VUK VIDOR by Richard Leydier
Inside / Outside
in ANNUAL Art Magazine
We live in schizophrenic times. The human soul is torn this way and that, pulled in contrary directions by multiple-personality disorder: our experience is so extensive and varied that, even if taken as a whole, it cannot sketch out the slightest basic truth about being. We lack the time and distance to rearrange the Arcimboldo-like picture of our sensations. Between what we project and think we know about ourselves, we basically don’t know who we are – and we lie to others just as we hide from ourselves.
Vuk Vidor pays heed to this fragmentation and translates it, in artistic terms, into formal eclecticism. Over the last twenty years his body of work has included paintings, installations, sculptures, videos, and statements about art history. From one medium or series to the next, there is little to suggest that this ensemble is the work of the same artist. Vidor is keen to open up the field of his means of action, and leaves no path unexplored; but we can also sense a desire to hide behind sheer weight of numbers – to avoid being classified or identified at all costs. In a statement painted on a wall at the Palais de Tokyo, he listed the names of artists whose work is immediately recognizable because they have created their own logo, from a motif, subject or form: Mondrian owns geometry, Baselitz owns upside down, Boltanski owns memory, Buren owns stripes… Vidor borrows from all the forms in art history. He is one and several, at one and the same time.
Some of his works consist of an amused commentary on the world as it is – on humanity, capacity for turning a blind eye to what, corning. His installation “If You’re Looking for Trouble” features the word EVILS spelt out in light-bulbs like a large, illuminated Broadway sign, alongside the images of Elvis Presley playing the guitar and Vidor in paramilitary gear with a kalashnikov – symmetrically facing one another in a photographic diptych, like a Rorschach, test. Further on, a gilded guitar and assault-rifle confront one another, as if in a duel whose outcome is not in doubt. The title of the ensemble comes from the Elvis song Trouble, whose lyrics (Well I’m Evil / So don’t mess around with me) play on the anagram Elvis/Evils. The work evokes how the changing references of today, youth. Previous generations worshipped rockers and flamboyant guitar heroes.These days – from the child-fighters of Liberia to war in the Balkans (Vidor hails from Serbia), not forgetting Iraq – soldiers are the idols of the young. Rifles have replaced guitars; the yearning for destruction has replaced the all-important need to create. Evil seems to have extinguished the glimmer of dream and hope that belongs to adolescence.
This idea of all-conquering machismo recurs in Vidor, installation Super-Ego. In the centre stands a statue of the artist making the three-fingered salute used among Serbs: a veritable monument to the narcissism of a people who, according to an American study, have a higher opinion of themselves than any other national community in the world. On the ground, emanating from a map of Serbia as if it were the centre of the universe, the rays of this baroque glory lead to other works – notably an ensemble of six hundred photographs of the artist with pretty women (My friends are more beautiful than yours); nearby is a selection of works chosen by artist-friends, either showing Vidor, or forming self-portraits (My friends are better artists than yours). In Super-Ego, nationalistic folly collides with artistic vanity.
Compared to these works, with their earnest or humorous denunciations of humanity, martial instincts, the strange paintings and drawings Vuk Vidor has produced since the early 1990s result from more interior visions. They are haunted by animals: a skinny dog, or a vulture we cannot see at first, as in the famous painting by Leonardo Da Vinci. A male profile keeps returning. It looks dissected and écorché, like some anatomical print. Is this the artist, profile? Or the profile of archetypal humanity, fragmented by global violence? It sometimes has a pointed beard, implying a link with Satan – evil lording it over a realm of skulls, bones and torn-out hearts that float to the surface of the canvas. This is surely where Vidor, message installations and enigmatic paintings coincide – where the exterior and interior meet up in a vision of the world that reflects a heightened awareness of human nature. Vuk Vidor, works may well be eclectic but, in these troubled times, he no doubt knows who he is.
