The Art Newspaper

Kienholz’s seminal work re-emerges, to be shown in US for first time

Powerful “Five Car Stud” installation restored before going on tour

By Javier Pes. From Art Basel Miami Beach daily edition
Published online: 02 December 2009

First shown in the 1972 Documenta 5 in Kassel, Five Car Stud depicts six masked white males castrating a black man, surrounded by the vehicles of the title. In a pick-up truck sits the figure of a white woman, the implication being that the victim is being lynched because of their inter-racial relationship. The scene takes place at night and viewers encounter the work in a darkened, tented dome, becoming eyewitnesses to the attack.

After Kassel, the work was shown in Berlin and Düsseldorf before being acquired by a collector who took it home to Japan. Now in the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Sakura, it has remained in store. “It was never shown in America,” Nancy Reddin Kienholz, the artist’s wife and collaborator, told us. But it is “re-emerging”, she added. She was speaking at the unveiling of another Kienholz installation, The Hoerengracht (Whore’s Canal), in London’s National Gallery (until 21 February 2010), which she and her husband created from 1983-88. “It’s a terrible thing that [Five Car Stud] was only shown in Europe,” she said.

Plans for the work’s tour to a US museum and European venues are being finalised. The organisers include Los Angeles-based L.A. Louver, New York’s PaceWildenstein (B8) and the Kawamura museum. A representative of L.A. Louver said that conservation work needed was surprisingly minimal after the work’s 38 years in store.

A mid-career Kienholz retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966 was a succès de scandale. The installation Backseat Dodge ’38, which features a skeleton-like couple embracing in the rear of a beaten-up old car caused a moral panic, along with the tableau Roxy’s, 1961, which evoked a Nevada brothel. Visitors flocked to the see what the newspapers reported was a “sex show”. In 2008, the museum bought Kienholz’s The Illegal Operation, 1962, for around $1m.