Introduction to On A Scale that Competes with the World: The Art of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz

Introduction

On A Scale that Competes with the World:
The Art of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz by Robert L. Pincus

This introduction was reprinted with permission from the University of California Press.

Theory and history were of little concern to Edward Kienholz when he constructed his first environmental sculpture Roxy’s. Its form, he recalls, evolved from the folk tableaux and stop-action scenes he had witnessed in the churches and grange halls of his native Fairfield, Washington, whereas its subject emanated from his own memories of a visit to a brothel in Idaho as a teenager.¹ Kienholz constructed human scale rooms in which he employed props such as a picture of General McArthur, a June 1943 calendar, and magazines of the time to evoke the era of his adolescence. He filled these rooms with grotesque interpretations of “prostitutes” created from skulls. dolls, boxes, and other found objects. In retrospect, it is clear that Roxy’s is also the pivotal work of his career, for it was to provide the basic formats for all of Kienholz’s subsequent tableaux: scenes that one views frontally, much like a stage in a theater; or environments that one can enter and experience much like the architectural spaces of our cultural landscape.

Working in Los Angeles with only the most cursory knowledge of precedents or contemporary parallels, Kienholz forged a powerful West Coast counterpart to environmental developments that were taking place on the East Coast. Working from a decidedly more theoretical and historically informed vantage point, Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Whitman, and others were creating collage environments that functioned as works in and of themselves and as “places” in which their fragmented theatrical pieces – commonly termed “happenings” – were enacted. As early as 1958, Kaprow, an art historian then teaching at Rutgers University, had constructed the first of his environments, it was structured like a maze out of suspended strips of fabric, plastic sheets, cellophane, and lights and played electronic sounds at approximately one hour intervals. In the very same year, Robert Rauschenberg exhibited the first of his wall- mounted hybrids of painting and assemblage – “combines,” as he called them – at the Leo Castelli Gallery.²

Rauschenberg pinpointed the assemblage aesthetic when he declared, “I think a picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world” (Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall, 193-194). But it was Kaprow, with his essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1957) and later with the book into which that essay was subsumed, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings (1966), who became the most prominent theoretician for all three genres. As one sifts through both of these writings Kaprow’s overarching theme becomes evident: that expanding the scale of art serves to blur the distinction between the arena of life and that of art. Although Kaprow recognized the importance of early twentieth-century Cubist. Dada, and Surrealist experiments with collage and assemblage, he argued that Pollock had pointed the way for the post-1945 American assemblagists “by utilizing gestures, scribblings, large scales with no frame, which suggest to the viewer that both the physical and metaphysical substance of the work continue indefinitely in all directions beyond the canvas” (154). Kaprow went so far as to assert that the more traditional formats of painting or drawing would become obsolete, though we can now see that his prognosis of the death of picture-making was greatly exaggerated. “The romance of the atelier, like that of the gallery and museum, will disappear in time,” he speculated. “But meanwhile, the rest of the world has become endlessly available (183). For Kaprow, as well as Oldenburg, Dine, Red Grooms, George Segal, and others of that milieu and generation of artists, art was to become integrated more fully into the world by embracing more and more of its materials.

It is important to note here that Kienholz’s tableaux are the only strong and sustained West Coast manifestation of this environmentalist aesthetic in American art of the late 1950s and 1960s. Wallace Berman had earlier exhibited a couple of human-scale assemblages at the Ferus Gallery in 1957 – the Los Angeles-based gallery that Kienholz then co-owned with Walter Hopps – but he soon abandoned this format to create sculptures of painted stones and wall works with serial arrangements of photographic imagery; both these sculptures and wall works used Hebrew characters and words which alluded to the Jewish mystical texts of the Kabbala. Neither of the other two major West Coast assemblagists – Bruce Conner, who worked primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area, or George Herms, who divided his time between Southern California and the Bay Area – worked on this scale, either at the time Kienholz created Roxy’s or during the remainder of the 1960s.³

