Is it possible to write about an exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art without commenting on the
institution itself? If lamenting the dismal state of affairs
at the Whitney has become tiresome, it is no less so than that which the museum routinely proffers as art. What is
surprising, then, about “Kienholz: A Retrospective” is not
that it almost didn’t happen, but that it didn’t happen
sooner.[1] Although he had been working for over forty years,
Edward Kienholz—who died in 1994 at the age of sixty-six—could be
considered the quintessential artist for the Whitney of the 1990s,
a museum partial to (as a colleague has it) “the school of
puke, pus, piss, and politics.” This is an unfortunate turn of
phrase but one that sums up the Whitney’s criteria for art
all too well. It sums up “Kienholz: A Retrospective”
pretty well too.

The title of the exhibition refers not only to Edward
Kienholz but also to his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz. In 1981
Kienholz retroactively designated his wife as co-creator of
all work made since 1972, the year they met, and this
collaboration was to last until his death. While this
acknowledgement by Kienholz may have been, in part, a display
of feminist solidarity, the extent to which
Nancy Reddin Kienholz was an equal in their artistic
partnership is uncertain. The Kienholzian vision is, after all, of a piece
throughout the period covered by the exhibition (1954–1994) with no
substantive variation in the post-1972