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. A dark, seedy atmosphere pervades, forcing one to think about prostitution, exploitation and morality. As Nancy has pointed out, ‘I would like the viewer to remember while walking these streets, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”...I would only hope that “The Hoerengracht” is a kind portrait of the profession, and that eventually prostitution will be legal and the girls can get police protection rather than prosecution.’ (Since 2000 brothels are no longer illegal in Amsterdam.)

Ed Kienholz first confronted the subject of prostitution in the early Sixties with his installation ‘Roxys’ (1961–2), which is based on a brothel he visited in Nevada aged 17. This tableau, now on show at the El Sourdog Hex gallery in Berlin (until 30 December), differs from ‘The Hoerengracht’ because one can walk right into the installation, and indeed become part of it, rather than being an outsider looking at the girls from the ‘street’. The room at first appears cosy and inviting, with its floral wallpaper, comfortable sofas and armchairs, and homely touches such as a goldfish in a bowl and a plate of sweets. Look around, though, and first impressions are misplaced. The Madam, a frightening mannequin with a boar’s-skull head, stands near the entrance and her ‘girls’ of various shapes and sizes are placed round the room: Miss Cherry Delight, who is just a head suspended over a dressing-table on which lie her make-up and cheap trinkets, The Five Dollar Billy, who sprawls over a sewing machine (visitors can crank the treadle and get her moving), Cock-eyed Jenny, A Lady Named Zoa and Diana Poole, Miss Universal, who is so ugly she has a hessian bag which she can pull over her head as a disguise. Poor Diana.

Back to the Sunley Room: why is the National Gallery giving space to a work about prostitution? Well, it’s been housing 17th-century pimps and tarts for years, which is why at the entrance to the exhibition there are three pictures from the Dutch Golden Age: by Jan Steen, Godfried Schalcken and Pieter de Hooch. For example, Steen’s painting, ‘The Interior of an Inn (“The Broken Eggs”)’, c.1665–70, depicts a tavern scene, where a customer is clutching at the skirt of a serving woman. Broken eggs, frying pan and mussel shells are scattered on the floor, all clues that this is an inn of ill repute.

As Colin Wiggins, the show’s curator, writes in the catalogue, ‘In the 17th century, the Dutch painters recorded everyday life in the Netherlands...Fast forward three centuries to the 1980s and the Kienholzes show an aspect of Amsterdam in the late 20th century, squalid and sleazy but clearly still connecting deeply to its past.’ He hopes the installation will stop people in their tracks and make them think afresh about the NG’s own collection. It certainly does that.