When Back Seat Dodge first opened in 1966 the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors threatened to withhold funding from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art if it insisted on including the work in a Kienholz retrospective. The museum finally agreed that the door would only be opened if someone over eighteen years old requested it and there was no one under that age present. The public was shocked that the museum would host a potentially pornographic display, so much so that over two hundred people lined up to see it. It has been that way ever since. Back Seat Dodge ’38 by Edward Kienholz has been shocking and charming the American Public for over forty years.
In 1966 Jeanie was not allowed to show her navel on television, and Kienholz’s couple were copulating in the backseat of a ’38 Dodge. Taken in context it is easy to see how the public was shocked by the casually blatant display of sexuality. Johnson’s “Great Society” was changing the way people thought. The Supreme Court handed down the decision in the Miranda case ground was broken on the World Trade Center, LSD was made illegal in California and Fidel Castro declared martial law because of the possibility of an attack launched from the United States. America was reinventing herself, and her relationship with the world.
And the beat goes on. Transportation, communication and digitalization have changed the world view. The Janet Jackson of 1966 would never have considered a “wardrobe malfunction” of the magnitude she engineered this century with the social values extant at that time. Of course, back then there was only network television, with no opportunity for parental controls. Her performance was broadcast on cable, and after everyone got done tweeting about it, there were more viewers who saw it on YouTube than watched it on TV. All that technology belongs to a world that saw the first episode of Star Trek in September of that same year; so do the old system of morals and mores that existed then. Yet somehow the “oh - Oh - OH,” factor in Kienholz’s sculpture remains. Perhaps it is the unexpected intimacy and passion, and the artist’s ability to capture it in all its blatant honesty.
In an interview quoted in a section of the Los Angeles County Museum’s web site. The artist tells the tale of his experience, for at one time in his life he was the guy in the back of the ’38 Dodge with beer and an amiable woman, and he does not remember her name. The way the story goes when he was around seventeen, he borrowed his dad’s ’38 Dodge to go to a dance at Chatcolet Lake, Idaho.
“This girl was out there, and I enticed her into the car, “We got some beer and pulled off in the tules someplace and did intimate and erotic things all over her, and we sat there and drank beer and had a nice time.” “And I couldn’t remember her name later,” he said. “I thought, what a crazy situation — to be that intimate with a person and not know who they are. It just seemed wrong to me in a way. And then I got to thinking about back seats and Dodges and the kind of a world where kids are really forced into a cramped space in — maybe even a fear situation, certainly a furtive situation. Like what a miserable first experience of sex most kids go through. I mean, the back seats of cars.” .
It is that juxtaposition of tawdry, miserable ecstasy that he remembered and captured. Remembered teenage exploration, such a shared experience; for today there are still Dodges and teenagers, being made. For those of us who are past that moment, it brings us back and reminds us there was a time, before our time, when the objects in the world were far different, but people and their passions have not really changed.
Kienholz searched for the Dodge of his memories in and among the abandoned vehicles in Los Angeles neighborhoods. The woman is made of plaster, the man of chicken wire so you can see though him to the woman he tops. Scattered about are cans of Olympia Beer.
The Dodge is back at the Los Angeles County Museum, but in a setting so new the web page has not yet been changed. . A description can be had from Edward Wyatt who wrote it up for Art Knowledge News. Now the sculpture is in the setting Edward Kienholz envisioned from the start. Tucked into a dim grey alcove, surrounded by plants and lit only by the car’s headlights and the dashboard light we are the voyeurs who must extend our selves to peer into that private encounter, stretching to see past the plants or peeking around the corner. There are no longer any casual glances available in the new display we must admit to our interests. Edward Kienholz died in 1994, but his wife and partner Nancy Reddin Kienholz lives on and remembers,
“Ed always said that the best installation was one that would make it look like you came upon this couple at night, up at a necker’s spot on Mulholland Drive,” “It would only be illuminated by the car’s headlights and the light inside the car.” “The radio would always be on, and the car would be surrounded by plants,”.
