Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Useful Art #5: The Western Motel, 1992 (Portland Art Museum). Video from Portland Art Museum (speakers: Dr. Christina Olsen and Bruce Guenther).
Bruce Guenther: [0:00] Bruce Guenther and Tina Olsen in the Jubitz Center for Modern & Contemporary Art. We’re standing in front of a work by Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, an artist collaborating team who shared studios in Hope, Idaho and Berlin, Germany.
Dr. Tina Olsen: [0:20] And we’re standing here but as we’re standing, I’m looking at this incredible object — and it really isn’t a sculpture — and hearing it, because there’s a radio playing, isn’t there?
Bruce: [0:33] Yes, and there’s a table lamp with the light on and a bowl of melting ice cream. And one of those wonderfully [disheveled] chairs with still the imprint of someone who’s sat there too long and an old pair of shoes. This is assemblage art. Art that happens from the bits and pieces of daily life, reassembled by the artists.
Dr. Olsen: [0:56] Right, and speaking of daily life, let’s take a really close look here at what we’re seeing, because there’s definitely…Like we’re been transported into a decaying hotel room.
Bruce: [1:07] It’s called “Useful Art #5, the Western Motel.” This is, in a funny way, a vignette through the dark lens of Ed Kienholz and Nancy, looking at Americana. The state highway. Those little motels that populated America.
[1:28] Little units attached with a carport, one to another like a train, and here we’re at the office, a red vacancy sign buzzing in the window. You can probably hear it. The window is a freestanding wall. On the outside, we see the outside of the window, the Venetian blinds, the drywall aged and spattered with rain. The verisimilitude, the reality of this, is omnipresent.
Dr. Olsen: [2:00] Right. It is, but it isn’t. Because on the one hand, here we are and we can actually stand outside the wall of this room, look through the window, and then of course at the same time walk right around it and inside of the room.
[2:15] The other thing that really kind of disrupts that sense of looking at a representation is that we see the wire that makes this thing work. We see that it’s on — what is it? Is it a pallet? What is it sitting on there?
Bruce: [2:29] The Kienholzes created two platforms with faux brick paving, linoleum, and they have aluminum-wrapped handles so you could pick it up and carry it, just the way that much of American culture is portable and movable.
Dr. Olsen: [2:46] And mobile.
Bruce: [2:46] And it’s a motel and it’s all those kind of funny notions.
Dr. Olsen: [2:50] Right. It’s a motel. And it’s also a motel that evokes the road and evokes the highway and evokes this kind of transient culture of people who don’t really stay.
Bruce: [3:00] Yet there’s someone who has stayed for a lifetime. What I find really revealing about it, and the poignancy emotionally for me, are this old man’s slippers, the half-consumed bottle of Jim Beam bourbon, a few magazines by “Soldier of Fortune” and “Western Tales,” and then the pipes laying there on the table.
Dr. Olsen: [3:22] Oh, I didn’t even notice those.
Bruce: [3:22] It’s a man, perhaps a veteran, living out the last days of his life managing a little motel on a road that no one uses.
Dr. Olsen: [3:32] So we step into this other world, this other space. Kienholz is evoking for us a whole environment, a whole space for us, but if I look down and I look around, of course, here I am in the galleries.
Bruce: [3:44] Yes, it’s that whole tradition in 20th century art of tableau and assemblage, from the early Cubist paintings that incorporated chair caning and ropes and bits of newspaper to the Surrealists who would evoke the internal dreaming of the mind through objects recontextualized; [from] the fur-lined teacup to Joseph Cornell in American art and the vignettes of the Pop artists.
Dr. Olsen: [4:14] Right, and if I really think about it, as I stand right at the very edge of this object, I mean really where does it begin and it end? When do we know that we’re outside of its space and when do we know that we’re in it? If I put my arm, I’m kind of in the space, but there’s a different floor to the space, there’s clear outlines to it.
Bruce: [4:33] Yes, it has a contained periphery that’s psychological and yet our experience, because we recognize every element that makes it up, from the rag rug to the clock to the Visa symbol.
Dr. Olsen: [4:48] Absolutely.
Bruce: [4:50] It is our world and yet we’re observers, and we see something at an arm’s length that we may never have personally experienced but we know this place.
Dr. Olsen: [5:01] We know this place so well and we know this stuff so well. This is the detritus and the stuff of our own life.
Bruce: [5:08] Absolutely.
Dr. Olsen: [5:09] The chair, the slippers, the bowl of ice cream, the dirt.
Bruce: [5:13] The plastic-encased AM/FM radio. Slightly squawky, slightly out of tune, but there.
Dr. Olsen: [5:20] Exactly. Ultimately, it seems to me that one of the things that Kienholz is asking us to think about is where does art end and life take up, and can you even make a line between the two?
[5:29] [silence]
