Careful with that axe, Ed
Far more than Chris Burden, Ed Kienholz has been much disparaged for throwing machismo around like it was nobody’s business, but although you can see where the critics were coming from when discussing installations like 1991’s “Mine Camp”, aka “Mein Kampf”, seen below, (and his work delved into rape and incest as well), I think in his case, brutish was beautiful.
If he had “an obvious desire to play God”, as one observer wrote — and he really was buried in his car, like a Chinese warlord on his chariot — Kienholz (1927-1994) was another take-no-shit American who scorned formal artistic training, took life by the horns and wrestled with it, starting with a Kesey-style gig as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, where you’re bound to get a skewed view of evolution.
When he fell in with the artsy crowd in San Francisco, he opened some oddball galleries and then started making his own collages and reliefs from junk, soon moving on to giant environmental tableaux. His assemblages of stuff found at flea markets, sometimes including figures cast from life, could be gruesome as well as iconoclastic, and he made some enemies at home before moving to Berlin with his wife and collaborator Nancy Reddin, and of course the Europeans loved them.
The image at the top of the post shows “The Back Seat Dodge ‘38″ from 1964. The car is real, sitting on articificial grass, and had recorded music playing and beer bottles lolling about. In the back seat were plaster figures of a couple making out. The press went nuts when Ed first showed it.
Kienholz had an infamous run-in with TWA in 1968 after an ornate Tiffany lamp lampshade he’d received as a gift was broken during a cross-country flight. Ed presented the airline’s customer-service representative with a formal letter explaining that since TWA was offering no compensation (and in fact suggesting he’d broken the lamp), he was going to destroy it’s check-in counter. Which he did, with an axe and with a photographer recording the whole “creative” destruction.
Kienholz was arrested and fined but did get reimbursed — along with a lot of media attention and an enduring reputation as a maverick tough guy. “Kienholz didn’t believe in refinement,” Robert Hughes wrote in Time. “What he believed in was a combination of technical know-how, moral anger and all-American yawp.”
“To Mourn a Dead Horse” from 1989 features a horse’s hoof, barbed wire and an artillery shell. Is it a World War I lament or was Ed missing Mister Ed?
Dada wafted in, Art in America in 1996 comparing Duchamp’s descendants Kienholz (bad taste) and Robert Rauschenberg (elegance), both “hicks from the sticks”. Others tracked him from bourgeois to blue collar, grungier than Pollock, and Kienholz was always wiping a faux farmer’s sweat from his brow. “A brush is not a tool that I am naturally attuned with,” he once said, “but I understand an electric drill very well.”
He was being conniving. Kienholz was among the personalities featured on national television in 1962, on David Wolper’s “Portrait” series, seen swapping one of his many rifles for a motorcycle and hunting deer in the mountains. But he was elsewhere willing to admit that his “great green simpleton image” was a concoction. “I think that’s just part of the fun of it,” he said. “If it were all serious I couldn’t take it.”
“John Doe” rode a baby buggy in 1959.
Yes, he really was buried in his car. He had a heart attack while hiking in the hills near his home in Hope, Idaho, on June 10, 1994. They embalmed the body and sat him in the front seat of his 1940 Packard coupe with a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket and a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him. In the back seat were the ashes of his dog Smash. Bagpipe music and Glenn Miller hits played.
Then Nancy got in the driver’s seat and rolled the car down a ramp into a pit. She got out and Ed was entombed in a shower of dirt and dollar bills. I can think of worse ways to go out.
Was “The Hoerengracht” funny? It’s a scene from Amsterdam’s red-light district, working girls awaiting window-shoppers. The city’s Herengracht neighbourhood means “men’s canal”. Adding the “o” made it “whore’s canal”. A few years later the Kienholzes made “The Bear Chair” (1991), with a feral teddy bear preparing to rape a blonde doll tied to a chair, Goldilocks bound, about to be sodomised by Papa Bear. No one thought that was funny, and nor did Ed and Nancy think they should.
