Edward Kienholz

First shown at the Harald Szeemann–curated Documenta 5 in 1972, Edward Kienholz’s epically scaled, psychically harrowing tableau Five Car Stud, 1969–72, depicts a Jim Crow–era lynching and has spent the past forty years stashed away in a Japanese storage facility, having never been shown publicly in the country whose dark history of racial violence served as its inspiration. Now lovingly restored with the help of the artist’s widow and longtime collaborator, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, the work has made its long-overdue United States debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a part of “Pacific Standard Time,” and it proves to have lost little of its power, despite the waning of its immediately topical political urgency.

Installed in a dark, cavernous room floored with the sort of loose, dry dirt one might find in any drought-blighted patch of anonymous Southern countryside, the work is lit only by the baleful glare of headlights belonging to the five titular cars. Four are arrayed in a semicircle, spotlighting a knot of life-size figures cast in plaster from the bodies of a willing group of Kienholz’s friends and relatives, who appear to be grappling in the dust. As you walk carefully among them and explore (at the encouragement of the helpful museum staff), these figures are revealed to be at work at a stomach-churning task: Their faces obscured by ghoulish rubber masks, the men—all white—are in the process of forcibly restraining a black man and castrating him with a rusted hunting knife. Lording over this sadistic scene, a shotgun jauntily cocked over the crook of his arm, is another man, who leans casually on the open door of the truck from which the victim was clearly pulled. He stands guard while the victim’s lover—a white woman—vomits in horror inside. The windows of the assailants’ cars are mostly blacked out, their obscured interiors adding to the sense that they are, like their drivers, predatory beasts. The only exception is the passenger side of one car’s windshield, through which we can see the figure of a boy peering out in terrified fascination, a cipher for the intergenerational perpetuation of racism.

The piece is unflinching. The experience of ambling about it, of mingling your footprints in the dirt with other footprints that seem as if they could be a map of the elaborate dance that led up to the violent scene frozen in the headlights, is totally enveloping and damningly implicative. It is the bracing intensity of this immersion—which comes over you like a freeze-frame nightmare—that saves Five Car Stud from fading into a mere record of historical trauma. Instead of instilling a sense of guilty comfort that such barbarity is safely quarantined in our past, the work evokes a queasy suspicion that human nature may not have changed much, but that the modes of oppression and the mechanics of prejudice may have simply become subtler and more insidious.