During the early ’60s in Los Angeles, Ed Kienholz forced a culture to confront itself in a series of unforgiving, deeply felt tableaux. His well-known The Back Seat Dodge, ’38, 1964, and The Illegal Operation, 1962, were shown this summer, for the first time in many years, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; seen retrospectively, these early works retained their ability to provoke and dismay. The painful friction of confrontation and exposure that viewers felt in the early ’60s, however, gave way to sad, even tender, feelings of empathy, as they looked back in time and realized that things

Art has traditionally functioned as a respectable arena for erotic delectation. Among the earliest erotic stereo-graphs produced in the 19th century were pictures of classical nude statuary; while the long exposure time needed for these daguerreotypes may to some extent have encouraged the use of statuary as model, it is also reasonable to suggest that the newly invented camera’s ability to appropriate aspects of the flesh-and-blood world inhibited to a degree the use of flesh-and-blood models as erotic subject matter. Nude statuary, unlike naked skin, was protected by the “morally and esthetically