VUK VIDOR
Texte de Jean-Luc Chalumeau
Combien sont ils, depuis Baccio Bandinelli au XVIe siècle se représentant en « Jupiter vainqueur du lion de Némée », parmi les artistes, à avoir un ego démesuré ? Ils sont évidemment innombrables et, aujourd’hui, la championne du genre me parait être Mariko Mori, grande prêtresse d’un nouveau syncrétisme annonçant l’accomplissement de « l’harmonie éternelle de l’esprit humain ». Vuk Vidor auto-représenté dans une statue dorée faisant le salut serbe (main droite en l’air, trois doigts tendus) est-il différent de Mariko Mori glorieusement installée dans sa capsule spatiale ? Son installation SuperEgo, visible à la galerie Magda Danysz jusqu’au 24 décembre, semble répondre négativement à la question : Mariko Mori est désarmante de sincérité (peut-être de naïveté) alors que Vuk Vidor apparaît comme un dandy essentiellement désabusé. Né en Yougoslavie en 1965, vivant en France depuis l’âge de deux ans, devenu artiste par osmose, son père étant ‘un des plus importants peintres contemporains, sa démarche est celle d’un opposant. On se souvient de son mur peint à la boutique Blackblock du Palais de Tokyo en 2006 : The Blood Value of the Banana qui s’en prenait à l’impérialisme américain en Amérique latine ; Aujourd’hui, SuperEgo s’attaque au nationalisme serbe (le plus virulent au monde selon une enquête récente). Vidor, pour mieux moquer la « folie inaltérable » de son peuple, s’identifie à elle en prenant la posture de l’artiste « monstre d’égoïsme, narcissique et imbu de lui-même ». Le socle de sa statue est posé sur une carte de la Serbie d’où partent, peints sur le sol, des rayons allant dans toutes les directions, manière de dire que la Serbie se prend pour le centre du monde. Sur les murs, des peintures (Vuk Vidor en Saint Sebastien percé de huit flèches) et des interpellations en américain : « My friends are better artists than yours » ou « My friend are better looking than yours », laquelle est illustrée par des dizaines de photographies de l’artiste en compagine d’autant de pulpeuses jeunes femmes. On est tenté de rire, mai Vidor nous arrête vite : dans l’un des tableaux exposés, on distingue des figures disloqués, un crâne, et une croix gammée. Titre : My country in miniature !
Vuk Vidor, déçu de l’Amérique des super-héros réduits à l’états de chiffes molles est aujourd’hui désespéré par la Nation de ses ancêtres. Il a des questions gravissimes à poses (un artiste n’a pas à donner de réponse), et il le fait avec l’élégance d’un humour qui ne l’épargne pas lui-même. SuperEgo, au premier étage de la galerie, ne constitue qu’une partie de l’exposition, deuxième étape de son Quartet américain, de bout en bout passionnante. Vuk Vidor, parvenu à maturité, se révèle comme un des artistes les plus originaux de sa génération.
Editorial du 10-12-2009
VUK VIDOR
On ne décrit pas la peinture de Vuk Vidor : trop variée, trop surprenante, trop mystérieuse dans certains cas. Mais c’est de la peinture. Pas de la peinture pour (com)plaire. De la peinture très personnelle sans doute (nombre de motifs sont liés à la vie intime de l’artiste), mais aussi de la peinture de combat avant toute chose. Donc un combat mené non pas hors de la peinture (ce genre décrié, paraît-il) mais franchement dans la peinture, celle d’aujourd’hui (elle n’est pas morte : faites passer la nouvelle), inséparable de celle d’hier. Sur la peinture et son histoire, Vuk Vidor a des idées très claires, très percutantes, qu’il lui arrive de proclamer avec un brio réjouissant. “…Vuillard was better than Bonnard, Tapiès was always the same, Rauschenberg was better before, Twombly always painted shit, Bacon was better alive ” affirme-t-il notamment dans une peinture-écriture récente (” Art History, part 2 “,1999). Un vrai manifeste, parfaitement jubilatoire.”
Jean Luc Chalumeau.
HARLAND MILLER & VUK VIDOR
I’M STILL STANDING
at the Soho House, London, 17 July 2009
Vuk Vidor: You and I come from small place’s; you from a small northern English town, me from a small East European country…
Harland Miller: I’ve never thought of your country as being small!
