Kienholz:The Son of an Antique Table?

"A protest against a dehumanized, fear-ridden society" Guy Brett on Edward Kienholz.

It was a neat coincidence, or was it, that I chose to visit Blain/Southern's Edward Kienholz exhibition, America My Hometown, the very same day tens of thousands of protestors were marching down nearby Regent Street to mark the visit of the racist, sexually abusive, lying, treasonous, and traitorous Donald Trump (he barely deserves the title President and hopefully soon he'll be divested of it).

Kienholz died back in 1994 so we can't know for certain what he'd have made of the current administration's combination of dishonesty and incompetence but in the works he made from the mid-fifties through to the mid-sixties, before he began collaborating with his wife Nancy in 1972, we can get a good sense that Kienholz probably wouldn't have been impressed. He wasn't afraid of calling out crooks and liars when he felt he had to and if his art, and his techniques, proved a very indirect way of doing this then so be it. It'll take an assault from all angles to bring down this potential despot and his dangerous, planet threatening, ideology.

The press release claims that "America My Hometown traces Edward Kienholz's formative years, showing an artist coming to terms with both his unique vision and the social climate of the US throughout this tumultuous era" before going on to speak of how "raw" and "direct" both Kienholz's work and execution is and how "unsparingly critical" he was "of the political problems of twentieth-century America".

One Day Wonder Painting (1954)

Which is all well and good but you wouldn't necessarily get that just by taking a casual wander through the three rooms of the gallery. You'd be well within your rights to think this is some pleasant installation art that looks interesting but you can't quite understand. The work runs the gamut from abstracted grids to Rauschenbergian combines via Duchampian mind puzzles and even throws in a touch of Ilya and Emilia Kabokov's heavily loaded conceptualism.

Yet the genre that Wikipedia puts Kienholz in is something called funk art. Funk art!? How did I not know about this before? It sounds great. I've never even heard of any of the, predominantly San Francisco based, artists that made up the core of the funk art movement but the gist seems to be that they wanted to keep the jazzy, funky, modern feel that had arrived with Jackson Pollock and his contemporaries but move away from abstraction back towards figuration.

One Day Wonder Painting, with its beautiful blues, greens, and turquoises is pure abstraction. The Nativity is figurative. In the middle there are works like Exodus (whose twisted contorted metal reminded me of Paul Nash's Totes Meer), the fantastically named My Mother Was An Antique Table, or the Franz Klinesque Black With White. The Little Eagle Rock Incident even, perhaps a tad grotesquely, incorporates a decapitated deer's head. I hope it was obtained humanely but the fact that Kienholz has incorporated live parakeets and goldfish in his work gives me cause for concern on that front.

Untitled (1954)

Exodus (1958)

My Mother Was an Antique Table (1956)

Untitled (wood relief) (1956)

Black With White (1957)

The Little Eagle Rock Incident (1958)

In a move worthy of Kurt Schwitters, Ed Kienholz was beginning to collect discarded furniture and other whatnots from the streets of Los Angeles and incorporating them into his art to make, admittedly obscure, political points. The Little Eagle Rock Incident, deer head'n'all, was a reaction to the 1957 race riots at Arkansas Central High School in Little Rock. The taxidermy is one of many powerful aspects of the painting but it's very unclear what he's trying to say about the riots with it.

The Nativity employs all sorts of macabre mixed media, most notably a toy doll whose legs are the only things protruding from a crude tin coffin and appears to lie in lieu of the absent Christ, to create an assemblage that draws you in for inspection just as easily as it both repulses and confuses you. 

The Nativity (1961)

Leda and the Canadian Honker (1957)

A Gift for a Baby (1962)

As a fan of The Fall it was good to see a God-box in the exhibition and, equally, who can't be impressed by a work with as daft a name as Leda and the Canadian Honker? A Gift for a Baby reminded me of some kind of Victorian cabinet of curiosities (which is always good) and The American Way, II has a nifty little back story.

It was sold to a collector under the condition that the work should remain under cover for a full decade. The collector got the work at half price but it was agreed that should the work be unveiled in those first ten years the collector would then have to both pay full price and relinquish the work back to the artist. It appears to be Kienholz's way of highlighting the ludicrous structures, rules, and ethos of capitalism. It also nods back to Rene Magritte's infamous 1928 painting, The Lovers.

The American Way, II (1960)

1960's The Mort Soul Searcher looked like some mangy stray mutt adorned with some Christmas tree lights found in an old box in the attic, America My Hometown makes even more pleasing use of lightbulbs, and The Sky is Falling:Act One has an oddly erotic pull. I don't know if you're sexually aroused by upturned furniture but don't rule it out until you've seen a Kienholz in situ. If his mother was an antique table then why shouldn't a chair represent further femininity?

The Mort Soul Searcher (1960)

America My Hometown (1963)

The Sky is Falling:Act One (1963)

Mother Sterling Revisited continues with the slightly discomfiting themes of objects standing in, at the same time, for both mothers and lovers (there's something very Freudian about some of Kienholz's art). It consists of a pair of shoes resting upon a wax doll which in turn rests upon a small table that is draped in the sort of dirty old bra that begs to be described as a brassiere.

It's a confusing thing to look at as it combines elements both fetishistic and grotesque with more prosaic and quotidian components. It certainly made me think and not along the same lines as Brian Sewell who dismissed Kienholz as "grim, gritty, sordid, and depressing" or the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors who called one of his works "revolting, pornographic, and blasphemous" - as if those are bad things!

Whilst I admired Kienholz's fun, intriguing, aesthetically pleasing, occasionally alluring, occasionally repulsive art I will have to concede most of the political implications of it either went over my head or didn't quite hit the mark. Maybe the times we live in call for a less subtle form of protest.

With that I headed on to Regent Street and joined the huge numbers of people protesting Trump, protesting Putin's virtual ownership of Trump, and protesting the likes of Boris Johnson for sucking up to, and shilling for, Trump. An upturned chair, an abstracted grid, and a dog that looks like a Christmas tree are all great diversions but right now we need to keep our eyes on the main target.

Hopefully Tate Modern, the Royal Academy, or even the Hayward will soon mount a fuller retrospective for Edward, and Nancy, Kienholz and hopefully by the time that happens the demagogues that have cheated their way to the top of world politics will be but a shameful memory, a stain on the 21st century much like the ones Kienholz tried his best to rid us of in the last millennium.

Mother Sterling Revisited (c.1963)