haga Art Journal: Ruckus Rodeo

Ruckus Rodeo, Red Grooms Dec 12, 2004~Feb 6, 2005

Ruckus Rodeo makes spectators participate with the clown of the rodeo environment. Through his larger-than-usual size, walk-through work of art that covers 1,237 square feet of gallery space, grooms shows Forth Worth rodeo alive. In preparation for this wild, mixed-media work, Grooms attended every performance of Fort Worth's 1975 Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show and made reams of sketches. Grooms completed the major figures of the rodeo in his New York Studio. These figures, such as Butter the Bull, the Rodeo Queen, the bronco rider. In fort Worth in 1976, with a group of artists known as the "Ruckus Construction Co", Grooms completed the final assembly of the figures, summarized from http://www.themodern.org/ruckus.html.

The works consist of three dimensional sculptures, rodeo characters, and two dimensional paintings, the audiences. Burlap paintings, on the ground, stand for the sand in the rodeo field. The figure below shows the layout of the rodeo I saw.

The Layout

The Art Works

Grooms uses many techniques to express his ideas:

Picture	Techniques/Design Principle	Note
The horse and the flying cowboy.	The three dimensional sculptures contrasted with two dimensional audiences, catch the spectators' focus. The larger scale sculptures also let the rodeo itself becomes the focus. You can easily notice that the flying cowboy is bigger than the audience. The flying cowboy's gesture and position imply the motion of the Rodeo.	The bucking horse and the angle of its front legs seem like a groovy, puckish kids that fights with cowboys and powerfully makes the cowboy flying out and another thrown into audiences.
Half horse reveal the collision to a cowboy. 2D Audiences.		The sculptures are actually larger than the real Rodeo.
The hands on the ground.	The burlap itself looks like texture of soil, but not the same. The hand and foot prints on the ground make you feel that someone was there and let you feel the movement of time, and the time was just frozen. Through high-intense colors, and complementary color scheme, the rodeo becomes more active.	This kind of texture has sharper angles, which make the art work look like cartoon style.
The Entrance of Ruckus Rodeo	The position of spectators in the museum is in the middle of rodeo field, which is not usual position when you see the rodeo.	We entered it from another entrance. The entrance is actually between a cowboy's legs. You can see the use of chaps on the legs. This is for protection against the back of the horse scraping against skin. By the way, I know this is humorous. However, in Chinese culture, it is a shame to pass through someone's legs. It implies that the person who passes the door would not be successful forever.
I can still feel I was watched.	The audience is divided into two sections. One is in the front and the other is in the back. Contrasts in elements are used: The size of the front is bigger and has more detail in it. The front steep white area strengthens the depth of the view, and the back part is just a kind of two dimensional painting. For the back section, a monochromatic color scheme is used for the seats and major part of the painting, which is in contrast to the colorful front part. The lines of the ally in the painting and darker and smaller sizes of the audience help to construct the space so that it looks like a stadium. The mixed atmospheric perspective and linear perspective create a very unique perspective.	I felt that different colors show different atmospheres of the audiences, which increase the momentum and variety of the environment.
The hanging hat.	Some subjects in the Ruckus Rodeo are hanged in the air. This lets audiences feel the motion of the Rodeo.
Strange thin-body men.	The two guys that hold up a person at the gate are very abnormally thin and make me feel that these two guys are taller than usual.	In my opinion, Groomers does not try to create another clown of rodeo show. Instead, he extracts his observations and exaggeratedly transfer them into another form.
Is she Rodeo Queen? The horse also looks at her. FUNNY.	The complementary colors (green and red) are a very bright combination that makes this piece active.	The horse eyelash infers feminine and looks like a figure in cartoon. This is a typical style of comedy, or say Pop art.
Struggling bull. Look at the movement!	The impossible angle of human body on the bull exaggerate the movement of violent shake when the cowboy fighting the bull.