Sanguine / Bloedrood
During the cultural city festival Antwerp Baroque 2018. Rubens Inspires, the M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, juxtaposes the spirit of the baroque masters with the vision of contemporary top artists. With the exhibition Sanguine/Bloedrood (Blood Red), curator Luc Tuymans aims to overwhelm the visitor by placing key works from the baroque of, among others, Francisco de Zurbarán and Caravaggio, in dialogue with works by classical contemporary masters, such as On Kawara and Edward Kienholz, as well as new works by contemporary stars such as Zhang Enli, Takashi Murakami, Michaël Borremans, Sigmar Polke and Tobias Rheberger.
FIVE CAR STUD
Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969-1972, Collezione Prada, Milano, photo credit: Delfino Sisto Legnani Studio, Courtesy Fondazione Prada
The visual impact of Five Car Stud can hardly be overestimated. It is a horrifying tableau created by the American artist Edward Kienholz (1927-1994). During his lifetime, Kienholz does not acquire the status that he deserves: that of a cult artist who directly engages with social excesses and, then, depicts them in a merciless manner. In Europe, on the other, people have always been very interested in his installations. After his death, the expressive force of his work, grimly and brutally depicting a degraded urban reality, is recognised on a global scale.
Kienholz, initially on his own but from 1972 together with his wife Nancy Redding, creates highly confrontational installations, tableaux vivants and environments: life-size characters in a recognisable setting and a characteristically silent pose, surrounded by banal objects. Edward Kienholz is an artistic contemporary and supporter of the Beat generation. His whole oeuvre is a furious comment on racism, sexual stereotypes, poverty, greed, corruption, imperialism, patriotism, religion, alienation and – above all – moral hypocrisy. In spite of this – or perhaps precisely because of this – he is in the United States for a long time regarded as “the least known, most neglected and forgotten American artist”.
From the seventies onwards, his artistic existence is increasingly situated in Europe, predominantly Berlin, where Kienholz and his wife continue to expand their oeuvre. In 1972, the couple is asked by Harald Szeeman to contribute to documenta 5, where the installation Five Car Stud will be shown for the first time: nine life-size figures, five cars, several trees and a truck load full of sand. The installation describes a circle of white men, lighted by the headlights of the surrounding cars, seizing, beating and castrating a gagged black man while, in one of the cars, a child and a white woman – the victim’s companion – watch the scene in helpless despair. Five Car Stud is a timeless sledgehammer blow. An uppercut in the plexus solar of the white supremacy and blatant racism of the American urban seventies.
After documenta, the installation disappears in the storage of a Japanese collector and remains hidden from view for almost forty years until, a couple of years ago, it meets renewed interest. Luc Tuymans wants to show the Five Car Stud in Antwerp in the way it was at documenta back in 1972: outside the circuit, in the obscuration of a big dome that will be set up on the Waalse Kaai, along the axis between M HKA and KMSKA. The significance of the installation, as connecting element between baroque paintings and contemporary art, is not only the theme that led to the title Sanguine/Bloedrood but also its cinematic setting.
Edward Kienholz worked on this epic installation from 1969 up to 1972. All this time, he keeps an extensive journal of the artistic development process – he calls it a pictorial chronology of the making of – which he describes as a personal struggle, as if in his head the work had a will of its own and its own identity. In this typed document, he gives a very accurate description of all components, his search for models and the construction planning but he also reflects on the social and political consequences that the work would generate. Anticipating the utter institutional negation that Five Car Studs would befall in America, he ends his narrative with a clear conclusion: “The conversation with Five Car Stud is still very painful and slow, but one thing has been established for sure: if six to one is unfair odds in my tableau, then 170 million to 20 million is sure as hell unfair ode in my country.”
In 1972, the year in which the work is completed, Edward Kienholz and his wife Nancy Reddin enter into an artistic partnership. Up to his death in 1994, they will sign their joint work with “Kienholz”. In 2008, Nancy Reddin starts the restoration of Five Car Stud in view of its “new” presentation at the Fondazione Prada, which had meanwhile purchased the work. The worldwide interest creates a new perception and posthumous recognition for the artist and his oeuvre but the presentation of Five Car Studs will always remain a perilous undertaking, if only because of the gruesome scene. It prompts Prada to give visitors of the exhibition a clear warning: “This exhibition includes representations of violent situations that may disturb or offend some visitors. Minors are strongly advised to avoid visiting the exhibition, and in any case may do so only when accompanied by an adult who assumes full responsibility for the visit.” The visual impact can indeed hardly be overestimated. It really is a horrifying tableau.
(Text: Hans Willemse, 2018)