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Home , Edward Kienholz

EDWARD KIENHOLZ

FIVE CAR STUD 1969-1972, Revisited Introduction arranged on a dirt floor in a dark room with their headlights illuminating a gruesome scene. Stephanie Barron Five Car Stud (1969–72), Edward Kienholz’s power- Four white figures are in the process of pinning Senior Curator of ful tableau, graphically depicts the hatred and down a black man in order to castrate him; pre- County Museum of Art violence expressed by many Americans toward sumably they have accosted the interracial cou- racial minorities and interracial partnerships. ple in the pickup truck and are exacting their It is undoubtedly his most important work punishment on the black man. As Leigh Raiford addressing civil rights. notes in her text in this brochure, Kienholz taps into a long history of white-on-black lynch- The artist was born in Fairfield, Washington, in ing, and transports us back to the late 1960s 1927 and grew up on a farm, where he learned car- and early 1970s when outright violence, hatred, pentry, metalwork, and mechanics from his father. and racial prejudices were all too common. Today He attended college briefly but received no for- viewing Five Car Stud reminds us that demonstra- mal artistic training. After working many jobs tions of racial inequality have not disappeared. and traveling throughout the western , he moved to Los Angeles, where he began Kienholz worked on the piece from 1969 to 1972. to make artworks assembled from urban detritus. There were plans to include it in 11 L.A. Artists He became involved with the emerging L.A. art at the Hayward Gallery in London, but ultimately scene, opening the with Walter the cost of shipping prevented its exhibition Hopps in 1957. Kienholz’s assemblages often there. Curator Harold Szeeman, who was organiz- included figures cast from life—at times vulgar ing the international contemporary art exhi- or gruesome—that confronted the viewer with bition 5 in Kassel, , learned questions about human existence and the inhuman- of the work and made a commitment to show it ity of society. His intense addressed there beginning in June 1972. Five Car Stud sub- political and societal issues, attracting nation- sequently traveled to the Academie der Künste, al and international attention. In 1966 LACMA , and the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf. It was mounted his first museum show, which provoked then acquired by a Japanese collector, and significant controversy.* remained in storage for forty years. Only recently was this powerful work taken from stor- Five Car Stud was Kienholz’s most ambitious work I would like to thank for working closely with us on this age and sent to the Kienholz studio in Hope, to date. He documented the creation of the piece, installation. I would also like to thank the following individuals for their help and Idaho, where it was painstakingly restored under support: Sam Adams, Keith Berwick, Peter Goulds (L.A. Louver Gallery), Lisa Jann the casting in plaster of friends and family, and (L.A. Louver Gallery), Lyn Kienholz, Anders Kold (Louisiana Museum of Modern the supervision of Nancy Reddin Kienholz, the Art, Denmark), Margo Leavin, Andrew Perchuk (The Getty Research Institute), the assembly of the scene. In 1972 he published artist's widow and collaborator. This is the and Leigh Raiford (University of California, Berkeley). At LACMA, I would like to an account of its creation in a limited edition. thank Michael Govan, Brooke Davis Anderson, Lauren Bergman, Jane Burrell, first time the tableau has been seen publicly Ilene Fort, Thomas Frick, Amy Heibel, Zoe Kahr, Franklin Sirmans, and Jin Son. Additionally, we are grateful to the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art for In this horrifying, though invented, environ- in the United States. lending Five Car Stud. ment, four automobiles and a pickup truck are * www.lacma.org/back-seat-dodge-38 Edward Kienholz: Five Car Stud 1969/2011 days of the republic, lynching emerged after the lic eye. In these ways lynching is imbued with Set against white anxiety around black power, reminder that this past-its images, its rhetoric, end of the Civil War (1861–1865) as a means to the pornographic, the white man’s sexual fascina- For many US citizens, lynch- amid riots, and internationally a growing alli- its forms of terror-may be forty years gone, but Leigh Raiford Associate Professor, African American Studies control newly emancipated African Americans tion with and repulsion by a fictionalized or ing remained, in the words of ance of anticolonial struggles, Five Car Stud it continues to undergird our present racial University of California, Berkeley through sheer terrorism. Between 1880 and 1930, projected black sexuality that enables, indeed scholar Jacqueline Goldsby, reminds us of the violence that undergirds all order. Like the letters that float and recombine the apex of white supremacy in American life and necessitates, the very real savagery of the a “spectacular secret,” one racial hierarchies. The fight for equality is not within the victim’s torso, our racial past is Edward Kienholz’s Five Car Stud (1969–1972) remains politics, more than three thousand men, women, vindicating mob. in which lynching’s violence merely a matter of rights, marches, or even the always present and available for reinterpreta- as powerful and disturbing, overwhelming and and children