VV: Well it is now, it shrank… let’s say we come from peripheral places, not the usual centers, and somehow this has affected us. I know it’s important for you. I remember when we first met you were always telling stories about it. You were attached to where you came from, and it emerged in your work…
HM: I still am. I think it’s probably about a journey to make, from a smaller place to a bigger place; it seems to be the right way round, logical. But it’s just as logical to go from a big noisy metropolis to a quiet village -when you’re trying to get your head together if the big metropolis is screwing you up. But if you come from a small place…. I don’t want to sound like a hippie, but that small place is always inside you, and you come to the big place, and you can somehow deal with it, and if it’s fucked up you can always console yourself with the fact that you didn’t come from there…
VV: I was in restaurant with Peter Beard once, and for some remote reason I was showing him some stuff I was doing about Yugoslavia and the break-up of the country, etc… And he said “this thing is where you come from, and you own this thing,” and that triggered in my head the whole “Art History” piece I did, which was about how some artists take on gimmicks in order to assert their identity or be identified with something by “owning” it. And in a way, for me, the identity came from where I’m from, and it transpires in the work whether I like it or not, as it does in what my father is doing. In your case, when I met you, you were making
these huge paintings with books stuck on them, and you had just done a little painting which was the first ever of the Penguin paintings, a really trashy one with “I’m So Fucking Hard” on it – the Hemingway one – and I told you “this is yours, it’s your thing, it’s English, you should do that’s… and ‘eventually, later, you did…
HM: And I didn’t want to do it, it felt different, it looked different; but now, looking back, it all makes sense, because all my early work was paintings of books, or I used to stick books on the paintings and painted on them, or do paintings based on pulp novels with really trashy covers that I would buy from junk shops in England. They were paintings themselves, not photographs, and they had an out-of-fashion quality to them which appealed to me; and I did these girls paintings based on Dope books, where you had the odd girl lying on the bed with a shady character in the back, ready to satisfy her tug habit and abuse her… and I did nurses way before Richard Prince did… And when I went to Paris I found a lot of those books with blondes on the cover in some post-sexual reverie, but they were in French, and I didn’t understand the titles. So I made them up, like 24 Hours To Betty, and at the time my girlfriend had been to the Betty Ford Clinic so I was making it personal – and that was the most enjoyable, thrilling element or aspect of the whole process. So, for the next one I did, I found it was quite a slug to go through all the painting of it just to write the title – so when I came up with the Penguins I was really pleased, the emphasis was all on the title and I could leave these great areas almost like colourfield abstraction. On top of that there were all these Pop Art elements I always liked…
VV: With bits of Larry Rivers…
HM: And Warhol, because once I did one I wanted to repeat it, and do them over and over; I couldn’t think I’d ever do the perfect one, it’s impossible… the thing with series is it’s hard to stop – or you need to start more series…
VV: It’s like having several rail tracks side by side, and pushing the trains on to all of them at the same time: the thing is not to get boxed-in. HM: It’s the only way to travel, going places with lots of series… but the Superheroes you’ve been doing are not that restrictive, because the composition varies from one to the other, and they’re real paintings; I often worry about the Penguin paintings because there’s a struggle to reinvent it, and to have the way you painted it reflect the title. Some are very dry and thick, then those which are about memory are lighter and blue, and you let the paint do its own thing and drip. VV: Those are more about where you’re from and your past.
HM: Yes, the grim and glorious North: the paint looks like rain and sea and mist and condensation, so that’s how it worked, and now I’ve been working on paintings based on the Yorkshire Ripper and the posters put up by the police to find him…
VV: You talked about that years ago.
HM: I only have a few good ideas!
VV: It’s amazing how long it takes to get something done. You get all these ideas and 5, 6, 7 years on you finally start doing it.
HM: When I was younger I used to have 4 or 5 ideas a week! But then you get older, marry, have kids… those sort of things don’t get in the way, but they do slow you down.
VV: I find it healthy sometimes to sit in the dark and go back to what it was that first drove me, because once you’re on the road you might loose it along the way – so many things interfere, so you make a full circle and say: “OK, I was really right to go there and believe in it, and it was good, even though I’ve never been in any ‘hot’ groups, and I saw all the trendy trains go by, I realized time is not an issue; I’m not gonna be a Basquiat and burn fast, so I might as well be like Bacon, who started late and did it until his last drop of life, there’s no hurry:’
HM: The most interesting artists for quite a while now, when they arrived on the scene, were called Young British Artists, and they’re still called that even though some of them are dead, like Angus Fairhurst. But that happened when he was 40 wouldn’t have happened when he was 29, and things were exciting… so the rest aren’t young anymore, but there hasn’t been another crop of interesting artists since, helping each other to get along and strengthen their own position.
