Mixing with prostitutes

Kienholz: The Hoerengracht
Sunley Room, National Gallery, until 21 February 2010

The first time I saw Ed Kienholz’s work was at his 1996 retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. I was completely overwhelmed — there was something so powerful and so disturbing about his huge stage-set-size installations which covered subjects such as brothels, mental hospitals and abortion.

Kienholz was a pioneer of assemblage art in the Fifties and Sixties, using objects he found in flea markets and elsewhere to make up his ‘tableaux’. He died in 1994; but from the early Seventies he and Nancy Reddin, the photographer whom he married in 1972, worked together as a team, travelling between their studios in Idaho and Berlin. And it is their joint work ‘The Hoerengracht’ (‘Whores Canal’), 1983–8, which has been assembled — with just inches to spare — in the Sunley Room: it is the Kienholzes’ largest construction. But what on earth is the National Gallery up to showing this work?

As its name suggests, ‘The Hoerengracht’ is about the red-light district of Amsterdam (drop the ‘o’ and it becomes a fashionable address: Gentlemen’s Canal). As we enter the Sunley Room it’s as if we are in an alleyway, wandering round corners and meeting life-size models of prostitutes touting for business from their doorways, watching others sit in their ground-floor rooms trying to lure in a client; abandoned bicycles lean against bollards; music plays in the background; red lights glow in the twilight: a ‘real’ street scene transported into a gallery.

The figures were all cast from actual women (friends of the Kienholzes) and then painted and dressed. Each face is framed by a glass ‘cookie box’: a tart can shut her box and keep her thoughts to herself — a client can’t buy her mind.