Edward Ralph Kienholz (1927- 1994), and Nancy Reddin Kienholz (b 1943) first met in Los Angeles in 1972. Ed bought and sold used cars and traded handy work for a living until 1951, when he began work as an artist, using brooms instead of paintbrushes. From the late 1950s, Kienholz made installations before they became a feature of contemporary art, and conceptual works before the term became a movement. In his Concept Tableaux, made in the 1960s, Kienholz typed details of proposed works on a piece of paper, each accompanied by a brass plaque bearing the work’s title, that would be realised if a buyer came up with the cash. These works are some of the earliest examples of what came to be known as Conceptual art.
After meeting Nancy, Ed made a statement in 1981 that all works from 1972 onwards would bear the signature of both artists; the two thus worked on numerous sculptures and installations until 1994, the year of Ed's death. No line existed between life and art for the Kienholz’s and they spent their time foraging for materials and objects through which they could express themselves, with a disregard for the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.
Tape recorders, vertebrae, mannequins, dried fish, dental moulds, flags, lights, the body of a Dodge truck, a bible: these are some of the wide range of materials which this artistic duo used to produce a diverse oeuvre, with works as variably titled as 'All Have Sinned in Rm. 323' (1992), 'The Future of an Afterthought' (1962) and 'Ignoring the Joke the Boy Lived On' (1987). A fibreglass and resin cloth statue by Nancy Kienholz - composed in 2004 - presents a copper-patinated, human-sized image of the Statue of Liberty, topped in a glowing neon sign where the flame of liberty would otherwise stand, claiming its title, 'It’s not my Fault'. This one example embodies the uncomfortable relationship which the couple maintained to their patrimony and is a reflection of the anxiety-filled response which the artists’ sought to invoke in their audience. This is evident in a work such as 'The Rhinestone Beaver Peep Show' (1980) which, positioning the plaster cast and pliant body of a woman yielding before the spectator, forces the viewer to be a voyeur. At far remove from many of the dominant formalistic artistic movements of the American post-war period, and against a stridently American ideological backdrop, these artists realized a more morbid gothic aesthetic.
War, corruption, death, commercialization, fetishization, decay: the Kienholz works are an accusation pointing a finger towards a society bereft of the humanity it claims to promote. The bodies they display in their tableaux are partial, mutated, or otherwise deprived of their humanness by the replacement of faces with clocks, or body parts with machine or animal parts: a dynamic evident in 'The Bronze Pinball Machine with Woman Affixed Also' (1980), which juxtaposes a Playboy pinball machine from the 1970s with a bronze cast of a young woman’s legs, and forms part of a group of assemblage works commenting on the dominating and aggressive formation of the American male psyche. In the seminal work from 1985, The Ozymandias Parade, the Kienholzs presented a postmodern interpretation of Shelley's poetic conviction of the self-destructive vanity of all potentates. The form of a man, a life-size President of the United States dangling with his nuclear-ready red telephone precariously from the back of a rearing white horse is followed by a soldier riding the back of a skeletal old woman. Surrounding are the figures of those less fortunate, looking on in awe or shock at the moment of an impending fall. Between the beautiful and the hideous, the crass and the eloquent, Ed and Nancy Kienholz's work does not speak, but shouts of a disappointed dream, a reality gone sour, and a persistent, ingrained, unyielding hope.
Ed Kienholz lived in Los Angeles from 1953-1973 with his first solo exhibition in 1955. In 1966, the Los Angeles County Museum hosted his first retrospective. Prestigious group exhibitions include: Documenta 4 + 5, Kassel, Germany (1968 & 1973), Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York (1981), the Biennial of Sydney, Australia (1988), and the Biennale di Venezia, Italy (1990). The artists' first joint retrospective was organised in 1996 by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and it travelled to the MOCA, LA and Berlinsche Galerie, Berlin. In 2005 Nancy collaborated with Haunch of Venison in organising a major retrospective exhibition that would travel from the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The Kienholz work can be found in collections worldwide including Centre Pompidou, Paris; LA County Museum of Art; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Stedelijk Amsterdam and The Whitney Museum. Ed Kienholz, larger than life, even in death, went to his grave in June 1994, sitting upright in his 1940 Packard, his late dog Smash's cremated remains in the back seat, with a bottle of Chianti in hand, a dollar bill in his pocket, and a deck of cards. Surviving her husband, Nancy Reddin Kienholz lives and works in Hope, Idaho, Houston, Texas and Berlin, Germany.