So there they are now, in the weeds the plaster woman and the chicken wire man, so deeply engaged in each other they do not even notice us as we furtively stare from over the plants or stretch around the corner for our glimpse into the immediacy of their passion and into our own past. Period music drifts out of the alcove, and the beat goes on
Ed Kienholtz was more than a person, he was a persona, in some ways his life was an episode of performance art. He has been quoted as saying “The great green simpleton image I push all the time, the butterball of good-natured fun, is defensive.” . Back in 1968, more than one person at TWA called it more aggressive than that. The way the story goes, airline employees insisted he check in a priceless Tiffany lamp and lampshade rather than carry on board, then they returned it smashed and compounded the problem by denying his insurance claim calling him a liar and accusing him of fraudulently packing a broken item to collect on the insurance claim. When Ed told the tale, it was being called a liar that really pushed him over the top. His lawyer told him not to take justice into his own hands, but that is just what he did. He was headed out of town, but made it clear that if the matter was not resolved by the time he returned he would enact equal damage to TWA. He returned with a letter, an ax and a photographer to chronicle the action. The letter read "Good morning, my name is Ed Kienholzyou broke my lampshade and I'm really unhappyso I'm going to cause TWA an equal amount of damage. I'm going to destroy a desk for TWA." and that is what he did. The LA Police arrested him in the parking lot. The outcome was that Kienholz won the small claims suit, and no charges were pursued against him. Through photographs and writing, he garnered tremendous positive media attention and TWA suffered from his distribution of humorous negative publicity towards them. .
His honesty and bold approach gave his work an immediacy that allowed him to enjoy a success in his lifetime that few artists find even posthumously. It is a good thing too, for part of his life was his performance as a publicly visible artist. When two hundred people lined up to see the opening exhibition in the Los Angeles back in 1966 it pushed him into a national spotlight that he never quite left. Even now the sculpture, in the new setting at its old home still garners the public’s attention. The media relations manager at the Los Angeles County Museum reports that she still receives calls on the Back Seat Dodge; more calls than for any other work of art they have. .
The critics have not always been kind; Hilton Kramer called his work “a jolly rape of the public’s sensibilities,” but they have not stopped talking. Such was his persona that even his critics had critics; Mark Dery quoted Kramer in the New York Observer and added that Kramer’s description, “recommends Kienholz highly, anything that induces the gag reflex in a prig like Kramer can’t be all bad, and is likely all good.” Ever since he grabbed the national spotlight with Back Seat Dodge ’38 back in 1966 to the day of his funeral and beyond; this life of art, and as art; is part of the chronicle of our times. Robert Hughes featured Kienholz in the last episode of "American Vision," his art series that aired on PBS.. and the beat goes on.
Edward Kienholz introduced his wife Nancy Redden Kienholz to the manly pursuit of art when they began collaborating in 1972. His last performance art was his wife’s first solo piece. As Robert Hughes described it
"His corpulent, embalmed body was wedged into the front seat of a brown 1940 Packard coupe," said Hughes. "There was a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him, and the ashes of his dog Smash in the trunk. He was set for the Afterlife. To the whine of bagpipes, the Packard, steered by his widow Nancy Reddin Kienholz, rolled like a funeral barge into the big hole: the most Egyptian funeral ever held in the American West, a fitting [exit] for this profuse, energetic, sometimes brilliant, and sometimes hopelessly vulgar artist.".
Works Cited
Art Knowledge News. "Edward Kienholz 'naughty' sculpture at LA County Museum of Art." Art Knowledge News. 17 4 2012
east of borneo. "Edward Kienholz's Back Seat Dodge '38 (1964)." 18 11 2010. east of borneo. 18 4 2012
jzellen. "Back Seat Dodge." 14 11 2011. Los Angeles County Museum. 17 4 2012
McEntire, Frank. "In Life and Death, Ed kienholz Makes Us Participate." Beat Museum. 17 4 2012
Willick, Damon. "Good morning, my name is Ed Kienholz." 3 8 2006. X-TRA. 17 4 2012
Wyatt, Edward. "In Sunny Southern California, a Sculpture Finds Its Place in the Shadows." 2 10 2007. The New York Times. 17 4 2012