VV: Everything is fragmented now, inside and out; I actually think of myself as a fragmented artist because of all the various directions and series I do. My interests are paramount and, since you are constantly under the pressure of being “identified”, I feel OK being “fragmented:”
HM: Yes, you can, and it’s no longer the problem for the people who go “Well, what does he do, is he a painter or a film-maker?”They don’t say that about Schnabel… Actually they do, because they don’t like his paintings but they love his films… But as far as I’m concerned he does both really well, he’s doing the same thing when he’s painting and directing. But the things we do – are compelled to do – come from what activated us when we were younger; it’s not really what happened last week that I’m going to do any work about, that all brushes off, but it’s fine now to do different things. I wrote a book (Slow Down Arthur) so for a while it looked like I was going to be a writer, then I got back to painting and luckily people liked it, especially since I’d been painting books…
VV: There’s always that need for classifications and barriers, a simplification made for selling purposes, which is like a curse.
HM: You get pigeon-holed, so you stay in your corner for a while and don’t cause any trouble… When I was a writer in residence at the ICA, there were these twins, two girls from Denmark or Amsterdam, who were properly anorexic and were expressing themselves through an installation featuring themselves; it was not about their weight, but what the British people and critics got hung up about was that the two girls were anorexic and needed a good meal. So I went to a debate about them and their work, and one woman said typically: “One doesn’t know how to categorize them!” That was more important than the fact that these girls might face an early death, and were ill because of whatever… And she was perturbed by not knowing how to categorize them, more than the fact that they were ill… I wonder if it’s the same in France?
VV: The same, yes, everyone likes pigeon-holes… but what’s interesting to me is to literally “stretch the canvas”- making it harder to comprehend the work at first, until you get the full picture. It’s better, because you’re not absorbed quickly, you’re not a Kleenex tissue but a riddle; you may be rejected or suspicious, but you’re not consumed fast; that, to me, is an advantage. You need to slow down somewhere, blur the image…
HM: I think that’s what Schnabel has achieved. He wanted to make a tribute to Basquiat, and made a film, and it was the best way; then he did another one and realized “Hey! I can do this!” If you’re trying to tell a story, painting really is the most difficult medium to do it with; it’s very frustrating, a frozen moment even if you do a post-modern image with lots of layers and elements. But looking for an emotional response is harder within the boundaries of a painting than in a film, with its music, imagery and words… and the element of time. You need to fill all these components and, with painting, you’ve got one component – so as an artist if you’re trying to tell stories and you discover film, you’re happy, like some artists are now. Sam Taylor-Wood is doing a film about Lennon’s early life, and it’s beautiful… Steve McQueen’s was great.
VV: There’s an interesting notion about painting or the practice of it: it’s a job you do standing up, as opposed to all the jobs people do sitting down, and that posture in itself – however selfish or pretentious – also has an
“heroic” side to it, because it involves so many aspects which most people don’t grasp at first.
HM: Unless you’re Chuck Close! There’s got to be compensation for doing super-realist paintings, sitting down all day smoking… Life’s too short to be a super-realist… I used to be a super-realist…
VV: You can do that. You were good at it.
HM: Thank you. But, you know, I did it standing up. I never sat down.
VV: Yours were very big thoughts, but all in all we just have to carry on doing it, whatever it is.
HM: “I’m Still Standing!” as Elton John would say. He’s got quite a good collection actually, he’s quite involved in the art world. I would love to be able to collect myself.
VV: Me too, I have a secret list of the art I’d like…
HM: But I’ve decided that’s probably not going to happen, you know… But all those people we talked about earlier, like Damien (Hirst) etc… I made swaps with them all, so I’ve got quite a nice collection now, but I haven’t got anything like a Bacon…
VV: You can only swap with the living! We have to do one too. I want to have one of yours in that project of mine called Superego, which is all about “nationalistic madness meets egotistical artist;’ in which I made a statue of myself in gold, with my arm raised with the Serbian “three fingers” sign, standing on a blood red cut-out map of Serbia with bright yellow sun-rays going from under me to the ends of the room, and a yellow mattress with over 600 photos of me, with mostly girls… my Jean Pigozzi tribute! I was really taking the piss out of the whole ego trip, national and personal, and one of the elements of it is having my artist friends do a piece either about me, or about themselves, and I put them all together on the wall, and above it I write “My Friends Are Better Artists Than Yours”… So I need a Penguin painting! Something like the International Lonely Guy, because I want to show the project again, in Paris this time.
