UGLY
So much contemporary art, particularly installation, has a purposefully unattractive aesthetic: rough, unbalanced, distended, and downright ugly. The works of contemporary American sculptor Ed Kienholz certainly do. These diorama-like set pieces are assembled from found objects (old furniture, carpets, appliances, and automobiles) and life-size cast figures, and tell stories of domestic violence, tawdry sex, and male aggression. When seen in photographs they can appear exploitative, engineered for titillation. Women often appear naked and dismembered, and men often appear masked and armed.
Kienholz’ best known work, Five Car Stud, first shown at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, has been reinstalled at his current retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. One approaches it dramatically, after passing through a string of brightly-lit galleries, through a floor-length black curtain, into a room piled with dirt, so dark that one can only step forward guided by the guard’s flashlight.
The sculpture depicts five rural, working class, masked white men castrating a black man, lit only by the headlights of their trucks, which are parked in a circle around them. It might be the most viscerally affecting artwork I’ve ever seen, a deep, direct critique of American life. The other gallery-goers, older, well-to-do, Milanese couples, didn’t seem to find anything amiss. They stepped gingerly to the center – careful not to get sand in their drivings shoes – and inspected details of the grotesque, cartoonish figures closely, laughing. One woman, in an ankle-length mink coat, posed for a photo standing right above the black man’s head.
Though this piece was made over forty years ago, it might have been been made in the summer of 2016. The five rednecks with their trucks could have rendered just as powerfully as five uniformed city cops in patrol cars. The racial and sexual violence lying just below the niceties of American life remain relevant, as does the disregard for black life. The ugliness in Kienholz’ sculptural expression – the bloated figures,
the melting-wax faces,
the horror movie lighting – equals the subject matter. It captures the terror correctly.
Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969–72. Photo: courtesy of Delfino Sisto Legnani Studio.