Savonarola in the City of Angels

SCULPTURE Savonarola in the City of Angels

High in the hills above Hollywood's Sunset Strip, a brick path worn slippery as slate leads to a sturdy, plain studio. Inside lives the man who last week was the most talked-about artist in all Los Angeles, 38-year-old Edward Kienholz. To keep in line the crowds thronging to see his work, the Los Angeles County Museum took the precaution of canceling all days off and vacations for its guards.

Surprisingly, what the people saw has all the surface appeal of a ten-week-dead rabbit. Kienholz is the man who immortalized (and cannibalized) an entire Los Angeles bar to make The Beanery (TIME, Dec. 17). His grotesque assemblages are covered with epoxy and fiber glass. They bristle with real bones, felt-covered bric-a-brac, and unglamorized junk. "All the little tragedies are evident in junk," he says, and he has made the junk heap his souvenir album.

The Viewer as Voyeur. There are those who see Kienholz's 47 collected works as an album of brilliant satire; others dig him as a kind of beat Savonarola; some consider him a blatant pornographer. The show, in fact, almost did not come off. County officials threatened until opening night to ban it, held off only in the face of a firm trustee and museum-staff declaration that "a great museum, like a great library, acquires, displays and studies, but does not pass judgment; only society, present and future, can do that."

Drawing the chief epithets was Kienholz's 1964 work Back Seat Dodge--'38, composed in part of a truncated '38 Dodge. In the back seat, amid a debris of cigarette wrappers and beer bottles, is a partial plaster figure of a girl being fondled by a man fashioned out of chicken wire. When the car door is opened, a light floods the interior and the viewer is as startled at seeing himself reflected as voyeur in the mirrors inside as he is by the scene before him.

The other principal target is a huge, walk-through tableau titled Roxy's, a 1961 re-creation of a 1943 wartime brothel in Las Vegas. One of the girls, Five Dollar Billie, is a mannequin with a virtuous face but a ravaged body (symbolized by a stuffed squirrel climbing out of her breast) lying on a sewing-machine table. Like a pathetic machine, she Yo-Yos pelvically if a spectator peddles the foot treadle. Adding a sardonic note is a call-to-arms portrait of General MacArthur and a sergeant's jacket, bedecked with a good-conduct medal.

Bigness Is Sickness. Kienholz himself sees his work as morality plays, as subtly scripted, static happenings. If they shock, it is merely to catch attention. Of Back Seat Dodge--'38, the artist says: "I think, when kids see where they are and why they are, I really think they would have second thoughts about what they're going to do with their lives. With my Dodge, the romantic nonsense is gone."

Kienholz, as a Northwest farmer's son who has made Los Angeles his home, feels like the puritan visiting Gomorrah. Says he: "The bigness of this city is a sickness. This need for space, grading the hills and filling the valleys, it's all part of man's inhumanity to man multiplied a million times, grinding against each other daily." Living in the city of five-level freeways, of supermarkets that never close, Kienholz searches for timeless values and tragedies in a metropolis that thrives on the fleeting present.

Embalmed Nostalgia. Kienholz's strategy is to preserve the past in his works, coating his junk assemblages in a rock-hard veneer of fiber glass. He handles decay as a time clock between the ever fresh present and the fullness of a lifetime, meticulously reconstructing the scene, down to an original 1943 calendar pinned on the wall of Roxy's. The mustiness that he seeks to enshrine, however, is not embalmed nostalgia. "I think of my art as laying a trail for people," he explains. "They can follow it, and at a certain point I disappear. Then they have to make a decision, even if it's only to get the hell out of there. No one can walk past a tableau; he has to walk into it. And if one person ends up being better, then I'm completely vindicated."

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