![]() For what in conventional Pop becomes banal in the context of ultra-sophisticated formal devices or intentions, becomes in the informal Beanery, the beauty of its particular sentiment. Thus Barney himself is a slightly less than noble Roman bust anchored to one corner of the bar, thus all the habitues have clocks for faces (same time but different clocks), thus a tape recorder wafts actual sounds of the real Beanery into the magical one, thus the entire assemblage is immured in a coat of plastic which like fingernail polish is ultimately more seductive than it is repellent. This is definitely not for Madame Tussaud. He had to stress the illustrative rather than the formal and depend for style on the sheer gaucherie of reproducing, roughly life-size, an entire bar, its habitues, its lights, its smells and its sounds-and by approximating reality in a crude sort of way rather than competing with it. For in order to release the latent nostalgia of the work, Kienholz had necessarily to forego a sophisticated structure, in fact, style altogether. What is probably brash and tacky in reality becomes, when invested in a loving simulacrum of it, a poignant wish-fulfillment that exposes the very real loneliness and alienation motivating an era of popular “camp.” The Beanery, however, is not “camp.” It has no “style.”Īs such, it is a momentary irony of criticism, not of the work, that the “form” of Barney’s Beanery becomes as important as its subject matter content. ![]() Kienholz’s adult “doll” house is an “emotion machine” which transports the enchanted visitor back to a realm of simple, pre-Freudian camaraderie. A bifocal conception, it exhibits affinities with the folk themes of Romantic American genre painters such as Bingham and Mount and, especially, the sculptor John Rodgers (1829–1904) whose mass-produced studies of popular literary and Civil War themes and genre scenes of every day life were huge popular favorites in their day, yet expresses them with an aggressiveness that is all the more contemporary for concealing its deep nostalgia for an existence uncomplicated by anxiety and ambition. ” For Barney’s Beanery is simply a giant genre sculpture which exhibits the logical distortion of being emotionally rooted in the past while demonstrating the psychological pressures of the present. Since Americans have always provided the most precarious framework for artistic tradition, one is tempted to say, “Only in America. But if it is naive, it is not in respect to what it wants to say, and succeeds in saying, but naive historically in that it reflects a sense of art that ignores-if it does not misunderstand-the formal development of art since the mid-nineteenth century. While exploiting Pop precedents, the Beanery is stylistically so ingenuous as to seem esthetically primitive. And it is the absence of irony, at least visual irony, that distinguishes the Beanery from “conventional” Pop art. Principally, only the ironies of Pop are new. Furthermore, Pop art remains radical in context and perhaps has the greater claim as “art” for being in context but the Beanery, infiltrating that context, exposes the belatedness of much of its artifice. Not that Pop art’s dependency on Parisian esthetics, however modified by Abstract Expressionism, has been overlooked but until now it has seemed less important than its transformation by a transfusion of banality and kitsch. For with Kienholz’s three dimensional valentine to firewater and fraternity, virtually all Pop art, American and European, must necessarily revert to another episode in post-Cubist taste. ![]() Fortunately I was prevailed upon by a friend to see it, and when I came out of the outsized packing crate which housed the facsimile of the colorfully dingy pub Kienholz apparently frequents, and after further reflection, I found that my entire perspective on Pop art had changed. I had intended to ignore the Beanery, having prejudged it on the basis of advance reports as a desperate, latter-day excrescence of Pop art. ![]() It is safe, I think, to say that local cognoscenti missed its import-as I almost did-out of simple snobbism. The New York Times ran an advance item on it, with a photograph, yet after it was installed in the Dwan Gallery’s recently opened New York quarters, the Beanery, to my knowledge, received little of the word-of-mouth publicity that is customary when an unusual exhibition happens along. IT’S DIFFICULT TO JUDGE with any accuracy just how the New York art world received Edward Kienholz’s ultimate assemblage-Barney’s Beanery-a bar reconstructed in every detail but living action.
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