As Kienholz: The Hoerengracht opens at The National Gallery today, Curator Colin Wiggins tells us how the unprecedented show came to London and gives us a darkened tour of the eerie installation…
Towards the end of last year, the National Gallery announced its plans to show The Hoerengracht, which is a major installation piece by American artists Ed and Nancy Kienholz. The Hoerengracht (literally: whores' canal) is a walk-in tableau which represents the notorious Amsterdam Red Light district.
Eleven life size sculptures, all cast from life, are placed in the glowing windows and doorways: they are, of course, prostitutes, waiting for trade.
Given the torrent of headlines in the press after we announced the exhibition, it would be fair to conclude that the idea of a revered collection of Old Masters deciding to exhibit a work dealing with the world’s oldest profession was seen as something fairly remarkable.
But this is exactly why the National Gallery is showing the piece: to make people sit up, take notice and see the connections with what it already has on display as part of the permanent collection.
Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, The Hoerengracht (detail) (1983-88). © Kienholz Estate, courtesy of LA Louver, Venice, CA
The National Gallery's collection ends at 1900. This now gives us a gap of some 109 years between today’s public and the most recent work on display.
Aiming to bridge that gap and to show that today's art is rooted in the achievements of the past, it continues to be policy of the National Gallery to have regular exhibitions of contemporary art that reflects upon the permanent holdings of the Gallery, or connect with it some way.
In recent years artists as diverse as Ron Mueck, Tom Hunter, Peter Blake and Alison Watt have all shown new work. The display of The Hoerengracht is the latest of these shows and is the first "installation" piece that the National Gallery has ever shown.
However, Ed's favoured word was "tableau", with its connotations of burlesque theatre and Victorian entertainments.
Ed and Nancy (Reddin) Kienholz married in 1972 and that is when their artistic collaboration began. Nancy had already had a successful career as a photographer but meeting Ed changed her direction.
Ed was already a controversial figure. In 1962 his first ever tableau was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum. Entitled Roxys, this piece was, again, a brothel, this time based upon a whorehouse in Nevada that Ed had visited himself as a teenager.
The Hoerengracht is the first installation to appear at The National Gallery. © Kienholz Estate, courtesy of LA Louver, Venice, CA
It was shown with other pieces, including Back Seat Dodge, a sculpture which features a real automobile with an alcohol fuelled teenage couple making out in the back seat.
The storm of protest that followed was predictable in the straight-laced LA of the early 1960s, but it made Ed's reputation, and he is now seen as a key player in the history of post-war art, whose work has had a huge influence on succeeding generations.
The Hoerengracht is Ed and Nancy's biggest piece and it took nearly five years to make. It is lit, appropriately, to evoke night-time. There are bicycles, maybe belonging to the clients who we can imagine behind the closed curtains of some of the windows.
Other windows cast their warm and glowing light towards us and as we walk along the narrow street we see claustrophobic alleyways down which we see more windows.
In those windows are the girls, scantily clad, putting on make up, looking out at us, waiting for us to ring their bells and ask their prices. Unwittingly, spectators become participants.
This is very much a Kienholz trademark – to lure in spectators and have us suddenly find that we are ourselves part of the action. We become voyeurs, potential clients even. How we respond will inevitably be dictated by our attitudes to prostitution.
The couple married in 1972.© Kienholz Estate, courtesy of LA Louver, Venice, CA
Months before installing this show, Nancy revisited Amsterdam to see how the area has changed since the piece was made in the 1980s.
The city authorities have been trying to clean up the district, in order to fight organised crime and people-trafficking. But the counter arguments run deep. Where will the girls go if the window brothels are shut down?
Historically, attempts to combat prostitution have only succeeded in driving it underground, where the women are in far more danger than in the Red Light district itself.
What have these arguments got to do with the National Gallery? Well, art and life are not inseparable. The National Gallery’s collection has plenty of pictures by artists who dealt with exactly the same issues as Kienholz.
Hogarth paints a man with a child prostitute. Toulouse Lautrec lived amongst the whores in the brothels and poignantly depicted them again and again.
In 17th century Holland the subject of prostitution was commonplace. And, a few hundred yards north of the National Gallery, is Soho, where the buying and selling of sex continues in London's own Red Light district.
Ed and Nancy Kienholz have been hugely influential artists. Their place in the history of modern art is secure. Figures such as Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley or the Chapman brothers all owe a debt of gratitude to them.
This exhibition at the National Gallery however, is the first time anything by Kienholz has been shown in a gallery devoted to Old Master painting. Seeing them in this context is surprising, but shows how their work goes beyond the mere contemporary and connects deeply with the wider history of painting.
Open until February 21 2010.
Check out our picture special on The Hoerengracht and our report on the changing artistic climate from Amsterdam.
See Culture24 later this week for our review of the show.
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