Word: kienholzes
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...Gallery of Modern Art rises King Kong?like next year, Macgregor's museum will lose its title as the country's largest exhibitor of contemporary art, though it will perhaps remain the edgiest. (Indeed, it's hard to think of another local institution gutsy enough to take on Ed Kienholz's sex-and-violence-splattered junkshop assemblages, as the MCA will do in December.) Wandering around its modest new permanent collection space, one senses a cultural flowering just as important as any glassy cathedral to contemporary art. Here the fiberglass manta ray and skater-boy video of former "Primavera" artists...
DIED. WALTER HOPPS, 72, visionary museum curator and influential advocate of American art, particularly the Los Angeles avant garde; of pneumonia; in Los Angeles. The first to create a museum exhibition for Frank Stella and a retrospective of Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, Hopps opened the Ferus Gallery with artist Ed Kienholz in 1957, which became a pre-eminent launching pad for such artists as Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin...
...Kienholz's best tableaus remind you what a long shadow Edward Hopper cast on American art. (It is a fair bet, though, that Hopper would have found Kienholz's raucousness and sexual satire detestable.) The Beanery, 1965, his famous reconstruction of a grungy West Hollywood bar--a little slice of hell, in fact, full of endless chatter, where all the clients' heads are clocks whose hands have stopped for eternity at 10 p.m.--has its affinities to Hopper's Nighthawks. Even the silver G.I.s in Kienholz's great antimilitarist piece, The Portable War Memorial, 1968, have a spectral Hopperish sadness...
...this is the most touching of Kienholz's early works, the fiercest comes out of a job he briefly held in a California madhouse. Through the door of The State Hospital, 1966, you peer into a charnel house of the soul, in which an emaciated and filthy body lies on the lower bunk of a two-tier unit while his doppelganger lies on the one above, encircled by a neon thought balloon. He is the real patient's dream; there is no escape from the confinement and lunacy; one fortifies the other...
Such tableaus, breaking through the crust of American denial and euphemism about old age, madness, sex and death, packed a wallop 30 years ago, and still do today. It's not surprising that the Kienholzes' work was more popular in Europe, particularly Germany, than in their native America: Americans have never had much appreciation of satire, especially in the visual arts. Even today Kienholz's detractors think he was practicing some kind of anti-Americanism (along with the rest of the godless liberal queer whiners favored by the National Endowment for the Arts, natch). Actually, he was at least...