While living in Prescott, Arizona, I learned that portions of the 1971 film Billy Jack had been filmed in the town’s historic Courthouse Square. The film follows Billy Jack, a former Green Beret and martial artist who uses violence to defend the students of a progressive Freedom School from hostility within the surrounding community. One of its most recognizable scenes takes place in the courthouse square, where Billy Jack confronts a group of men largely on his own. The location was familiar to me, but so was the physical language of the scene. I had practiced traditional martial arts since 1996 and had spent several years training in mixed martial arts. I began returning to the film through my own body.
Red, White, Black and Blue: The Revenge of Billy Jack grew from the idea of a fictional sequel, returning the character to a country increasingly divided into opposing sides. Working with a friend who holds a black belt in jiu-jitsu, I put myself physically into the action, having him throw me down, drag me across the courthouse grounds and rough me up as we made the photographs. The situations were constructed for the camera, but the force applied to my body was real. An accompanying movie poster extended the fiction beyond the photographs and into the language of cinema itself.
I stripped the photographs of color and removed the landscape in which they were made, replacing the courthouse grounds with a deep black space. The strong Arizona sun provides the primary light, separating our bodies from the darkness and giving the photographs the appearance of a stage. Produced for exhibition at ten by ten feet, the photographs place the viewer physically in front of bodies and confrontations approaching cinematic scale. With much of the original narrative removed, the body is left to absorb the action. It bends, falls, resists, is thrown and recovers. What each figure believes, what each is defending, and which one we identify with are no longer immediately visible.
The title points to the divisions running through the work. Red, white, black and blue suggest the American flag, racial difference, political division and the marks left on the body after physical violence. At the time I was making the work, I was thinking about a country increasingly divided into opposing positions: right or wrong, black or white, red or blue. Each side can understand itself as defending something that cannot be surrendered. Reduced to bodies, light and darkness, those distinctions become harder to locate.
The Western and American action film have long depended upon particular ideas about masculinity and violence. Billy Jack offers the fantasy that a sufficiently capable individual might step into an unjust situation and physically set things right. His violence is acceptable to the viewer because of whom and what he is defending. Bringing him back within a more divided America complicates that certainty. Violence can appear heroic, absurd, theatrical and dangerous at the same time. The body carries out the conflict and bears its consequences. When violence is used in defense of what we believe is right, how do we determine when that violence is justified?