Ed and Nancy

I'm pretty shattered but I want to write some stuff while it's still in my head.

Astra and I went to see the Kienholz exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art today. It was a really interesting exhibition aesthetically and conceptually. The majority of Kienholz's work was about society, politics and religion. He criticised war, racism, brain washing and abuse of power.

They showed some of his less serious works which I also liked. One series, called the Barter works, was a collection of plastic plaques with writing on them. Each plaque was essentially a token made for trading in exchange for specific items. In some cases this was just money but in others it was for a car, or for a hammer. I quite liked this idea and I also found the execution of the idea aesthetically interesting. Another series I liked was Concept Tableaux. Each work was a typed page with a proposal for an artwork which could be bought. The buyer then had the option for an additional sum to have diagrams of the proposed work drawn up which they could then pay to have built. It was unclear if any, or all, or none of the proposals had been carried through. These two works collectively gave me a good idea which made the whole trip worthwhile, everything after that point was a bonus.

After that we saw a lot more works, the general nature was more dark, morbid and brooding and I'm only going to talk about the ones I really liked. There was a large sculpture which was the outline of a crucifix in metal on top of a large marble plinth (reminiscent of a gravestone) and inside the crucifix was a huge, missile-like bullet. It was pretty obvious and powerful which I guess I liked. It wasn't trying to be anything other than what it was. In the next room there was another work that I found similarly simplistic and touching. It was a shovel with a soldier’s helmet attached to the top where the handle used to be. On the handle of the shovel there was a large X engraved and the work was called 'Soldier X'. It was a memorial to the Unknown Soldier, a battlefield grave and a reminder that people do die in wars.

One of my favourite works was in three parts. The first part was a Concept Tableaux for a work, Kienholz proposed getting soldiers uniforms and tying off the arms and legs, then filling the uniform with wet clay. These dead soldiers would then be strewn across a large field and left for five years before being removed. I think that would've been a pretty awesome artwork to see but I got the impression it was never made. Across from the Concept Tableaux five of the proposed dead soldiers were laying twisted and contorted on the ground, the only difference I assume being the use of sand not wet clay to fill the uniforms. In the middle of the bodies was a plinth with a book of photos. Each page had a collection of carefully ordered photos on it and each photo had one dead soldier in it. The book had hundreds and hundreds of photos and it was both beautiful and haunting to see. It reminded me of seeing a news story about pictures of dead soldiers in a war memorial and seeing images of people walking reverently down aisles with dead men looking down on them from either side.

I liked the exhibition but as Astra said to me, you feel that it was maybe a good thing Kienholz died in 1994 because seeing the way the world is going now might have broken his heart. All the works he made had to do with previous wars and previous governments and it is sad how easily his works translate to our world today.