David Rathman

Clementine Gallery, New York
Through October 6

Had he lived in the nineteenth century, artist David Rathman might have found employment as a storefront daguerreotypist chronicling the frontier from some high plains flypaper town. But the Montana native was born into a more ironic age, at several removes from the mythical Old West for which he has a pronounced, if ambivalent, affection. Rathman’s stark ink drawings are sparsely populated by the cowboys, drunkards, gunslingers, and prairie maids of popular legend.

He culls his images from old movie Westerns—specifically the grittily nihilistic spaghetti variety—mixing and matching these with crudely handwritten snippets of found movie dialogue, which serve as both titles and disjunctive captions. Oddly familiar and yet a bit off center, a tinny remark like “doing good just ain’t got no end” acquires a queasy new meaning when paired with a disturbing image showing one man trying to lynch another.

The same goes for a scene of a corseted damsel being addressed by a man reaching for his pistol: “Stella, get a gun or get out of town.” Stylistically following in the footsteps of Raymond Pettibon, Rathman’s vignettes ingeniously recycle the clichés of American myth with equal measures of black humor and parched desperation.

The high contrast of the leathery, sepia-toned ink on a ground of bright white paper suggests dark deeds committed in the bleaching glare of the Western sun. Likewise, Rathman makes ample use of the dramatic silhouette, a cinematic device most closely associated with the Western—just remember John Wayne’s craggy figure pausing in a cabin doorway in The Searchers (1956) and you’ll have a good idea of Rathman’s mise-en-scène. While his lonesome cowpokes and hotheaded desperados (who all seem to range from bad to ugly) are graced with a telling detail here or there—the glint of a cartridge belt, the crease in a ten-gallon hat—they remain skillfully-articulated ink blots, cutout figures just right for a bleak two-dimensional shadow play.

They need not be any more elaborate—we know these characters so well already—and in Rathman’s cultural and gestural shorthand, the Old West is revealed as Beckett or Goya might have envisioned it: stunted and grotesque, laughable and grimly unyielding.




James Trainor