LA Louver director Peter Goulds, the Kienholzs' art dealer since 1981, says he began to hear rumors in the early 1990s that the museum was looking to divest the piece. "It was an idiosyncratic addition to the collection," he says. "It didn't have a place." In 2005, a partnership was formed between LA Louver and Pace Gallery in New York to fund the restoration, which Goulds estimates to have cost $130,000.
Reddin Kienholz wasn't keen on the idea, however, and resisted their entreaties for a year and a half. She didn't want to step away from the project she was then absorbed in to return to a piece she'd never even worked on. That, she says, "and then the meaning of the piece is so painful. It's painful dealing with these racist figures, their ignorance — it's hard for me. I didn't want to put my mind in that direction."
Eventually Daryl Witcraft, the head of her studio team, volunteered to go to Japan. The piece, he found, had been poorly cared for: parts of the figures, made largely of latex and resin, had disintegrated, car windows were broken and numerous pieces were missing, including a portion of a shotgun presumably removed by Japanese customs.
In 2007, the work was shipped to the studio in Idaho. The restoration took a solid four months. In the meantime, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark signed on as the host institution for a multi-city tour next year. Director Michael Govan being, by all accounts, more amenable to Kienholz than Maurice Tuchman's board of trustees, LACMA joined forces with the Getty Research Institute to serve as the first venue. By the close of the tour, Goulds hopes to have found the piece a new permanent home.
"We thought it would be an important thing to do for Pacific Standard Time, which looks back on the era when Kienholz was such a major figure," says Andrew Perchuk, deputy director of the research institute, who was instrumental in the negotiations. "Though rarely seen, it's one of his great tableaus, and the summit of that shift from assemblage art into installation art that was such a key feature of the art scene here."
Stephanie Barron, the show's curator at LACMA, happened to have seen the work when it premiered at Documenta 5. "It was a horrific, chilling, powerful work," she says, "and something I've never forgotten."
At LACMA, she's taken pains to present the piece in a sensitive context. Visitors will enter the installation through an introductory gallery with explanatory texts and archival materials. Admittance will be limited to 15 people at a time, and trained facilitators will be available on the weekends to discuss the work with patrons. "It's a piece that will make many people uncomfortable, and we've had many internal discussions about that," she says. "Our responsibility is to frame it, to try to explain it and to let people have their own experience."
Kienholz described the work in 1972 as "symbolic of minority strivings in the world today." His widow echoes that interpretation. "It isn't really about black and white," she says, "This is used more as an example of any new immigrants — and of course America is built on immigrants. Every new group that's come in has had a difficult time."
Conceived not in a response to any particular event but as the expression of a morbid fantasy harbored in the shadows of our national history, "Five Car Stud" challenges viewers to confront the inadmissible. How it will be received today — whether as a historical document of the civil rights era or as lens to turn on the darkest tendencies of our own time — remains to be seen.
For Kienholz, it was both a gesture of anger and an opportunity for growth. "In my mind the work has always taken on a kind of life and identity of its own," he wrote, "and as I push one way it seems to push back another.... The conversation with Five Car Stud is still very painful and slow, but one thing has been established for sure: if 6 to 1 is unfair odds in my tableau, then 170 million to 20 million is sure as hell unfair odds in my country."
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