David Levinthal’s polaroids of cowboy dolls which recall memories of Gunsmoke, Saturday afternoon matinees, and a 1950s imagination of the American West, will be on view September 13 through January 24 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Cowboy Corridor features twenty-eight seductively realistic images of cowboys and other icons of the American West drawn from Levinthal’s Wild West series.
The figures in Cowboy Corridor possess the larger-than-life quality of television characters and reflect Levinthal’s continuing fascination with dolls as archetypes of the American imagination. In Levinthal’s photographs, dolls embody the idealized qualities of cultural icons, yet are infinitely compliant with his artistic will. Levinthal’s approach to this unusual medium has earned him notoriety with such series as Blackface, Desire, or the German war series he created with Garry Trudeau in 1972.