John Menick | Project

I've never been one for Western films. They don't inform my imagination; they seem generations away from my ethical universe. I'm probably not alone in feeling this way: Americans my age weren't raised on a glut of square-jawed cowboys and taciturn Indians. We watched Star Wars. We got our boyhood kicks with G.I. Joes. About the only true Westerns I saw in the present tense growing up were Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves – two late meta-Westerns hardly representative of the genre. Other than those two titles, I can't think of a single major Western that would have appealed to me.

My opinion would be different if I had been born thirty years earlier. There was a time when Hollywood produced over one hundred Westerns a year, peaking sometime in the 1930s. In the Fifties, television appeared and Westerns became cheaper to make for the small screen. From the mid-Fifties to the end of the Sixties the number of Westerns produced by Hollywood dwindled. So too did the careers of the last generation of Western directors. By the end of the Seventies, the Western was dead, with only a few produced every year.

No other genre in the history of cinema died such a dramatic death. Television was to blame, but there was also Vietnam, and a change in American attitudes to machismo, Native American rights, and imperium. In its death throes the Western began to look at its history and its failings, and as with any diminished selfhood, its own identity became its greatest subject.

That's not to say the script changed all that much. Right up until the end Westerns were a very coherent genre. The Western genre is almost comically redundant, employing a structure of plots, characters, and settings so similar only a true connoisseur could judge the real differences between two films. But this similarity is not due to a failure of imagination. What's most important for the genre is the minuteness of differences. While only allowing for small changes, creative decisions become very controlled and extremely meaningful. A slight change of hat color or facial hair can lead to a seismic change in a film's reception. Today no one cares or even notices that the steely-eyed killer in Once Upon a Time in the West was – of all people! – Henry Fonda. And probably not too many people remember that a clean cut Clint Eastwood was ludicrously re-read by Leone as a rough, cigar chomping killer. It's the latter image we retain today, not that of the former non-smoker.

It was these two ideas – the Western as a dead genre and a structurally rigid one – that led me to make Mirage Terminal. The work treats the Western as a cinematic junkyard, a collection of images, sounds, and texts deserted by history. Like The Secret Life of Things, the series is also a work of film criticism enacted through other means.

Works in the series include:

John Wayne Rehearsals (Mirage Terminal), 2008
Series of c-prints, each 36 x 36 inches.

John Wayne Rehearsals II (Mirage Terminal), 2008
C-print, 46 x 94 inches

The End of the End (Mirage Terminal), 2008
Three c-prints, each 30 x 40 inches

The End of the End in Color (Mirage Terminal), 2008
Three c-prints, each 30 x 40 inches

Let's Put the Furniture in the Fire (Mirage Terminal), 2008
Video, silent, black and white, DV, 1'30"

Dead Air (Mirage Terminal), 2008
Video, stereo, color, DV, infinite loop