Scavenger's parade - assemblages and installation art, Edward Kienholz, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

Art in America, Oct, 1996 by Reagan Upshaw

In a career that spanned four decades, Edward Kienholz used the detritus of contemporary life to produce impassioned, often brutal works of political and social satire. His assemblages and tableaux (made after the early '70s in collaboration with his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz) are currently on view in a traveling retrospective.

It must have been around 1972 that I first encountered Edward Kienholz's work, at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. The Watergate scandal was just beginning to dominate the American political scene, and the war in Vietnam was still going on, though it was obvious by then that we had lost. While I looked at the Pop art and other works in the Ludwig Collection, l became faintly aware of music playing in another room. As I got closer, the tune fell into place: "God Bless America," sung by Kate Smith.

I finally entered the room from which the music emanated and was confronted by a wall-filling installation, whose label bore the title The Portable War Memorial (1968). Five face less mannequins dressed in combat gear, posed as in the famous World War 11 photograph of the marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, were attempting to plant a flag pole in the umbrella hole of a patio table. The music came from an upside-down garbage can bearing Kate Smith's likeness, while to the right of the marines were a Coke machine and a reproduction of the service window for a hot dog stand. The entire installation was colored in the tones of galvanized steel, except for a menu board bearing the legend "V-__ Day." Underneath, in chalk, were names of hundreds of nations that no longer existed because of wars, while the blank next to the "V" awaited the initial of whomever we were to celebrate beating this time.(1) With its conflation of patriotism and the turning of a capitalist buck, The Portable War Memorial at once evoked a past war in Asia and stood as a rebuke to the one currently raging.

But then the thing wouldn't leave me alone. I went on to other rooms, to look at other art, and that damned, scratchy recording with its soaring ending ("My home [pause] sweet [pause] HO-O-O-OME! [and the band joins in]) kept following me, like a tiresome drunk on the next stool who won't stop plucking at your sleeve. It was an epiphany of Kienholz at his best (that's to say, most irritating), with dead-on satire, inspired use of iconography and an in-your-face attitude.

The attitude was still there in a pair of recent retrospectives of Kienholz's work, one of which included The Portable War Memorial--unfortunately with the sound fumed down. Last fall and winter, the Menil Collection in Houston mounted a show of early works done between 1954 and 1962, and a full retrospective, originating at the Whitney Museum of American Art (where I saw it), is currently on view (until Nov. 3) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. These were the first such shows since the artist's death in June 1994. Both were curated by Walter Hopps, Kienholz's friend since 1956 and his partner for two years in the pioneering Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.

Born in 1927 on a farm in Fairfield, Washington, Kienholz learned early the bubblegum-and-baling-wire repair skills that would later serve him in the making of his art. He showed a gift for drawing while still in grade school and, in a foretaste of his mature work, designed and painted scenery for school plays. Except for a few scattered semesters of college, he had no higher education. Instead, he spent the five years following high school traveling from Montana to Los Angeles to Chicago and just about every point in between. A Rembrandt exhibition, encountered in Minneapolis during his wanderings, inspired him with the idea of an artistic career. By 1953, after a brief stay in El Paso, where he was encouraged by older muralist and painter Tom Lea, Kienholz moved to Los Angeles, where he would remain for two decades.

It was Kienholz's good fortune to recognize fairly early that his talents lay not in painting but in assemblage. The best thing about One Day Wonder Painting (1954), a typical early work, is its insouciant title. Fully abstract, the 40-by-22-inch painting balances squares and rectangles of muted color with occasional triangles and circles, bordered and sometimes cut diagonally by a network of white lines--a compositional strategy that is charming in the small works of Paul Klee which influenced it but which loses its lyricism at this scale.

From paintings and torn-paper-on-masonite collages, Kienholz moved, in the mid-'50s, to wall-hung constructions of wood mounted on plywood. The color was often applied with kitchen brooms in order to make the works, in the artist's own words, "as ugly as possible." Already one can begin to detect--in the titles, if not always in the works themselves--character" istics of the mature Kienholz such as humor, political satire and a move toward narrative. George Warshington in Drag (1957) is a brightly colored relief, but without the incised and purposely misspelled title (a punning condemnation of American militarism), the semi-abstract figure would not recall to any viewer the first president.