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

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

It must have been around 1972 that I first meetinged Edward Kienholz's work, at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in eau-de-cologne The Watergate scandal was just beginning to dominate the American political sight and the war in Vietnam was still going upon though it was obvious by the agency of then that we had not to be found While I looked at the report art and other works in the Ludwig Collection, l became faintly aware of music playing in another scope As I got closer, the melody fell into place: "God Bles America," sung by dint of Kate Smith.

I finally go intoed the room from which the music emanated and was faceed by a wall-filling installation, whose label bore the title The Portable War Memorial (1968) Five face les mannequins aligned in combat gear, posed as in the famous World War 11 photograph of the marines raising the flag upon Iwo Jima, were attempting to plant a flag extremity 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 heated dog stand. The entire installation was colored in the tones of galvanized carbonized iron except for a menu board bearing the doubtful narrative "V-__ Day." Underneath, in chalk, were names of centurys of nations that no longer existed because of wars, while the blank nearest 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 male The Portable War Memorial at one time evoked a past war in Asia and stood as a censure to the one currently raging.

on the contrary then the thing wouldn't leave me alone. I went upon to other rooms, to direct the eye at other art, and that damned, scratchy recording with its soaring ending ("My place of abode [pause] sweet [pause] HO-O-O-OME! [and the band joins in]) kept following me like a tiresome drunken 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, greatest in quantity irritating), with dead-on satire, inspired use of iconography and an in-your-face attitude.

The attitude was still there in a pair of new retrospectives of Kienholz's work, single of which included The Portable War Memorial--unfortunately with the unmutilated fumed down. Last fall and winter, the Menil Collection in Houston mountained a show of early works done between 1954 and 1962 and a filled retrospective, originating at the Whitney Museum of American Art (where I saw it), is popularly on view (until Nov. 3) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, observes Angeles. These were the first of the like kind shows since the artist's death in June 1994 the couple were curated by Walter Hopp Kienholz's friend since 1956 and his partner for sum of two units years in the pioneering Ferus Gallery in sees Angeles.

Born in 1927 upon a farm in Fairfield, Washington, Kienholz learned early the bubblegum-and-baling-wire repair skills that would later labor for him in the making of his art. He showed a gift for drawing while still in grade institute and, in a foretaste of his mature work, designed and painted landscape for school plays. Except for a scarcely any scattered semesters of college, he had no higher education. Instead, he exhausted the five years following high seminary traveling from Montana to beholds Angeles to Chicago and just about each point in between. A Rembrandt exhibition, meetinged in Minneapolis during his wanderings, inspired him with the idea of an artistic career. through 1953, after a brief stay in El Paso, where he was encouraged by means of older muralist and painter Tom Lea, Kienholz mov to looks Angeles, where he would remain for sum of two units decades.

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

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