Word: kienholzes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Surprisingly, what the people saw has all the surface appeal of a ten-week-dead rabbit. Kienholz is the man who immortalized (and cannibalized) an entire Los Angeles bar to make The Beanery (TIME, Dec. 17). His grotesque assemblages are covered with epoxy and fiber glass. They bristle with real bones, felt-covered bric-a-brac, and unglamorized junk. "All the little tragedies are evident in junk," he says, and he has made the junk heap his souvenir album...
...Viewer as Voyeur. There are those who see Kienholz's 47 collected works as an album of brilliant satire; others dig him as a kind of beat Savonarola; some consider him a blatant pornographer. The show, in fact, almost did not come off. County officials threatened until opening night to ban it, held off only in the face of a firm trustee and museum-staff declaration that "a great museum, like a great library, acquires, displays and studies, but does not pass judgment; only society, present and future, can do that...
Drawing the chief epithets was Kienholz's 1964 work Back Seat Dodge-'38, composed in part of a truncated '38 Dodge. In the back seat, amid a debris of cigarette wrappers and beer bottles, is a partial plaster figure of a girl being fondled by a man fashioned out of chicken wire. When the car door is opened, a light floods the interior and the viewer is as startled at seeing himself reflected as voyeur in the mirrors inside as he is by the scene before...
Bigness Is Sickness. Kienholz himself sees his work as morality plays, as subtly scripted, static happenings. If they shock, it is merely to catch attention. Of Back Seat Dodge-'38, the artist says: "I think, when kids see where they are and why they are, I really think they would have second thoughts about what they're going to do with their lives. With my Dodge, the romantic nonsense is gone...
...Kienholz, as a Northwest farmer's son who has made Los Angeles his home, feels like the puritan visiting Gomorrah. Says he: "The bigness of this city is a sickness. This need for space, grading the hills and filling the valleys, it's all part of man's inhumanity to man multiplied a million times, grinding against each other daily." Living in the city of five-level freeways, of supermarkets that never close, Kienholz searches for timeless values and tragedies in a metropolis that thrives on the fleeting present...