Yet if he created work on a scale that matched that of his East Coast counterparts, Kienholz had different ends in mind for his art. He used discarded objects to reconstruct everyday environments and in turn to make us see the workings of contemporary culture more lucidly and startlingly. As one tableaux after another followed Roxy’s, it became clear that Kienholz’s art was predominantly a socially critical art – that it confronted us with the darker aspects of contemporary American life. Its subjects were society’s victims and the methods of their victimization: the loneliness of death, furtive sex, violent acts motivated by racism. Indeed, Kienholz focused on these and other troubling aspects of everyday life in Western culture that were generally excluded from art of the 1950s and 1960s – including other assemblages and environmental work.

He employed similar means to those of his East Coast counterparts, using discards on a grand scale. To paraphrase Kaprow, Kienholz was willing to relinquish the goal of picture-making (159). Like Kaprow and Rauschenberg, he wanted to create an art that was more like the real world than any art that came before it. Yet the underlying impulse of these other artists’ work was to subsume more of the real world into the arena of art; in their varied ways, they strived to aestheticize more of the world. Oldenburg makes that point vividly in a poetic catalog from his memoir and working notes for that period, Store Days:

For Oldenburg, art was to take the things of reality and create a universe of sensory experience which paralleled and transformed that of the ordinary physical world. For instance, the commonplace clothespin was an appropriate form for an immense monument, as he so vividly illustrated by creating a giant version of one that today sits in downtown Philadelphia; or common forms, such as a toilet or a drum set could be made out of soft, stuffed vinyl, altering our physical experience of them in the everyday world of mass manufactured Items. 

For all of its use of both the materials and imagery of contemporary American society, the work of these artists offered a different sort of realism than Kienholz’s. His art wasn’t so much about extending the space of action painting into three dimensions, as were Kaprow’s environments of that time: or blurring the boundaries between detritus and a painting, in the fashion of Rauschenberg’s combines; or playfully transforming the technological world, as Oldenburg’s sculptures did; or making segments of the everyday world serve as the setting for cast figures that evoked Classical and neo-Classical sources, which is the achievement of George Segal’s tableaux. Instead, Kienholz’s art provides an intensified version of the given social world. It forces us to think about the darker, troubling, and more covert aspects of contemporary Western culture – with a decided emphasis on American society – by giving it back to us in a distorted form that strives to reveal its underlying cruelties.

This is the aesthetic that has unfolded in the more than a quarter century of art that has followed Roxy’s: first in the work that bears only his name and then in the subsequent art that displays his name and that of his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz. It is an oeuvre, as I have begun to suggest, which seems fairly idiosyncratic amongst other notable environmental work of the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Moreover, as this kind of environmental art waned and the room-scale geometric forms of Minimal sculpture waxed dominant throughout much of the rest of the 1960s, Kienholz’s tableaux came to occupy an equally, if not more, eccentric position in the panorama of American sculpture.⁴

His aesthetic is maximalist, as it were. His “rooms” or “scenes” are often filled with the clutter of life: letters, photographs, knick-knacks, and every other sort of item that connotes a place that possesses a history or patina of use. He employs these things much like the novelist of Realist temperament would: to place characters (in his case, the figure or figures within the constructed environment or implied by it) within a quite specific social milieu. However, the figures in these tableaux are decidedly not the stuff of Realism. They function as generic types rather than as fully realized individuals, providing nightmarish, quasi-surrealist correlatives for the anguish, loneliness, and cruelty of those who live and suffer in such places. In this respect, their oeuvre reveals its debt to the objets trouvés and tableaux of the Surrealists dating from the 1930s and 1940s.

