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| "...and the
rain washed the dust from their boots" A man walks in to a college, dressed as a cowboy. He goes about his day like any other day; lecturing, talking with colleagues, filling out paperwork. The next morning the caretaker finds him hanging, still dressed as a cowboy. A man walks in to the street dressed as a cowboy. There are children playing there. He talks to the children and asks them if they want to come in to his house to see his CB radio. Some of them do. A man steps out of his front door dressed as a cowboy. He's got pictures from the Radio Times stuck all over his denim waistcoat. As he walks down the street, people challenge him to imaginary gunfights. He accepts the challenges, then carries on walking down the street. "Their prairie is the High Street and their horse, it has a key" The cowboy is one of the ultimate symbols of male Western machismo. It's a romantic and somewhat skewed idea of what a real man should be. The hat, the boots, the shirts are a psychological armour and a uniform. The urban cowboy is a romantic person. By donning the clothes, they are associating and asking to be associated with a certain time, place and stereotype that may or may not carry negative connotations in the eyes of the beholder. 
S. Mark Gubb gained his Fine Art MA from Birmingham Institute of Art & Design (UCE) in 2003, and was the Wheatley Fellow there 04/05. He is based in Nottingham but has recently had residencies in New York and Poland. He has written for a-n magazine, as well as exhibiting his work nationally and internationally. He is one of the featured artists in the Sideshow Festival
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