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 the late '50s, Kienholz began to include a broader range of scavenged objects in his work, making art out of the detritus of American culture. With the rise of conspicuous consumption and planned obsolesence, junkyards were the dark side of American postwar consumerism, and Kienholz's works were reflective of this fact. His everything-including-the-kitchen-sink esthetic of the late '50s recalls the work of a New York-based artist who was also achieving much notoriety at that time: Robert Rauschenberg. (It was in 1959 that Rauschenberg finished Monogram, an assemblage which includes a stuffed goat.) A comparison of the two contemporaries may be useful, as critics of the time saw each artist's work as a continuation of the Dada impulse. Both were hicks from the sticks, but Texas-born Rauschenberg attended art schools in Kansas City and Paris, and his work, for all its unconventional elements, is often quite elegant. Kienholz was never guilty of good taste. His work also distinguished itself from Rauschenberg's by being politically explicit.

Long before the current wave of political art, Kienholz was creating sculptures that dealt with specific issues and events. He took aim at organized religion in works such as Yes, Jesus Loves Me (ca. 1959). When unsuspecting viewers pull a lever sticking out from this roughly 3 1/2-foot-high wall relief, a wooden leg mounted on a hinge shoots out and kicks them. Kienholz's view of American history is equally irreverent. As part of his emphatic rejection of the myths of American history, from the Father of His Country to the Westward Expansion, he often turned to the mistreatment of minorities. The Little Eagle Pock Incident (1958), a predominantly yellow, black and red composition on wood with an upside-down deer's head attached to it, alludes (at least in its title) to the struggle over school desegregation then going on in Little Rock. In Conversation Piece (1959), two legs adorned with fake-lndian buckskin boots jut perpendicularly from the surface of a badge-shaped relief. Underneath the legs, two protruding forearms are suggestive of gun mounts made from deer hooves. As the artist described it, the work represents a mounted trophy of the "stuffed remains of an Indian girl raped by frontiersmen."

While Kienholz continued to fervently pursue political themes in his assemblages, at the end of the '50s he made a second important formal shift (if we count the inclusion of junkyard and thrift store elements as the first). With the was reliefs becoming ever more three-dimensional, he made the logical move to freestanding works. In one of the earliest freestanding sculptures, John Doe (1959), the top and bottom halves of an armless male mannequin stand together on an arrow-shaped platform which itself is mounted on the frame of a baby stroller. The mannequin is cracked and chipped, and black resinous material has been poured over its head. The chest has burst open where the heart should be, and red paint has run down like blood. There's a cross in the chest cavity. One's first thought is that this might represent the subject's religiousness. But if viewers kneel, they can see through the hole in the chest into the other half of the divided mannequin. Their gaze passes through the buttocks and out the enormous, erect phallus which projects from the groin. The cross thus becomes like the crosshairs of a rifle scope and we get, as it were, a sperm's-eye view of John Doe's sexual target for the night. John Doe easily lends itself to Freudian interpretation, with its rational, religious half heading forward, only to find its erotic half pulling in the opposite direction.