Word: kienholzes
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Last week was a lucky week for Les Levine, a 31-year-old leprechaun who was born in Dublin, studied art in London, and has since migrated to New York to become a member of the rapidly expanding environmental school of art. Like George Segal, Edward Kienholz, Jim Dine, Lucio Fontana, Louise Nevelson, Cassen & Stern, Lucas Samaras and a host of others, Levine makes total rooms, not individual works of art. Most environmental artists, however, are lucky if they can manage to get one room displayed at a time in a single city. Last week in Manhattan, Les Levine...
...designed to look exactly like Brillo boxes; cartoons blown up to mural size, complete with dialogue balloons and lithographic dots; old bits of crumpled automobiles presented as sculpture; an old Savarin coffee can containing 18 brushes in turpentine and frozen in ineffable permanency. Sometimes the subjects are erotic. Edward Kienholz's plaster couple makes love in the back seat of a real, if dismembered, car. Larry Rivers' seven-foot, three-faced Negro in plywood achieves vivid connection with a complaisant friend by way of a flashing light bulb. A disembodied female breast by Tom Wesselman looms...
...blinking lights will somehow tug at the imagination, while another will not. That Savarin coffee can full of paint brushes, which is in the Museum of Modern Art at the moment, is a visual bore. But Rauschenberg's goat with a tire around it is somehow amusing. Kienholz's latest exhibit, an abortionist's chair, complete with curette, bloody rags and fetus, has some horrid documentary interest, even if it need not be confused with El Greco's best work. Tony Smith's huge constructions have a presence (even if they are ordered by phone...
...About the Kienholz exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum [April 8]: Thanks for letting us see just what was in that Back Seat. Now we know what we didn't miss by not driving across town to get a peek...
Embalmed Nostalgia. Kienholz's strategy is to preserve the past in his works, coating his junk assemblages in a rock-hard veneer of fiber glass. He handles decay as a time clock between the ever fresh present and the fullness of a lifetime, meticulously reconstructing the scene, down to an original 1943 calendar pinned on the wall of Roxy's. The mustiness that he seeks to enshrine, however, is not embalmed nostalgia. "I think of my art as laying a trail for people," he explains. "They can follow it, and at a certain point I disappear. Then they...