Word: kienholzes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...assembly of junk into metaphoric objects has an ancestry that goes back to Surrealism and German Dada. Joseph Cornell in the 1940s was the first American to base a whole oeuvre on it; Robert Rauschenberg in the '50s picked up on him; and Kienholz in the '60s on Rauschenberg. But whereas Cornell was butterfly gentle and Rauschenberg effusively open, Kienholz was a raging satirist attached to the view from over the top. Show him any kind of Establishment, and he loathed it. Almost from the start his work was about social pain, madness, estrangement. He hated all cant, including...
...Kienholz wasn't a Pop artist; there was nothing benign or accommodating in his view of mass culture. To him the TV set was both America's anus and its oracle. He was a history artist, working in a real-things-in-the-real-world vernacular that was, by turns, scabrous, brazenly rhetorical and morally obsessed. Compared with the thin, overconceptualized gruel that most political art in postmodern America has become--the stuff the Whitney normally favors--Kienholz was red meat all the way. Which doesn't mean that his output was uniformly good. An item like The Ozymandias Parade...
...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...