However, Kienholz’s works – particularly his assemblages of the late 1950s and the tableaux of the 1960s – find their most precise contemporaneous parallels in literary rather than plastic works: William Burroughs’s fiction and Allen Ginsberg’s angry early poems such as “Howl” and “America.”  More generally, they are related to two traditions in the history of the arts in America. One is to be found in genre painting of democratic subjects by William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham during the mid-nineteenth century that is revitalized and updated in the art of John Sloan and Edward Hopper. The second is the current of American cultural criticism that stretches back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century poetry of Joel Barlow, gathers strength in Walt Whitman’s prose pieces such as Democratic Vistas (1871), and perseveres in the writings of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Mailer, and others.

What Kienholz did share with Minimalists such as Carl Andre and Donald Judd was a concern with the interrelationship between sculptural form and architectural space. These Minimalists, however, were chiefly preoccupied with the ways common objects or fabricated ones could create new relationships between the object and the gallery, between their sculpture and that of their modernist predecessors. By 1966, Andre was stacking bricks in a straight row on the floor, declaring, “All I’m doing is putting Brancusi’s Endless Column on the floor instead of in the sky. Most sculpture is priapic with the male organ in the air. In my work, Priapus is down on the ground” (Battcock, Minimal Art, 104). In other words, there is an implicit attack on the monumentalism of sculpture, whether modernist or earlier. Even when the forms are large like Kienholz’s, as with Donald Judd’s galvanized steel floor- or wall-mounted boxes, they are repeated forms. Their seriality emphasizes their existence as no more or less than they appear to be, forms with the smallest possible degree of metaphysical or humanist resonances hovering about them; forms arranged according to the artist’s system of composition. The Minimalists’ ambition was, in a sense, to create forms with as few suggestions of metaphor or symbol as was possible. Their criteria were predominantly optical, formal, and spatial and only implicitly social. In what has become an emblematic statement of the Minimalist sensibility, Frank Stella tersely asserted, “What you see is what you see” (Rose, Readings, 173).

For Kienholz, however, optics, form, and space were – and have remained – secondary. Each of these criteria are subordinated to a work’s theme, which invariably focuses on a large cultural problem and offers a critical reading of it. Although this approach relegated him to the category of “eccentrics” in the 1960s, he was nevertheless recognized as a major eccentric. But only in Europe, where he and Reddin Kienholz have lived and worked half the year since 1973 (in Berlin), has their oeuvre long been recognized as a uncontestably important one of the post-1945 era; in the United States, where they have assumed the posture of outsiders – living in rural Hope, Idaho and rarely mounting solo shows in New York – critical acceptance lags behind.⁵

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, however, Kienholz’s work as well as the later tableaux executed with Reddin Kienholz  had looked increasingly less idiosyncratic as the dominance of optical and formal criteria had given way to a whole host of strategies for introducing social realities and ideas as well as figurative imagery into the plastic arts. In an era when optical and formal criteria for art no longer dominate, the literary orientation of the Kienholzes’ art no longer seems eccentric or idiosyncratic. Indeed, their work seems to have anticipated other significant art; and its influence is widespread A host of artists, from those devoted to socially critical picturemaking, such as Leon Golub and Sue Coe, to later tableaus artists, like Michael McMillen and Roland Reiss, are indebted to Kienholz’s pioneering work of the 1960s.

My essay traces the development of Kienholz’s and the Kienholzes’ oeuvre, which in following its own trajectory, has assumed an increasingly more prominent position in recent and contemporary American art. It also attempts to place this body of work within the context of post-1945 American art and the tradition of American cultural criticism in literature, as I have outlined them above. These assemblages and tableaux insist on this kind of interdisciplinary reading, because the Kienholzes’ integrate a wide array of effects – literary, theatrical, visual, and plastic – into their art as they attempt to address various aspects of life in both the United States and Europe. Working on a scale that competes with that of our prosaic environment, they recreate it in ways that make it seem utterly familiar but also extraordinarily strange and richly interpreted. 

