the west is in us

You enter a room and watch comboys at a campfire. Beautiful, and seen in so so many movies good and bad. There is also a woman in front of a house, on another screen. And an outside view on an apparently deserted Western town. Then the Cowboys start talking.

This is a bit of what you see in Julian Rosefeldts video "American Night" that I encountered yesterday during Berlin Gallery Weekend at Arndt & Partner. Rosenfeldt, Munich-born, reflects surprisingly subtly on what it might mean to be American. He also has a thing or two to say about what the self-understanding of America means for all of us. In his work, not only in American Nights, he engages with the American myths, and with the nightmares of a superpower that has become vulnerable. (At one point, the Western town is attacked by "move move"-US-soldiers jumping out of a helicopter.)

The American nightmares in American Nights are our nightmares. We all have internalized not only Western myths, but also the neverending and never-winnable fight for the ultimate freedom. A fight most American movies, not only Western movies, refer to, honor and trivialize at the same time. Whether watching these movies or not, we have internalized their cultural fabric. This is why our internal America responds so easily to the strong pictures in Rosefeldt's videos. Of course it is all facade, he says, and shows this towards the end. But the facades in us are part of what makes us. And they are what makes us creative, Rosefeldt I think also wants to say, with many references to film history and Hollywood production modes.

He also refers to European film history. American Nights is the translation of a Godard film title. And the videos are shot in Almeria, the Southern Spain area that gave us the landscape for the Spaghetti Western, one of the few brilliant European deconstructions of American mythology.