Peter Clothier

The term "drawing" acquires new meaning in the exhibition "Kienholz: Tableau Drawings", including a museum-quality selection of largely collaborative work which spans the years from 1961 to the death of Ed Kienholz in 1994, and until the present for his wife and partner Nancy Reddin Kienholz. (Her notes, along with a useful essay by Marco Livingstone, form the text for an exhaustive catalog that accompanies the show.)

As the title suggests, these mostly three-dimensional pieces relate directly to the tableaux on which the Kienholz reputation is justly built. Yet they clearly stand on their own merits-even those which are identified as "drawings for" a particular work, and seem more traditionally preparatory works, some of them schematics, where plans for larger works are sketched against roughly collaged backgrounds, as in the series "The Art Show Drawings." Others, identified as "drawings from", are spin-off works created from the surplus of meticulously sought-out found materials assembled for a particular work, but not used in the final version.

Whether "for" or "from", however, each of these works evokes its own drama, character, location, or mood. Beyond the painterly sensitivity, much in evidence in these smaller works, the Kienholz vision is also that of the story-teller, recreating textures of real-world or imagined experience and setting scenes for action. The couple share with us an elegiac and satirical view of the dark side of the good life, where those left behind in the social sweepstakes (like "Sollie", or the women of the "Hoerengracht" series) share space with the tacky, cast-off relics of our acquisitive materialism. Of special interest is a pair of recent Nancy Reddin Kienholz solo works, in which a hilarious forest of crude male erections is used to take a jab at the rapacious soul of loggers deforesting Howe Mountain, where Ed's body lies buried at the wheel of his treasured vintage Packard.

---Peter Clothier is a Los Angeles based art critic and has written numerous  articles, art reviews, art catalogues, book reviews, and essays.