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248.
Gallery announcement for “Three Tableaux”.
Los Angeles: Dwan Gallery, 1964. Photo-illustrated with a detail from “Back Seat Dodge .38”. 21.5x29.5cm.
Kienholz joined Virginia Dwan’s gallery in Westwood in 1962, four years after relinquishing his role at the Ferus Gallery he co-founded with Walter and Shirley Hopps in 1957.
This show, his second at Dwan, debuted “Back Seat Dodge .38”, a tableau incorporating a truncated 1938 Dodge and two intertwined mannequins sharing a single caged head and simulating sex in the back seat, with beer bottles and other detritus scattered at their feet.
When the work was exhibited at Kienholz’s retrospective at the LA County Museum of Art in 1966 it caused a furore after members of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors condemned it as “revolting, pornographic and blasphemous” and threatened to cut the museum’s funding unless it was removed (a compromise was reached whereby the car’s door was kept shut to under-18s and anyone older could ask the guard to open it for a quick peek).
The other tableaux exhibited at Dwan were “Birthday”, a life-size installation featuring a mannequin strapped to a gynaecologist's examination table, surrounded by objects and illuminated with electrically lighted Lucite, and “While Visions Of Sugar Plums Danced In Their Heads”, an elaborate tableau incorporating peepholes in the grotesque heads of two mannequins in bed through which the viewer could see sex fantasies involving nude Ken and Barbie dolls.
Archivally mounted and framed behind perspex in a beech wood frame (29.7x37cm.). Near Fine (unexamined out of the frame). Illustrated in Kienholz: A Retrospective, p.255.
Price:
£500.00
