Peter Granser, Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Mike Nelson, Cornelia Parker, Simon Patterson, Salla Tykkä and Gillian Wearing.

Print the Legend offers an opportunity to see some great works of art in a new context. Some, such as Adam Chodzko’s Better Scenery (two photographs of signs, one in London describing a site in Arizona and the other in Arizona describing a site in London), play on the idea of the American West as a semi-fictional construct. Others, such as Salla Tykkä’s film Lasso, emphasise the enthralling power of this construct – the central image of Tykkä’s film is that of a young man spinning a lasso inside his house in suburban Finland. Both Peter Granser and Gillian Wearing deal with the modern compulsion to dress up as cowboys, while Isaac Julien’s complex three-screen film installation The Road to Mazatlan looks at longing and desire and the homoerotic potential of the western.

Three works in the exhibition directly reference particular westerns. A wall drawing by Simon Patterson takes its structure from the shootout in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Douglas Gordon’s Five Year Drive By (The Searchers) is a projection of the film The Searchers, slowed down so that the running of the movie matches the five-year fictional duration of the action, the frame changing at a rate of approximately one every 23 minutes. Faithful to the spirit of the drive-in (or drive-by) movie, the work is projected in the car park opposite the Gallery. It runs continuously throughout the exhibition, the image coming up as the sun goes down. We are particularly pleased to have commissioned Mike Nelson to make a new work, inspired by the climax of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter. Echoing the film, Nelson has painted a part of the Gallery not normally open to the public an unforgiving and hellish red.

Print the Legend is part of an ongoing series of group exhibitions at The Fruitmarket Gallery, in which artists, academics, art historians and writers working outside the Gallery’s structure are invited to bring their expertise into the programme. Like all the exhibitions in this series (which includes David Hopkins’s popular Dada’s Boys of 2006), Print the Legend is unashamedly ideas-driven, and begins with Patricia Bickers’s position as a long-term western fan. Nonetheless, it ultimately cedes the floor to artists, providing a new context in which we can begin thinking about the work, but allowing the art itself, endlessly inventive, the final say.

Image: Douglas Gordon, Five Year Drive-By (The Searchers), 1998, Video projection
Douglas Gordon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery from The Searchers, 1956, dir. John Ford, Warner Bros. Studios Warner Home Video

The Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street - Edinburgh

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