Making war on society: a well-mounted Kienholz exhibition at Baltic in Gateshead compensates for the prolonged British neglect of this powerful, provocative sculptor

Apollo, August, 2005 by Eric Shanes

Despite his deep humanity, inventive and witty use of found and new materials, and endlessly fertile sense of visual metaphor, Ed Kienholz (1927-94) is undoubtedly the major internationally renowned artist to have emerged in the 1960s who is virtually unknown to the British public. This is unsurprising, for incredible although it may seem, the last major showing of his work in the UK occurred as long ago as 1971, when ten of his tableaux were exhibited at the ICA in London (although three minor works were included in the 1991 Royal Academy Pop Art show).

Doubtless such unfamiliarity is equally explained by the fact that until very recently the artist and his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz--who after 1972 became his co-worker--have had no British commercial gallery to promote their interests and visibility. Moreover, this neglect also surely derived from the fact that in his maturity Kienholz (and later Nancy Reddin as well) didn't give a jot for the boundaries of 'good taste' when attacking the hypocrisies of patriotism, war, religion and jurisprudence, the ugliness of racism, the spiritual vacancy of a consumerist mass-culture, and tbe tragedies of mental illness, cheap sex, abortion, the neglect underlying the loneliness of old age, social vacuity, cruelty to animals, trashy television, the hollowness of the art world, and much else besides.

The Kienholzes have always gone for the jugular, echoing Picasso's belief that artists make war on society. Quite evidently, over the past four decades British museums have hOt felt comfortable with works that ignore the bounds of politesse, let alone ones that attack social values. And because it has probably been left far too late to afford the purchase of their works, it may be a very long time before a large Kienholz or Kienholz-Reddin tableau is permanently installed in, say, Tate Modern, which is where one deserves to be. The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, is to be strongly applauded, therefore, for bringing Kienholz-Reddin back to Britain, and for making London look distinctly provincial in the process.

The exhibition is spread across two of the gallery's three display levels, and makes the most of the building's impressive spaces, excellent lighting and fine contrasting of materials. The first level consists of five rooms, two of which are filled with conceptual pieces, such as the engraved plates and supporting documentation in which Kienholz set out his agenda for proposed works in the hope that the money realised from selling those objects and descriptions would go towards the realisation of the projects they described (which in some cases they did). Next, a room full of mock TV sets demonstrates the material inventiveness of the Kienholzes, for in most instances the casings of the sets are made from breeze blocks, plastic liquid-containers and the like. These sculptures imaginatively put across Kienholz and Reddin's conviction that although television is potentially a major communicative medium, mostly it is used to impart monumental stupidities.

We then pass the physically impressive Big Double Cross, with its fusion of religious and military imagery, to enter a large room containing eleven pieces that attack war, genocide, political collusion, moral buck-passing (in Reddin's vivacious version of the Statue of Liberty holding up a neon sign stating IT'S NOT MY FAULT), Adolf Hitler's long-term destruction of human potential, and further negative dimensions of modern life. Beyond this room we enter a space housing a vast tableau that reconstructs a street in the red-light district of Amsterdam in all its tawdriness. Here the faces of all eleven women who parade themselves for hire are contained within small, open mini-windows that double the distancing by which we view most of the prostitutes through windows anyway, thereby underlining the falsity of the sexual experiences on offer.

Up a floor, we come to the five major works that constitute the climax of the show. Perhaps the most sober but not least witty of these is The Caddy Court of 1987. This comprises a huge white Cadillac fused with a Dodge van, within whose interior hideous caricatures and shelves of law books mount a vicious attack upon the us Supreme Court. Nearby, an entire wall is given over to 76 effigies of Jesus Christ mounted upon the axles of children's carts, to form a sea of puns upon the shape of the crucifix while simultaneously assaulting religious kitsch. A superbly crafted and suitably garish merry-go-round permits us to enter its heart individually, whereupon we are reminded that human existence is itself a merry-go-round, dictated by accidents of birth and geography.

Undoubtedly the most impressive work in the entire exhibition is the vast Ozymandias Parade that stands at the heart of this room. Readers of APOLLO will need little reminder of Shelley's 'king of kings'. The tableau shows a president, a vice-president and a general respectively riding a prancing horse, an upturned steed and a skeletal female, and it reinvents Shelley's point about earthly transience in the light of modern political exploitation, nationalism, the endless creation of armaments and the rapine self-indulgences of the military. The result may be gloriously vulgar but it demonstrates enormous technical panache, and in any case the vulgarity is surely congruent with the banality and falsity of what is being mocked. Certainly the work serves to remind us of how Kienholz Reddin foreshadowed (and upstaged) such sculptors as the Chapman brothers, as does another work on display, the shocking Bear Chair. This shows a small bear poised above a little girl who is tied up and in the process of being raped by the animal. The creature probably represents her father or stepfather, for on a table in front of it is scrawled the message, 'If you ever tell I'll hurt your Mama real bad'. The tableau shows Kienholz and Reddin responding to yet another tragic (and tragically prevalent) brutality of life, and it acts as a suitably provocative ending to a superb exhibition that demands to be seen by anyone remotely interested in modern sculpture, let alone the nearest the medium has produced to a William Hogarth, with all his comparable anger, invention and wit. In a fine catalogue overview, David Anfam states, 'Never has the art of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz looked more contemporary than it does now'. It is impossible to disagree.