Notes

1. For information on vernacular sources of Kienholz’s tableau, see K. G. P. Hulten, 11 + 11 Tableaux (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1970), n.p.; for Kienholz’s memories that triggered Roxy’s, see Lawrence Weschler, ed., Edward Kienholz, 2 vols., part of Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait (Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles Art History Program, 1977): 231-233, where the artist painfully recalls: “I went back in memory to going to Kellogg, Idaho to whorehouses when was a kid, and just being appalled by the whole situation—not being able to perform because it was just a really crummy experience of old women with sagging breasts that were supposed to turn you on, and like I say, it just didn’t work,”

2.  The most accurate and concise history of the development of New York assemblage, environments, and happenings during these years is in Barbara Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism and Performance 1958-1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in association with W. W. Norton & Company, 1984); for information on Kaprow’s first environments and Rauschenberg’s combines in his 1958 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, see Haskell’s chapter, “The Aesthetics of Junk,” 15-19.

3. Underlying my argument in the introduction – and elsewhere in this book – is the notion that the work of Berman provided a precedent, but one that Kienholz quickly assimilated and transcended. Subsequently, his work took a decidedly different direction than Berman’s, Conner’s, or Herms’s. For a general, if somewhat factually flawed, discussion of West Coast assemblage, see the chapter “Assemblage Line” in Peter Plagens, The Sunshine Muse (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974): 74-95; for an extended chronology/oral history of the era, see “Assemblage Art in California: A Collective Memoir, 1940-1969,” in Sandra Leonard Starr, Lost and Found in California: Four Decades of Assemblage Art (Los Angeles: James Corcoran Gallery in conjunction with Shoshana Wayne Gallery and Pence Gallery, 1988): 53-119; for the best documentation of Berman’s career, see Hal Glicksman, ed., Wallace Berman Retrospective (Los Angeles: Otis Art Institute Gallery, 1978); for the most thorough account of Herms’s life and work through the 1970s, see Thomas Garver, ed., The Prometheus Archives: A Retrospective Exhibition of the Works of George Herms (Newport Beach, Calif.: Harbor Art Museum, 1979); there is no substantial scholarly catalog to date on Conner’s oeuvre. 

4. For a contemporaneous critical response to Kienholz’s work of the early to mid-1960s, see Michael Benedikt’s group of reviews, “Sculpture as Architecture: New York Letter, 1966-67,” in Gregory Battock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1968): 82-85; writing of such artists as Claes Oldenburg and Robert Hudson in the context of The Whitney Annual of 1966, he asserts, “[C]ertainly Edward Kienholz, with the disgusting pillows and pots and currettes and lamp of The Illegal Operation (all blood stained) belongs among the eccentrics too….” In American Art Since 1900 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965): 265-266, Barbara Rose praised Kienholz as one of three major American assemblagists, but placed him on the periphery of contemporary concerns when she characterized his work as “a specifically American reaction — a kind of negative puritanism and extreme form of local eccentricity — to the American scene.”

5. Substantial American writing on Kienholz’s art is infrequent. The best American catalog is still Maurice Tuchman, Edward Kienholz (Los Angeles: County Museum of Art, 1966); the most recent one of note is Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz: Human Scale (San Francisco: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1984), published for an exhibition that subsequently traveled to four museums; it documents many of their recent American tableaux. Also see Anne Ayres, “Berman and Kienholz: Progenitors of Los Angeles Assemblage” in Maurice Tuchman, Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1981); and among recent articles see my “An Ode and an Odious for Neo-Dada: Edward Kienholz’s Assemblages and Tableaux, 1959-65,” Images and Issues Fall 1981: 53-55; and Robert Silberman, “Imitation of Life,” Art in America March 1986: 138-143.

Works Cited

Henri, Adrian. Total Art: Environments, Happenings and Performance. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974.

Kaprow, Allan. Assemblage, Environments and Happenings. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966.

Rose, Barbara, ed. Readings in American Art 1900-1975. 1968. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.

Tomkins, Calvin. Off The Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time. 1975. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.