In The Penal Colony: Ed Kienholz at LACMA

“Parents were even advised not to take children inside, though it’s unlikely that anyone under the age of 40 would be shocked or offended”

Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969-1972, Revisited Installation view.  Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.  September 4, 2011 – January 15, 2012.  Photo Credit:  Tom Vinetz.  Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice CA and The Pace Gallery, New York.

In The Penal Colony:  Ed Kienholz at LACMA

Edward Kienholz’s Five Car Stud (1969–1972) transports the viewer to a dusty clearing in the woods. It is late at night. Five vintage cars are parked in a circle, their headlights illuminating a couple of dead trees and boulders. Six life-size mannequins, made up to look like white trash, are arranged in the center. All of them are wearing fright masks. Two have pinned a seventh, partially clothed man to the ground, and a third is pulling on a rope tied to the victim’s leg. A fourth is leaning over his quarry, while the remaining duo carry shotguns, standing guard.

It is hard to know what’s going on at first, not until you move closer. When the installation was recently exhibited at the LACMA, historical literature in vitrines and on walls in an adjoining room, including the screening of a TV documentary from 1971, help to fill in the picture. But, when Kienholz made the work he was careful to keep people in the dark. Nothing about it is certain, least of all the identity of the injured party. Its “head” is a weird duplex, animatronic-like structure, the core component of which was taken from a found 1940s medical display and wrapped in a molded plastic covering, frozen in a scream. Only the context hints at the foul deed in progress, though as Kienholz wrote in 1972, “in actuality there is no black man.”

Stranger still is the “torso,” a car oil pan in which swirling dirty water tumbles around alphabet blocks occasionally spelling the N-word, although that contingency hardly ever arises, if at all. Only then do we notice that the person bending over the prostrate figure is holding a knife. You really have to look under the hood, as it were, to see the steel shaft-and-hammerhead “penis” (“strong enough,” Kienholz remarked, “to withstand attacks by vandals or souvenir hunters”) and cast-iron trailer hitch “scrotum” welded to the pan. The tiny incision mark left by a blowtorch is the only clue that the man is being castrated.

Wandering around the 75-square-foot tableau, other details begin to press forward. Kienholz has left us a few pointers, such as small American flags, “State of Brotherhood” license plates, and assorted zombie masks, which put one in mind of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The film was released in 1968, the same year as the execution of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and popular uprisings across the country. This haunted house theme also continues in the reference to Emmett Kelly and sexual psychopaths like John Wayne Gacy, who in 1972 had already begun his reign of terror as the “Killer Clown.” Nearby, we see a woman throwing up in a pickup truck, and what Kienholz describes as a “sissy boy” peering out from inside one of the cars.

We know from the artist that this scene is about “a black man caught drinking in his pickup truck at night with a white woman.” Yet over the four years it took to complete his magnum opus, Kienholz was concerned to avoid any surface readings. After all, it’s one thing to show what used to go on all the time under a cloak of secrecy, but quite another to get people to think about it. He admits that “the scene is invented,” that it is only “symbolic of minority strivings in the world today,” but another source points to an actual occurrence in Hawaiian Gardens, near Long Beach, California. When it came down to it, Five Car Stud had “always taken on a kind of life and identity of its own and as I push one way it seems to push back.” That we may never know the whole truth, whether it concerns the meaning of his work or the conspiracy of silence surrounding race crimes throughout history, was perhaps the only truth he thought worth considering.

This ambivalence shines through much of the everyday material used in the work, and especially in the title allusion to the game of poker. Kienholz informs us that the plaster figures were all cast from acquaintances and family members. The woman, for instance, is the reincarnation of one of his friends, while the boy in the car turns out to be a composite of his own son and a school chum. Even the presenter in the Channel 28 documentary shown at LACMA was stripped down to his skivvies and “mugged” as the gun-toting ghoul.

The pickup truck is in fact pivotal to the show. Kienholz describes how it was purchased from a car lot in North Hollywood, in which he found “some letters to [former owner] Clarence Fred Sawdy, miscellaneous personal effects and pictures of white women from nudist magazines over the visor.” An attempt was made in early 1972 to get various scholars and other professionals to write something for the documentation book intended to accompany Five Car Stud and Sawdy, a limited-edition multiple completed in the same year. A one-time film shoot of the former work was conducted in the parking lot of Gemini G.E.L., the printer of the edition, so a photographic record certainly existed. But the plan didn’t work out, presumably because the photography lacked the subtlety of the sculpture in the round. After stepping in to write its documentary history, Keinholz was at last free to reflect on what lay behind him.

Sawdy, intended as a footnote or program guide to the larger work, was for a long time the only remaining clue. Now in a number of important museum collections among them Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and the Tate in London, the multiple was not included in the LACMA show. It consists of a license plate, on which is imprinted the name originally found on the door of the truck, and a replica of the door itself. Its highly reflective, partially rolled-down window returns the gaze of the people looking through it, a possible reference to the blindness of the silent majority toward race crimes, both past and present.  But when you look past the surface, to the stark black-and-white photo seated inside, it acts like the peephole in Duchamp’s Etant Donnes, revealing what looks horribly like the real deal. Ironically, this image documents the only showing Five Car Stud ever had in Los Angeles up until now.

Subsequent events demonstrate just how mixed its reception proved to be. Selected in the beginning by Maurice Tuchman, then curator at LACMA, for inclusion in his “11 L.A. Artists” exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1972, Five Car Stud was deemed too costly to ship and deleted. Next, Tuchman decided to mount it at his own institution, where the artist had his first museum show in 1966. But, in the words of Kienholz, Tuchman’s “notorious Board of Trustees … overwhelmingly voted the proposal down in some vague demonstration of censorship or aversion to controversy (or probably just aversion).” Swiss curator Harald Szeeman then came to the rescue, arranging for it to appear at Documenta 5 in Kassel and two other venues in Germany, Berlin and Düsseldorf, after which it was bought by the Japanese collector Katsumi Kawamura and put in storage, where it disappeared for almost four decades.

The Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in Sakura, Japan, has recently indicated its willingness to sell Five Car Stud, piquing the interests of both L.A.’s Louver and Pace Gallery in New York, who supplied much of the funding for its restoration. The next step was to test audience responses in the current, post-Obama climate, so it was shipped from Japan to Pacific Standard Time, the largest survey of post-WWII Southern California art to date. Obviously LACMA and the Getty, by admitting only 15 members of the public at a time, still had misgivings. Parents were even advised not to take children inside, though it’s unlikely that anyone under the age of 40 would be shocked or offended, not when images from across the whole spectrum of violence are now readily available online and on cable television.

No doubt the work will fare better when it travels to the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, where it was welcomed back in 1972, before moving to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, whose fantastic collection of Los Angeles art will give it a real homecoming.