In the Remington Moment by Stephen Tatum

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By Stephen Tatum

For most folks, the paintings of Frederic Remington conjures an antiquarian international of all issues “western.” Why this can be so, and no matter if it should be so, are of the severe questions raised during this booklet. Stephen Tatum heavily considers chosen work from Remington’s final 4 years of life—his so-called years of serious acclaim. Tatum’s objective is twofold: first, to appreciate those work, either officially and thematically, inside of their ancient, aesthetic, and biographical contexts; and moment, to account for what endows them today—after marking the centennial of Remington’s loss of life in 1909—with carrying on with aesthetic and cultural significance.
 
To this finish, Tatum examines those overdue work with regards to Remington’s different works, his letters and released writings, his evolving severe reception, and the writing and paintings of different cultural figures of the period, similar to historian Frederick Jackson Turner and sociologist Georg Simmel. The publication presents an illuminating glimpse of the way and why specific Remington works may perhaps grab a viewer’s cognizance in his or her earlier or current second of reception—how in truth their risky visible complexity can finally take in their viewer. In his “Coda,” Tatum bargains a private memoir of his personal come across with Remington’s The Love Call, a serious meditation enacting and wondering the “Remington Moment.”

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Whatever its source — I shall variously mention an anxiety over abandonment, over one’s vocational identity or “calling,” over the visible evidence of aging, decline, and mortality — Remington’s transient, noir interworld results in a rather unstable form of nostalgia. Remington’s unstable nostalgic mode troubles those who have and still would 25 1. Frederic Remington, Untitled (Ghost Riders, altern. [c. 1908–9]). Oil on board, 12 x 18 in. 72 cm). 67). consign his work to the dustbin of sentimentality or to mere antiquarian interest.

All told, then, the “surprise” here at the painting’s center — with its structural dynamic of hiding and seeking, exposure and camouflage — involves two dimensions: one is that Remington’s overall composition and handling of cast shadows effectively solicits the viewer to model an oscillating gaze. That is, rather than any fixing of the viewer’s attention along one line of sight, this painting distinctively “calls out” for an alternative, oscillating mode 5. Frederic Remington, Success, 1889–90.

From this perspective the self actively composes itself — “gets it together” or “keeps it together” — by performing a kind of self-holding. It performs this self-holding not so much in reaction to an external (or internal) threat to its overall integrity or wholeness, the sense of the subject being under siege that we typically in Remington’s “surround” compositions. Rather, as signaled by the searching gazes and the particular mode of attention represented on the canvas, it performs self-holding to keep open the possibility of the subject’s eventual discovery of an environment in which the need for such self-holding and self-possession can be let go.

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