Scenes of ordinary abomination

The Prada Foundation is hosting a rare exhibition on Edward Kienholz (1927-1994), a great exponent of 20th century American art. Under the curatorship of Germano Celant, “Kienholz: Five Car Stud” presents installations made between 1959 and 1994.

Barbara Rose describes Kienholz’s work as “shocking, brutal and effective”, inspired by “repressed unimaginable brutality, sadism and violence” hidden beneath the “polite surface of our organised society”. Kienholz began making his assemblages in the late 1950s. He grew up on the family wheat farm in Washington state, learning carpentry, working with metal and repairing cars. He spent seven years on the road, after which he settled in Los Angeles and helped establish two art galleries there, the second of which, Ferus Gallery (1957), soon became a reference point for the city’s artistic community.

Upon his arrival in Los Angeles, he began making his first large-scale installations and true-to-scale rooms. In 1972, Kienholz started collaboration with his wife, Nancy Reddin, and from 1973 to his sudden death in 1994, the couple co-signed every piece it made. This was when the United States was marked by consumerism, mass culture, the Cold War and racial tension. In the art world, abstract expressionism and its desire for spontaneous and immediate affirmation by the individual was being replaced by land art with its epic character; minimalism and conceptual art with their reduction to the bare essentials; and pop art with its infatuation for mass society. With respect to all this, Kienholz’s work represented at that moment a kind of countermelody. Comparable to that of very few other artists – Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo and Robert Rauschenberg – his work is the expression of a piercing view of American society. Based on realism, combining the excess and redundancy stemming from social customs, his pieces emphasise in a grotesque way the foulness, unwholesomeness and immoderacy induced by consumer society.

Kienholz employed used and discarded objects to create scenes of ordinary abomination: domestic spaces, bars, brothels, amusement rides and other places of entertainment in which daily life is marked by solitude, abuse and violence. The violence is visceral and disintegrates all possible stability. Nothing in such a society can last. Chaos reigns supreme. His human subjects are enveloped in an emotional void. Their bodies are exploited and dismembered by trivial, destructive sexuality. His entire world is in the grip of a kind of sexualisation. Even the objects, ugly and broken, express suffering and desperation. This is how Kienholz brings out the insalubrity and obscenity concealed by society’s facade of respectability. It is clear that in this type of world, the sole certainty is the perpetration of perversion and savagery. Each of Kienholz’s tableaux is a comment on social conventions, the citizenry, the family, morality, what is male and female, home interiors, and pleasure. In The Bronze Pinball Machine with Woman Affixed Also (1980), a pair of women’s legs is grafted onto the front of a pinball machine, reducing the female body to an object of pure sexual entertainment. Jody, Jody, Jody (1994), inspired by an item in the news, depicts a gruesome scene of child abuse. 

The Caddy Court (1986-1987) is a mobile installation with a van spliced between the front and rear of a Cadillac. Inside are Supreme Court justices whose heads have been replaced by the mean snouts of stuffed dogs and wolves. Numerous assemblages incorporate or simulate monitors from which indecent objects or howling animals protrude outward. The invasiveness of television, the colonisation of our imagination, and the stupidity of information are responsible for frustration and melancholy, and they generate monsters. In a 1984 letter to Sidney Felsen, Edward Kienholz writes, “You may have guessed that I have long had a love/hate relationship with American TV. I sit dummy style in front of that marvellous communication tool and find my years slipping by and my mind turning to slush from the 95% trash being beamed my way. To try and understand my on-going stupidity and perhaps to express some kind of critical objectivity I find that I keep making TV sets out of anything that vaguely resembles a TV apparatus (oil containers, block of concrete, surplus jerry cans etc).”

Yet for all its bleakness, Kienholz’s work shows rays of profound, albeit tragic and heart-breaking poetry. In The Nativity (1961), a bizarre three-dimensional representation of the birth of Jesus, the human and holy figures have been substituted by tawdry objects such as decorations for automobiles, lamps and parts of toys. In 76 J.C.s Led The Big Charade (1993–1994), bits of dolls and wagons are transformed into crucifixes. It responds to exalted and imitative religious representations, and more generally to religion in its institutionalised form, devoid of spirituality.

Kienholz’s systematic use of found objects – where he salvages from the garbage things that seem to have concluded their life cycle and are no longer of use to anyone – brings with it a sense of loss and abandonment on one hand, and a feeling of rebirth on the other. It is a poetic act par excellence. The most brutal example of realistic content concludes the show. It is the menacing Five Car Stud (1969–1972) installation, bought by the Prada Foundation in 2012. In an isolated spot surrounded by trees, a scene of gruesome violence unfolds. Five white men are holding down and castrating a black man. Two stunned spectators in addition to us are watching: a white woman and a child.

Interracial violence and hate for mixed couples were rife in the United States at the time, and Five Car Stud is an unequivocal condemnation of it. In reference to this installation, Kienholz spoke of “the weight of being an American”. This piece was presented for the first time at documenta 5 in Kassel (1972) under the curator Harald Szeemann. It was critically acclaimed in Europe, but not so much in the US. More than 40 years have passed since its creation, and Five Car Stud, like much of Kienholz’s other work, is still overwhelming.

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until 31 December 2016
Kienholz: Five Car Stud
Fondazione Prada, Milan
Curator: Germano Celant