HM: It’s my company’s name now! I’ve done it quite a lot, and my book was called that, so I either stopped it or got it further, so I decided to push it further… but it takes time to create a context. I’ll be doing a show in Dublin soon, and it’s also an island with more of a literary history than a visual history, and most of my paintings are filed with some kind of Northern sarcasm which you probably also get in other northern industrial cities, where people have developed a resilience, expressed mostly through humour, and that’s the basis of my work… I think we’ve come full circle now!
VV: So you’ll make some green Penguin paintings for them… standing up.
Richard Leydier: Questions for Vuk Vidor
ANNUAL Art Magazine
RICHARD LEYDIER: Your work takes very diverse formal directions. What is the link between your installations (i’m thinking of the “SuperEgo” project you showed last year at the Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris), your sculptures, your statement pieces, your computer altered pornographic images and your more anatomical paintings of anthropomorphized figures? How do you deal with your eclecticism?
VUK VIDOR: A few years ago I did what you refer to as a statement piece, called “Art History”. It was a print designed as a list, in an obituary style, of famous artists and what defines them artistically; the fact that you could immediately associate them to a style or a gimmick made them “own” it. So you had “Pollock Owns Drippings”, “Ryman Owns White” or “Arman Owns Accumulation” etc… I decided to define what I was doing differently: I looked at the linear progression of artistic movements and their relations to history. How Catholicism was the sole sponsor of the arts for centuries for the obvious reasons that a God or a King always needed a good painting or a good sculpture to glorify his existence. How the reactions towards established rules created successive fractures and opened new doors for representations and the practice of art all the way into the 20th century culminating with Dada and Surrealism. How we then moved into a more Anglo-Saxon or Protestant system after the Marshall Plan which clearly put the USA as the new leader of art trends and movements with its heroes and their recognizable sets of gimmicks. That functioned more or less into the 80’s and then it all exploded into many fragments. Everything came in and everything came out, everything could happen at the same time… So I thought of Art and its practice as a Buffet… You take what you want according to your hunger and needs. We live in a fragmented world where the metaphors of the digital age can be applied to many new transformations within our lifestyles and habits. For me it became obvious that I couldn’t satisfy my needs and visions with one form of representation only. Different subjects and projects had to take, demanded, other forms. And I was also interested in reacting to the outside world, not just be turned towards the inside. So projects which had a more political or social aspect had to take various shapes which included installations, video, digital prints, sculpture, lights and sound. And then the idea that the artist was entering a new mutation took place. The idea of the Hybrid Artist, surfing on all mediums, open to all possibilities and propositions, not boxed in into one style which could become a prison but to several layers of them. For the viewer it might be a problem, since the image is blurred, but it just takes more effort and time to get into someone’s work. For me it became a way to not be absorbed immediately by a fast-art market. I want to be a long runner not speed racer… In a way I try to escape the “Art History” paradigm…
RL: These paintings I last mentioned above seem to constitute a separate production. It’s an opus that you’ve been pursuing for a while now in parallel with other series. Are these paintings where we should look for something that could be called the “essence” of your work?
VV: They are the essence because they come from the dark and grey areas of my mind, like a flow. They are instinctive and impulsive… That made me consider for a long time that the true essence of any true artist can’t be analyzed or explained through concepts, it can only be interpreted and contemplated which is a heresy in contemporary art theory. The Artist is the connector, materializing shapes coming from a beyond onto a canvas, a paper, a piece of wood or metal. These paintings and especially the drawings which are the base for them are the dark side revealed, an immaterial world where everything clashes with fury. That in itself is in a complete antagonism with anything which tries to define Art today where there is no place for the unknown, the immaterial, the undefined or the unreal. It is really the part of my work which is the most constant one because it seems there are endless possibilities of exploration and interpretations, it is timeless which is not the case with some projects which are “reality” oriented or are driven by an event or an idea… fixed in time and space.
RL: These days you’re re-working on some of your older paintings. For what reason? What more can you bring to them? When is, according to you, a painting finished? Do you consider a painting to be a living organism, susceptible to grow and age with time?
