Kienholz started out as an unremarkable abstract painter. His titles were good: “Leda and the Canadian Honker” is one of modern art’s all-time best. Kienholz’s natural inclination was to load on thick paint, but he couldn’t afford to. Instead Kienholz painted bright colors on pieces of wood and stuck them onto the surface of “George Warshington in Drag” (1957). From there, Kienholz eventually arrived at his first full assemblage in 1959: the haunting “John Doe,” a dummy’s head, dripping black paint, mounted on a stroller. Kienholz didn’t actually invent assemblage; Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters were there way before him, back in the 1910s. But Kienholz practiced the art of assemblage with unequaled physical ambition (as in “Roxys,” 1962, a Nevada bordello re-created with shriveled mannequins and a cow’s skull) and moral ferocity (the deserted scene of “The Illegal Operation,” also from 1962, with its scuzzy surgical chair and tilted floor lamp). OK, maybe “The Portable War Memorial” (1968), with its trash-can woman continuously singing “God Bless America” in Kate Smith’s voice, is a bit much. But it is funny.
Kienholz married five times. His widow, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, is the daughter of Tom Reddin, the conservative former L.A. police chief. Ed and Nancy were a couple, and sculpture team, for 22 years. In 1981 Ed Kienholz announced that, retroactive to 1972, all his work was officially their work. Many of the pieces on which Nancy labored, as a full partner in a firm she didn’t found, sustain that wonderful Kienholzian awfulness. “Sollie 17” (1980) is difficult to look at, both physically and emotionally (you peer around a half-opened door to see an old man enduring a hot-plate existence in a cramped SRO hotel room). But in some of the later works, Kienholz’s targets get softer and his touch harder. The woman sitting before a mirror in “The Gray Window Becoming” (1984)-which the catalog says “deals with the issue of female identity”-looks more lethargic than melancholy. Here, the Kienholzes comment on something Ed thinks he should care about but doesn’t really seem to.
When Kienholz is on, however, he’s dead on. “Back Seat Dodge ‘38” is as ruggedly poignant a depiction of furtive sex as anything in a film noir classic. The faceless man strapped to his bunk in “The State Hospital” (1966) confirms your worst fears about mental institutions. Kienholz once said of one work, “I don’t know whether [it] is art or not. But I don’t give a damn.” It was art, precisely because Kienholz was tough and original enough not to give a damn.
