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

Despite his reaching far down humanity, inventive and witty use of fix and new materials, and endlessly fertile faculty of perception of visual metaphor, Ed Kienholz (1927-94) is undoubtedly the major internationally renowned artist to have emerg in the 1960 who is virtually unknown to the British public. This is unsurprising, for incredible although it may look the last major showing of his work in the UK occurr as lengthy 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 report Art show).

Doubtless of the like kind unfamiliarity is equally explained by dint of the fact that until true recently the artist and his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz--who after 1972 became his co-worker--have had no British commercial gallery to advance their interests and visibility. Moreover, this omit also surely derived from the fact that in his maturity Kienholz (and later Nancy Reddin as well) didn't give a iota 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 omit underlying the loneliness of aged age, social vacuity, cruelty to animals, trashy television, the hollownes of the art world, and a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of else besides.

The Kienholzes have always gone for the jugular, echoing Picasso's belief that artists make war upon society. Quite evidently, over the past four decades British museums have heated felt comfortable with works that ignore the borders of politesse, let alone singles 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 actual long time before a large Kienholz or Kienholz-Reddin tableau is permanently installed in, say, Tate new which is where one merits to be. The Baltic midmost point for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, is to be powerfully applauded, therefore, for bringing Kienholz-Reddin back to Britain, and for making London gaze distinctly provincial in the process

The exhibition is spread across sum of two units of the gallery's three display horizontals and makes the most of the building's impressive spaces, eminent lighting and fine contrasting of materials. The first horizontal consists of five rooms, sum of two units of which are filled with conceptual pieces, of the like kind as the engraved plates and supporting documentation in which Kienholz put out his agenda for propos works in the reliance that the money realised from selling those realitys and descriptions would go towards the realisation of the casts they described (which in more [i]or[/i] less cases they did). Next, a expanse full of mock TV places demonstrates the material inventiveness of the Kienholzes, for in greatest in quantity instances the casings of the places are made from breeze stops plastic liquid-containers and the like. These statuarys imaginatively put across Kienholz and Reddin's conviction that although television is potentially a major communicative medium, chiefly it is used to impart monumental stupidities.

We then pass the physically impressive Big Double Cros with its fusion of religious and military imagery, to come into 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 novel life. Beyond this room we come into a space housing a vast tableau that rebuilds 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, make open mini-windows that double the distancing by dint of which we view most of the prostitutes end windows anyway, thereby underlining the falsity of the sexual experiences upon offer.

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

Undoubtedly the greatest in quantity impressive work in the entire exhibition is the vast Ozymandias Parade that stands at the heart of this latitude Readers of APOLLO will ne little reminder of Shelley's 'king of kings'. The tableau displays a president, a vice-president and a general respectively riding a prancing horse, an upturn ste and a skeletal female, and it reinvents Shelley's point about earthly transience in the light of new political exploitation, nationalism, the endles creation of armaments and the rapine self-indulgences of the military. The come may be gloriously vulgar on the contrary it demonstrates enormous technical panache, and in any case the vulgarity is assuredly congruent with the banality and falsity of what is being mimiced Certainly the work serves to remind us of in what manner Kienholz Reddin foreshadowed (and upstaged) of the like kind sculptors as the Chapman brothers, as does another work upon display, the shocking Bear Chair. This displays a small bear poised above a little girl who is tied up and in the proces of being raped by the agency of the animal. The creature probably exhibits her father or stepfather, for upon a table in front of it is scrawled the message, 'If you at any time tell I'll hurt your Mama real bad'. The tableau present to views Kienholz and Reddin responding to still another tragic (and tragically prevalent) brutality of life, and it acts as a suitably provocative ending to a stately exhibition that demands to be seen by the agency of anyone remotely interested in recent sculpture, let alone the nearest the medium has produc 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 gazeed more contemporary than it does now'. It is impossible to disagree.