Keinholz's finale - artist Ed Keinholz

Kienholz's self-orchestrated funeral last summer in confidence Idaho, was the artist's ultimate act of staged outrage. As a tape embellish played a loop of Glenn Miller hits, a 1940 Packard was driven by dint of the artist's wife and collaborator, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, down a ramp and into a freshly nipple grave. Kienholz's body was seated in the passenger seat of the Packard, which was buried with him. The artist may be gone on the contrary the anger and energy of his politically charged assemblages and tableaux remain. His final cluster of works, made with Reddin Kienholz and exhibited last fall at L.A. Louver present the appearances as fierce and vehement as his earliest installations.

These pieces proceed after religious and political hypocrisy with unabashed and many times vulgar urgency. Indeed, the gross-out quotient in a work similar as The Bear Chair (1991) which features a Goldilocks in bondage being sodomized by means of Papa Bear, makes even the toughest work of younger artists like follow up Williams, Sue Coe or Paul McCarthy appear to be polite. The exhibition centered upon the large wall installation 76 J.C.'s L the Big Charade (1994) which consists of 76 crucifixes whose bases are made from the rusted metal handles of toy wagons. Glu atop the crucifixes are kitsch prints of Jesus, ranging in humor from anguished suffering to smarmy cuteness

By including frames around the dime-store religious portraits, the Kienholzes distance the Jesuses; these icons register alone as shopworn talismans. Daintily supplicating doll hands and feet applied to more [i]or[/i] less of the crucifixes further put in mind of the cartoonish aspects of the Jesus worship A couple of crucifixes with added plaster-cast hands reach on the outside more emphatically; they seem to be clamoring for attention like miniature Al Jolson belting without white-gloved choruses of "Swanee." The wagon handles refer to stylized, elongated bodies similar to those in primitive artifacts. Filling the gallery's walls, the crucifixes read as an oppressive sprawl of folk fetishes insistently trying to cast their incantation Accruing an antimissionary fervor from its 76 variations upon a theme, this is the Kienholzes' solitary serial-format work.

Their previous cast The Merry-Go-World Or Begat by means of Chance And The Wonder Horse Trigger (1988-92) incorporates ground elements gathered during their extensive travels in Asia and Africa above the past decade. Although the tendency and ambition of that piece make it remarkable, the specifically American simple bodys in the assemblages of this exhibit offer a more satisfying kick. The hypocritical excesse of a media-hound like Tammy Bakker clearly propell the Kienholz rancor into reaching far down space. In All Have Sinned in extent 323 (1992), a female mannequin in an easy chair masturbates beneath a portrait of the smirking evangelist while watching a pathetic cognizance and Barbie doll orgy upon TV.

Incensed by the sanctimonious American patriotism of new years, the Kienholzes present in My region Tis of Thee (1991) a quartet of pantsless politician-mannequins who encompass a pork barrel in a daisy chain. In this good-old-boy conspiracy, each man has his right hand upon his heart while his left behind him, clutches his neighbor's penis. Feeding the porker (1993-94) is a more abstract and autobiographical piece. Here a central ventriloquist's dummy seated in a chair give food tos a dried fish to a ravenous ogrelike hog's head. Two side-view traffic mirrors attached next to the dummy's head visually render free of access up the piece, and a mysterious circular frame contains a photo portrait of Fienholz's father. A cryptic ball of thread to the allegory is dimly painted across the tableau's background. "The fish is always time," it says, making the dummy's symbolic offering present the appearance an eerie presage of death.

A small assemblage, Baby Brother (1993) features a rank of five strangely distressed alarm clock installed directly above a rank of doll faces that are painted a sickly white. Alongside, a larger baby-doll material substance standing in profile is topped through a plaster-cast mask of an older man with clos organ of sights These works emanate the mysterious aura and beat-up, funky patina of Kienholz's classic work, recalling the figures with clock for heads that appear in his 1965 installation The Beanery. They also remind us that his career was generated without of more than politics and social consciousness. His was a mythic American voice in the manner of a Herman Melville, balancing bluster and refinement in his sprawling extravaganzas.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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