VV: It seemed to me that those images were lacking some dimensions which had to do simply with my immaturity. I would do them very fast and not get into them more deeply. I had a huge misbalance between the amount of drawings I was doing and the paintings which were resulting from them, so I was in a hurry to get to the next one. I could also see the errors that I could try to fix. A painting has a life of its own, at one point it just escapes, it doesn’t belong to you anymore; that’s the moment when whatever you add or withdraw won’t alter its essence or impact. Some painters like Howard Hodgkin or Peter Blake endlessly work or rework on their paintings, sometimes long years pass before they consider them finished, it’s about layers and subtleties only they can see. The way a painting changes through time is by the way you look at it, the beholder is the one who gives it a different meaning or perception. The painter’s job is finished when the hand has nowhere else to go on the canvas surface, it just stops.
RL: You recently took part with other artists to a curious show- performance, “Speed Painting” at the Magda Danysz Gallery where you all had to paint a picture in 99 minutes. Is the time (long or short) it takes to make a painting essential in its achievement?
VV: The idea behind the “Speed Painting” performance was actually validated by the comments we received after it was over: people (and not just visitors but “experts” from the Art World) where truly surprised to see we could pull it off and produce paintings which could exist and work. 99 minutes is a constraint in which you have to compress and simplify your actions, go to the essential; that can work or not according to your ambition and also your way of painting, but it’s a good exercise because it also resets some perception of the work itself. Painting is a discipline and a craft. You can make a great image in 10 minutes or struggle on it for weeks and get nowhere so the time of a painting is a time of its own, it’s a time out of time, probably a mental time because you can easily loose the sense of time when you’re in the action. I mentioned how that performance could reset some perceptions of what it is to make a painting, to be a painter. It seems we’ve gone very far in order to try to modernize the idea of the artist: He’s an entrepreneur, a studio director, a tribe guru, a production manager, a digital nomad, a social activist… But what kind of work comes from it all? What answers does it give or try to give? What does it tell about us, today, here and now? I believe in the Hybrid Artist as an open system filtering flows of informations inside and outside of his own set of black boxes, it seems impossible to be otherwise. But I also believe in the Studio. I believe in the Artist standing alone in it, brush in hand, ready.
Art Press no 339 (November 2007)
Superheroes Can’t Save Us Now! by Vuk Vidor
Superheroes Can’t Save Us Now!, a solo exhibition of paintings and laser cut sculptures by Franco-Serbian artist Vuk Vidor, opened on September 6th at Cueto Project in Chelsea in New York. This exhibition is the second part of a project titled “American Quartet”, in which the artist deals with his interpretations of symbols and archetypes as seen through the current prism of today’s America. Appropriating comic strip superhero characters, Vidor lavishly represents them as tired, deflated and defeated figures, infiltrated and disarmed by tear. These colorful and at first, seemingly pop » paintings show figures in pensive and vulnerable poses and situations. Vidor uses them to describe his view of America and the world’s current political and power landscape. The “pop” aethetic used by the artist has a purposefully cloying effect when set against the sombre subject-matter of the works. In a few of the paintings, for example, the superhero characters are depicted with a conversation bubble with no words. Traditionally, comic book conversation bubbles express power with words such as ” barn » and pow » whereas these empty one convey silence. In a more subtle manner, the viewer also comes across religious references and Christian imagery, more precisely the Passion of Christ which can be found in most of the paintings in the exhibition. Vuk Vidor’s laser-cut sculptures are fantastically sparse works created with minimal, linear gestures. His characters are depicted as contorted forms and even seem to be dripping or melting. His drawings, presented in a secuence similar to comic strips present non-linear narratives of a superhero and his perils. These drawings contain appropriately ominous phrases such as : « an eye for an eye », « the peril and the power» and « what price life », setting the tone and serving as a catalyst for their reading. In one of the laser cut sculptures, the word terror » is inscribed in the same font and style as in Halloween decorations, again subversively creating tension by drawing in this childlike « pop » element and pairing it with serious political connotations. Part one of « American Quartet >, first introduced the topic of fear by dealing with the image of the expired idol no longer symbolizing a Rock Star, but transformed into a paramilitary/terrorist. Part Three and Four will furtherexplore the topic of fear in a diversity of media : monumental sculpture, installation ; and a film installation. The later will be loosely based on a novel by Sam Shepard and will question the stereotype of the Wild West and the Cowboy. As stated by the artist himself, << America, Land of Modern Myths is confronted with the validity of the very myths which helped create the mightiest country on Earth. This project doesn’t have the pretension to be politically relevant, but only to question a possible reality and illustrate it. Which in essence, is also political…. »
By Silvia Karman Cubina (Executive Director and Chief Curator
Bass Museum of Art, Miami)