'SoCal' dreaming

IN 1962, the year Edward Kienholz made his devastating assemblage sculpture "The Illegal Operation," newspapers and television screens were filled with the terrible story of Sherri Finkbine, cheerful mother of four and the popular "Miss Sherri" on the Phoenix franchise of the children's television show "Romper Room." Finkbine had learned that early in her fifth pregnancy, she had taken headache medication containing the drug Thalidomide, suspected of causing severe fetal deformities. Despite that, she was denied an abortion in her home state, where the procedure was illegal.

Amid a blaze of hostile publicity, Finkbine and her husband left for Sweden to have the operation. She was vilified by politicians, humiliated in the media, condemned on Vatican radio, threatened with death by anonymous telephone callers and fired from her television station. Her husband was suspended from his teaching job. After the abortion, Swedish doctors confirmed that the fetus had no legs and just one arm.

Kienholz's sculpture, on view in a new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, exemplifies a dramatic shift in the long-contentious abortion debate, which culminated in the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade. Of an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 American women who each year underwent back-alley abortions in the 1950s and 1960s, untold numbers died or were maimed. Their grim fate was mostly hidden behind a screen of moralizing silence; but suddenly, Finkbine's tragic story thrust an all-American mom into the glaring abortion spotlight.

For his sculpture, Kienholz dumped a sagging gray bag of wet cement on top of a supermarket shopping cart covered with soiled white rags and standing on a stained and shabby rug. Blunt instruments from the kitchen and garage are crammed into a filthy bedpan beneath it. A bucket and a chipped enamel pot are nearby, while dirty fingerprints mar a frilly lampshade, tilted in the direction of the lifeless, drooping "body." Its innards ooze from a slit in the bag.

Equally disturbing is a short wooden stool painted pink. Seemingly incongruous, the chair is pivotal to the sculpture's power. It's placed as if offering a viewer the seat from which the grim butchery was performed.

"Put yourself in their place," Kienholz's sculpture in effect says. "Because whether it's hidden or not, we all participate in this social horror."