Page 45 - Studio International - June 1971

assemblage-minded artist in all the tradition of wilful and at the same time insouciant to make
working that way, and he makes full use, one impatient with Kienholz's making for
relentlessly, of all its ploys, with the substantial sensation. Nor can one take the catalogue's
addition of anecdotage and a freedom of jolly attempts at uplift in describing The
movement within his larger environmental Birthday, a torture tableau which, we are to
scale that hasn't been attempted before, except understand, shows that 'from this ravaged
perhaps in certain temporary exhibition torment comes rejuvenation for her and all
installations. He is a thematic artist, and his mankind'. Let's see it then, one feels. Kienholz
themes are less to do with the social protest for is an artist whose personal impetus is deadly,
which he is sometimes commended than with and he plays round the edges of death, in
suffering, the inefficacy of healing, death, a extreme situations of miscarried birth and
strangled infantilism, and the denial of the hideous old age. He is obsessed with the life-
most warmingly tactile experiences, which are span, but without the middle, which is empty.
sexual. And in one of his late 'concept There is nothing for him to lament, no
tableaux', as yet unexhibited, he has come Oldenburgian childhood, and nothing to expect.
nearer to a presentation of the taxidermist's Since he is constantly on the move between
forbidden ultimate: a preserved human corpse infantilism and gerontology there is no use for
in a gallery. the middle years. As can be seen from
Kienholz came out of the late-fifties West literature, all the best poems about maturity
Coast scene, and I imagine that like his are elegies, and the elegiac mode is precisely
friend Wallace Berman, who was a link with what Kienholz's death art does not comprehend.
the beat poets, and the first man to print The most shocking thing about this exhibition
William Burroughs, he was little taken with is that the Portable War Memorial is alone of
Clifford Still sublimities, which must have
been running out by the mid-fifties, when
Kienholz arrived in Los Angeles after a series
of odd jobs. The year that Kienholz and
Walter Hopps opened the Ferus Gallery, 1957,
was also the time of Allen Ginsberg's Howl,
and there are obvious resemblances between
them. Kienholz apparently made large
Schwittersy pieces out of detritus and old wood,
painting them with a broom, and then went on
to do the constructions George Washington in
Drag and John and Jane Doe, in which John
Doe appears as a legless and presumably
penniless cripple in a pram and a similarly
disfigured Jane wears a bridal dress. This was
followed by The Little Eagle Rock Incident, in
which a stuffed deer's head appears, painted
black and fixed on to the painting upside down,
and The Medicine Show, which was box-like.
The show at the ICA begins at this point,
when Kienholz moved into the fully
environmental, with Roxy's, a reconstruction-
cum-reinterpretation of a Las Vegas
whorehouse. The name 'tableau' was taken
from the staged nativity reconstructions he
knew from his youth in rural American
churches, and the tableau itself is specifically
dated 1943, by the calendar, the magazines, squirrel and scattered around the room are the tableaux in being emotionally neutral.
and incidentalia like a photograph of General toys, broken dolls for the most part. Kienholz The tone of his explanation of this piece,
MacArthur. One should get over the irresistible has to be nasty in order not to be banal. reprinted in the catalogue, is so equivocal
comparison with Oldenburg, who also 'made it The Illegal Operation's undeniable power is that I cannot tell what he had in mind. I am
up when I was a kid', who was not a beat poet dependent on one's recognition that abortion merely left with shuddering doubts about his
but wrote the best beat poem, 'I am for an art...' is the place where surgery denies life and undoes intentions. The thing he wants to exhibit is
and whose somewhat unAmerican childhood sex, unerringly needling at a soft spot in the Black Leather Armchair concept tableau.
perhaps led him to avoid the love-hate liberalism. Kienholz similarly undoes Kienholz explains : 'It is possible that I will
relationship to forties America so apparent in Christianity; the Nativity began to take shape never be able to make this tableau as I do not
Roxy's, and in Kerouac and others. But the in his mind when he was sent a knife in the have the chair in my possession at this time. It
drift of Kienholz is quite opposed to Oldenburg, form of a crucifix. The introduction of is stored in an attic in Texas and is the property
since it is concerned with a denial of the crucificial death-motifs in nativity scenes is of a Negro family there. I am told by a friend
therapeutic. In Roxy's the prostitute hardly unknown in Christian art, but the that although the family is reluctant to part
Cockeyed Jenny is on her back, but her bed is a association of Caesarian birth with Caesarian with it, he will be able to get it for me some
sewing machine and it doubles as an death—among these props of a toy hobby-horse time in the future.'
operating table. The Madame's head is a (Joseph's ass) and Mary Virgin as an The leather on the chair is made from the
boar's skull. Five Dollar Billy incorporates a unidentifiable stuffed animal—is sufficiently skin of Kienholz's friend's great-grandfather. q
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