Beate Rathke

Bio

I grew up in the rural South of Germany, traveled around Europe for three years as a trained stonemason and came to Berlin to study Fine Arts. In San Francisco I joined the Urban Studies program at the Art Institute.

My work deals with the construction of normativity and identity, with a special focus on cowboys.

Statement

Exit Now is a video I produced during my stay in the US from 2006-2007.

Traveling through the country and passing different locations and landscapes I reflected on the idea of “America” by transforming myself into a cowboy.

This figure appears in the picture and stands still without any other action, the surroundings keep moving. Locations are the park of Beverly Hills Hotel, the Native Americans' reservation near Tucson, Arizona, a Motel corridor in San Diego, a tourist “Ghost Town” or a Highway with a blinking sign of a casino (and many more). After several minutes the cowboy steps out of the frame again.

The time in between while the cowboy stands still is a meditation the viewer (like the cowboy “him” self) is invited into, about this appearance and its (non)sense. The cowboy looks displaced, even in a location that seems cowboy-alike. The stillness makes “him” somehow absurd.

The work plays with cultural connotations, with “trying to become a part”, (how can I as a German artist become part of American culture and would I even want to?) - and, after all, with the question “what is America”.

The gender performance also leaves a space open to the question whether “America” is an all-male dream. Of course, the cowboy-image also relates to the making-of a national identity via Hollywood movies and the relation of landscape and nation.