Word: kienholzes
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...artist Edward Kienholz's last piece was his burial, which took place at a hunting cabin he owned on top of a mountain in Hope, Idaho, in 1994. He had died of a heart attack at age 65, and now his corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe. There was a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him and the ashes of his dog Smash in the back. He was set for the afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes, the Packard, steered...
...retrospective of 120 works by Kienholz, now at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art, is a pretty good tribute to this profuse, energetic, sometimes brilliant and sometimes very corny artist. Kienholz didn't believe in refinement. What he believed in was a combination of technical know-how, moral anger and all-American barbaric yawp. Moving through the show is like being alternately slugged and hectored by a redneck Godzilla with strong libertarian-anarchist convictions. His truck used to have ED KIENHOLZ--EXPERT painted on the door. You might not trust Roy Lichtenstein to frame a shed...
...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...
Rosenberg, contacted at his office yesterday,said "There's not much we can say" about theincident. Kristi Kienholz, a spokesperson atChildren's Hospital, said Rosenberg could notcomment further because of the ongoinginvestigation...