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

As its name indicates, John Doe is meant to represent a typical American of the Eisenhower era. The sculpture's clear intention to satirize and provoke points to Kienholz's place in the nascent culture of dissent. Significantly, his friends in the '50s included Beat figures such as writer David Meltzer and artist Wallace Berman, and his involvement with the Ferus Gallery (where both he and Berman showed) put him in the forefront of the West Coast underground scene. Kienholz, who would later have his own troubles with the authorities, was present when the Hollywood vice squad arrested Berman during the latter's 1957 solo show at Ferus. Kienholz's role in the Los Angeles underground was reflected by the inclusion of four of his early '60s sculptures in the recent Whitney exhibition, "Beat Culture and the New America." [See A.i.A., Mar. '96.]

In Jane Doe (1960), John's counterpart, a female mannequin's head, baptized with red and black gunk, is mounted atop an end table whose drawers are hidden by a lacy skirt. Visitors to the museum shows were not allowed to touch the works, but the viewer permitted to ravage Jane--to lift her skirt and get into her (three) "drawers"--would find the top one empty except for a cross at the back, the middle one containing red-soaked doll parts recalling birth or abortion, and the bottom containing a turdlike wooden burl. In works like John Doe and Jane Doe, Kienholz convincingly explored what Yeats called "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," as well as offering a critique of America's conformist society of the '50s.

In the early 1960s, the individual freestanding works were joined by elaborate installations which Kienholz called "tableaux." The first of them, Roxys (1961-62), was based on the artist's youthful memories of a brothel in Kellogg, Idaho. In developing the piece, Kienholz worked dike a set designer, constructing a room and firing it with period props, including a jukebox which plays mid-1940s music, a 1943 calendar, a photo of General Douglas MacArthur and the like. Inhabiting the set are a number of Kienholz's grotesque assemblage-figures representing the madam and her prostitutes. The madam has a cow's skull for a head, while Five-Dollar Billy, one of the prostitutes, lies on her back on the stand of an old foot-powered sewing machine. (Is this a pun on the fact that she's there to be pumped?)

When Roxys was exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in 1962, it was a walk-though environment. At the Whitney's retrospective, visitors could only look into the room from behind a barricade. Though this decision was undoubtedly made to protect the art work, it also weakens its effect, for thus restricted the viewer cannot see the touches that emphasize the disparity between the shabby but mock-respectable setting and the bizarre figures who inhabit it, or between the hookers' present occupation and their earlier lives. It is only by reading the catalogue, for example, that the viewer will learn that one of the prostitutes, Miss Cherry Delight, has a letter from her sister in a drawer of her dressing table, a letter full of family news whose writer is utterly ignorant of what her sister does for a living. While Roxys can be appreciated as Kienholz's evocation of a part of the American past, with an implicit attack on puritanical hypocrisy, it also stands as a prelude to the let-it-all-hang-out sexuality of the late 1960s.