were lynched across the United “could command the public’s establishment of separate institutions; rather tion. As the letters move in slow and unpredict- Lynching is nothing less than an act of terror- irritating, as it was when it first appeared in States, mostly, though not exclusively, in the attention and yet will this struggle marks an exposure of and challenge able patterns, we are alerted to the fact that ism. It is intended not to achieve “justice,” but Germany. So shocking was this debut-a testimony south. This is an average of well over a lynching the nation to a collective to the long and deadly history of racial subjuga- “progress” isn’t always linear; indeed “nigger” to create a spectacle and set an example that to its challenge to the racial politics of the a week somewhere in America for more than fifty s i le n c e.” 2 By the 1950s, tion that serves as the foundation of the present may appear just when we least expect it. With blacks could claim no rights when accused of moment-that the piece was subsequently shelved years. Most of these victims-nearly 90%-were lynching had declined to crisis. Lynching’s absolute and abject disregard Five Car Stud, Kienholz has staged a tableau that crimes against whites. Lynching’s terror circu- in a Japanese storage facility for nearly four black. Many lynchings were grotesque spectacles the point where 1953 was the for black life lay at the heart of the Jim Crow inhabits the past and present simultaneously. The lated through word of mouth, through newspapers, decades. In this interregnum, history continued of unimaginable torture and humiliation, with first year in US history system of segregation, a system that had only reappearance of the piece uncomfortably expands and through the proliferation of photographs. to move, challenging and correcting the violent victims suffering beatings, burnings, dismember- without a recorded occur- begun to be dismantled in the decade prior to lynching’s audiences, draws ever-widening circles Amateur photography grew exponentially during wrongs depicted in this piece. While Five Car ment, and castration, as well as hanging at the Filmmaker Keith Berwick being cast in rence. With the onset of the Five Car Stud’s debut. “If six to one is unfair of complicity, and forces us to reckon with Stud slept in its crates, we have witnessed the the same period that lynching saw its peak, and plaster while interviewing Kienholz for the hands of white mobs that could sometimes number documentary Speculation: The World of modern civil rights movement, following the 1954 odds in my tableau,” Kienholz wrote in 1972, “then lynching’s legacies in the here and now. cameras became an integral part of the lynching end of Jim Crow segregation and the extension of into the tens of thousands. Only a handful of Ed Kienholz, 1971; © Kienholz, from Docu- Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing 170 million to 20 million is sure as hell unfair democracy to all US citizens, and we have cele- spectacle, extending the experience to those not mentation Book for Five Car Stud Tableau lynchers was ever brought to justice. and The Sawdy Edition, photos by “separate but equal” racial segregation, there odds in my country.” in attendance. For professional photographers, brated the end of Apartheid in South Africa and John Romeyn, Bob Bucknam, Malcolm came a prevailing sense of racial optimism. the election of a mixed-race black man as presi- Defined as the murder of an accused person or lynchings spawned a cottage industry in which Lublinder, and Adam Avila Given the strides towards racial equity-including dent of the US. Yet in the same decades we have persons by a mob without a trial or even evi- picture makers conspired with mob members and It is significant, then, that Kienholz made Five the near-disappearance of lynching and the grow- built the largest system of mass incarceration in dence, lynching found its greatest proponents in even local officials for the best vantage point, Car Stud in the turbulent period of 1969 to 1972. ing rates of interracial marriage and intimacy- history-with 2.3 million Americans behind bars, whites motivated by fears of interracial sex, and constructed portable darkrooms for quick turn- Though the era of formal lynching was over, why should Five Car Stud still matter? And why is the majority of them black or brown (far more men specifically of the mythical brutal black rapist. around, and pedaled their product “through news- racial relations were no less volatile. The civ- it still so disturbing? The size and form of the Students at the lunch Faced with a newly freed population seeking the papers, in drugstores, on the street-even .. . door il rights movement had achieved a number of work offer one clue. Its circulation through pri- of color than attend college)-and witnessed the counter of Woolworth’s; 1 rise of a race-baiting political party that ques- rights of full citizenship, many white Americans photo © 1960 Greens- t o d o or.” In lynching photography’s earliest man- modest victories, but the power to vote or to marily black and white photographs during the boro News & Record, Lynching projected a new generation of white men ifestations, whites were meant to identify with period of its exile only hinted at its scale. As tions Obama’s legitimacy as an American. Five Car in the years following the Civil War perceived photo by Jack Moebes public accommodations meant little