ALL-AMERICAN BARBARIC YAWP

By ROBERT HUGHES

The artist Edward Kienholz's last piece was his burial, which took place at a hunting cabin he owned on top of a mountain in Hope, Idaho, in 1994. He had died of a heart attack at age 65, and now his corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe. There was a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him and the ashes of his dog Smash in the back. He was set for the afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes, the Packard, steered by his widow Nancy Reddin Kienholz, rolled like a funeral barge into the big hole. All in all, it was the most Egyptian funeral ever held in Idaho.

The retrospective of 120 works by Kienholz, now at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art, is a pretty good tribute to this profuse, energetic, sometimes brilliant and sometimes very corny artist. Kienholz didn't believe in refinement. What he believed in was a combination of technical know-how, moral anger and all-American barbaric yawp. Moving through the show is like being alternately slugged and hectored by a redneck Godzilla with strong libertarian-anarchist convictions. His truck used to have ED KIENHOLZ--EXPERT painted on the door. You might not trust Roy Lichtenstein to frame a shed or Jasper Johns to re-weld a railing, but Kienholz was doing that stuff since childhood. He was brought up on a farm in the Northwest, near Fairfield, Washington. He could fix anything, combine anything, so that it worked. But as an artist he was entirely self-taught, and he could neither draw well nor paint convincingly on a flat surface.

The earliest pieces in the show, from 1954 to 1957, are terrible--Beat coffee-shop art writ large. What enabled him to become an artist in the 1960s was junk, scraps, the offcuts and excreta of America, which he combined first into small hybrid pieces and then into whole rooms and environments. As a hunter-gatherer, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, he was a whiz. He put in everything, including the kitchen sink--no, make that the whole kitchen. Some of the catalog entries for this show, listing title, date and materials, sound more like small towns than works of art: "The Ozymandias Parade, 1985. Tableau: wood, plastic, mirrored plexiglass, fiberglass horses, light bulbs, recorded music, paint, clothing, plaster casts, rubber, metal, galvanized sheet metal, polyester resin, wagon, pork barrel, suitcases, fake money, telephone, miniature flags, and toys, 147 x 349 x 180 [inches]."

The assembly of junk into metaphoric objects has an ancestry that goes back to Surrealism and German Dada. Joseph Cornell in the 1940s was the first American to base a whole oeuvre on it; Robert Rauschenberg in the '50s picked up on him; and Kienholz in the '60s on Rauschenberg. But whereas Cornell was butterfly gentle and Rauschenberg effusively open, Kienholz was a raging satirist attached to the view from over the top. Show him any kind of Establishment, and he loathed it. Almost from the start his work was about social pain, madness, estrangement. He hated all cant, including the art world's. One of the bigger pieces at the Whitney is The Art Show, 1963-77, in which the Kienholzes (he and Nancy Reddin were co-authors of all the work from 1972 on) constructed an art-gallery space and filled it with cast figures whose faces were air-conditioning grilles. From these would spout taped readings of art-magazine gobbledygook when you, the viewer, pressed a floor switch.

Kienholz wasn't a Pop artist; there was nothing benign or accommodating in his view of mass culture. To him the TV set was both America's anus and its oracle. He was a history artist, working in a real-things-in-the-real-world vernacular that was, by turns, scabrous, brazenly rhetorical and morally obsessed. Compared with the thin, overconceptualized gruel that most political art in postmodern America has become--the stuff the Whitney normally favors--Kienholz was red meat all the way. Which doesn't mean that his output was uniformly good. An item like The Ozymandias Parade, 30 ft. long and including hundreds of figures, from life-size horses to tiny toy Indians and frogs, wants to impress you so much it becomes a fulsome, preachy bore.

Kienholz's best tableaus remind you what a long shadow Edward Hopper cast on American art. (It is a fair bet, though, that Hopper would have found Kienholz's raucousness and sexual satire detestable.) The Beanery, 1965, his famous reconstruction of a grungy West Hollywood bar--a little slice of hell, in fact, full of endless chatter, where all the clients' heads are clocks whose hands have stopped for eternity at 10 p.m.--has its affinities to Hopper's Nighthawks. Even the silver G.I.s in Kienholz's great antimilitarist piece, The Portable War Memorial, 1968, have a spectral Hopperish sadness as they raise the Iwo Jima flag on a patio table.

In his later work this lyricism would too often get buried under the polemics, but in the '60s it was to the fore, and it accounts for the pathos of a piece like The Wait, 1964-65. At first it's a shock, like coming across Mama's corpse from Psycho in a museum. The old woman is waiting for death; her head is a sheep's skull in a jar on whose front is pasted a photo of herself when young; she wears a necklace of memories: jars containing gilded mementos of prayer, marriage, long-gone sexual love. The repeated forms of oval frames, a sewing box and tabletops combine with the big curve of the screen behind the chair to give the piece a strong binding rhythm at odds with the poor shriveled figure. All is dust and mummification except for one touch of life: a real canary cheeping in its cage.

If this is the most touching of Kienholz's early works, the fiercest comes out of a job he briefly held in a California madhouse. Through the door of The State Hospital, 1966, you peer into a charnel house of the soul, in which an emaciated and filthy body lies on the lower bunk of a two-tier unit while his doppelganger lies on the one above, encircled by a neon thought balloon. He is the real patient's dream; there is no escape from the confinement and lunacy; one fortifies the other.

Such tableaus, breaking through the crust of American denial and euphemism about old age, madness, sex and death, packed a wallop 30 years ago, and still do today. It's not surprising that the Kienholzes' work was more popular in Europe, particularly Germany, than in their native America: Americans have never had much appreciation of satire, especially in the visual arts. Even today Kienholz's detractors think he was practicing some kind of anti-Americanism (along with the rest of the godless liberal queer whiners favored by the National Endowment for the Arts, natch). Actually, he was at least as American as his critics--a compulsive Puritan who realized that the City on a Hill had been built in a mud-slide area. The very thought of this moved him to gusts of bitter laughter, and these still blow from his work. Did he exaggerate? Of course; that's what large-hearted moralists do. There are some truths that speak only from the well of exaggeration.