UGLY

So much contemporary art, particularly installation, has a purposefully unattractive aesthetic: rough, unbalanced, distended, and downright ugly. The works of contemporary American sculptor Ed Kienholz certainly do. These diorama-like set pieces are assembled from found objects (old furniture, carpets, appliances, and automobiles) and life-size cast figures, and tell stories of domestic violence, tawdry sex, and male aggression. When seen in photographs they can appear exploitative, engineered for titillation. Women often appear naked and dismembered, and men often appear masked and armed.

Kienholz’ best known work, Five Car Stud, first shown at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, has been reinstalled at his current retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. One approaches it dramatically, after passing through a string of brightly-lit galleries, through a floor-length black curtain, into a room piled with dirt, so dark that one can only step forward guided by the guard’s flashlight.

The sculpture depicts five rural, working class, masked white men castrating a black man, lit only by the headlights of their trucks, which are parked in a circle around them. It might be the most viscerally affecting artwork I’ve ever seen, a deep, direct critique of American life. The other gallery-goers, older, well-to-do, Milanese couples, didn’t seem to find anything amiss. They stepped gingerly to the center – careful not to get sand in their drivings shoes – and inspected details of the grotesque, cartoonish figures closely, laughing. One woman, in an ankle-length mink coat, posed for a photo standing right above the black man’s head.

Though this piece was made over forty years ago, it might have been been made in the summer of 2016. The five rednecks with their trucks could have rendered just as powerfully as five uniformed city cops in patrol cars. The racial and sexual violence lying just below the niceties of American life remain relevant, as does the disregard for black life. The ugliness in Kienholz’ sculptural expression – the bloated figures, the melting-wax faces, the horror movie lighting – equals the subject matter. It captures the terror correctly.

Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969–72. Photo: courtesy of Delfino Sisto Legnani Studio.

December 11, 2016 by Nalina Moses

A little exhibit at the Schomburg Center in Harlem tracks the history of Africans who were brought to India as slaves, focusing loosely on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It’s not much of an installation: about two dozen large printed boards with texts that relate, in a matter-of-fact tone, the stories of some of the most accomplished Africans in India, illustrated with some not-so-great reproductions of paintings and photographs. But the content of the exhibit – slavery in India, the assimilation (and acceptance) of Africans into Mughal culture, the against-all-odds success stories of some brilliant men and women – is dazzling. I went to the exhibit with my parents, who were raised and educated in India, and none of us had any idea that Indians participated in the slave trade. A staff members at the Center told us that many Indian-Americans arrived excited to see the show, and then left protesting that none of it was really true. But it is.

One particular painting in the exhibit, Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah and Ikhlas Khan riding an Elephant, from 1650, is particularly shaming. I know this miniature well. It was the key image of an 1985 exhibit about Indian art at the Met that my parents took me to. I bought a notecard of it which I still have and keep at the very bottom of my stationery bin, because I don’t want to part with it. It shows the two men and the beast in bold graphic profile against a thick, midnight blue sky. The Sultan, with gold robes and a halo, rides cross-legged at the top of the bedecked and bejeweled elephant. Khan, a smaller and darker man, sits in back, on the elephant’s rear, and fans the Sultan with a white towel. I’ve looked at this image about a hundred times without really seeing the second man and wondering who he is. He is, in fact, a freed Abyssinian slave, formerly named Malik Raihan Habshi, who, through ambition and hard work and at least one murder, was anointed Ikhlas Khan and rose to the position of ‘Adil Shah’s chief minister. He was a decision-maker who ran the Bijapur sultanate which 'Adil Shah, in title, led. The refusal to see this man in this painting, and in the history of India, is telling.

July 17, 2013 by Nalina Moses