without truly to positions of unassailable supremacy by demon- Stud in its return to its country of origin at black quests for racial equality as attempts at the power of the photograph’s white participants, representative candidates, adequate education, a life size that is at once full of izing every black man as a sexual menace, while once transports us back to a time of unambiguous domination. White fears of black economic autonomy mob members who brazenly and triumphantly sur- or basic economic security. The emergent Black symbolism but unambiguous in its realism, Five restricting white women to a protected and sup- violence, hatred, and racial divisions, while and political equality found supreme expression round their victim. So, too, were blacks meant Power movement expressed the needs and moods of Car Stud is a truly immersive experience: it sur- in perhaps the greatest fear of all, miscegena- posedly privileged position within the domestic to identify with the dehumanized and powerless African Americans caught between the passage of rounds us. Unlike most sculptures placed on a alerting us to our own current crises. Five Car Stud on view at documenta 5, Kassel, Five Car Stud displayed inside an inflated dome atdocumenta 5; tion, or race mixing. The era’s belief in biologi- sphere. Further, lynching and its narratives com- figure at the center of the image’s frame. Pho- the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the catharsis Germany, 1972; © Kienholz pedestal around which we walk, here we are photo © Delmore E. Scott With Five Car Stud, Kienholz tapped into the long cally based white supremacy and black inferiority pletely silenced and erased black women, leaving tography etched the lynching narrative in memory, of Watts, Newark, and the urban uprisings of im mersed, implicated, and indicted. 1. Text from the Without Sanctuary exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, history of white-on-black lynching in the United meant that in order to maintain racial supremacy them without political protection and thereby repeating in visual form the story of black sub- more than one hundred inner cities by 1968. Yet in its massive scale and in its many ironic May 12, 2000. States. An extralegal practice since the earliest sexual boundaries had to be policed. vulnerable to sexual violence outside of the pub- ordination to white supremacy. 2. Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and subtleties, Five Car Stud serves as a harsh Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 281. Related Events Edward Kienholz: Five Car Stud, 1969–1972, Revisited September 4, 2011–January 15, 2012 Representing Racial Violence: A Short History Checklist: September 8 | 7:30 pm Edward Kienholz Leigh Raiford, associate professor of African- United States, 1927–1994 American Studies at the University of California, Five Car Stud, 1969–72 Berkeley. Cars, plaster casts, guns, rope, masks, chainsaw, Bing Theater | Free, no reservations clothing, oil pan with water and plastic letters, paint, polyester resin, Styrofoam rocks, and dirt Artists Discuss Kienholz Then Collection of Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Sakura, Japan; courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA, and Now and The Pace Gallery, New York September 18 | 4 pm Ed Bereal and Alonzo Davis in conversation with Edward Kienholz United States, 1927–1994 USC’s Yael Lipshutz. Documentation Book for Five Car Stud Tableau and Art Catalogues Bookstore | Free, no reservations. The Sawdy Edition, 1971 Seating is extremely limited. Ink on paper, photographs, and newspaper; edition 41/75 Produced by Gemini G.E.L. Profiled: Race and Whiteness in Collection of Margo H. Leavin Sculpture from Frederick the Speculation: The World of Ed Kienholz, 1971 Great to Ed Kienholz 16 mm film transferred to DVD October 23 | 2 pm Total running time: 1 hour; selection: 9 min., 5 sec. A lecture by artist Ken Gonzales-Day, professor A KCET Production, produced by Price Hicks, directed by Allan L. Muir, interview by Keith Berwick of art at Scripps College. Brown Auditorium | Free admission; tickets The Story of an Artist, 1967–72 required. Tickets available one hour before the 16 mm film transferred to DVD Total running time: 21 min., 58 sec.; selection: 4 min., lecture. 45 sec. Produced and directed by William Kronick and Gallery Conversations: Kienholz produced by David A. Wolper September–January | Saturdays and © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved. Sundays, 1–4 pm Ephemera related to documenta 5, Akademie der Educators will be available in the exhibition to Künste, Berlin, and Monumente at Stadische Kunsthalle engage visitors. Düsseldorf, courtesy of Nancy Reddin Kienholz Please see www.lacma.org for additional events as information becomes available. Captions: Front cover: Five Car Stud on view at docu- menta 5, Kassel, Germany, 1972; © Kienholz; Back cover: Detail of photography contact sheet from Documentation Book for Five Car Stud Tableau and The Sawdy Edition, 1972; © Kienholz, photos by John Romeyn, Bob Buck- This presentation is organized by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and nam, Malcolm Lublinder, and Adam Avila; Introduction: is jointly presented in Los Angeles by the Getty Research Institute and the Los Angeles Five Car Stud on view at documenta 5, Kassel, Germany, County Museum of Art, with support from the Getty Foundation. 1972; © Kienholz ^