TMC Reviews… Kienholz: The Hoerengracht at the National Gallery

by Strawberry Cheesecake

The Herengracht (Lord’s canal) is the first of the three major canals in the city centre of Amsterdam. The Hoerengracht (whore’s canal) however is a tableau vivant constructed by the American artists Ed and Nancy Kienholz in the mid 1980s. It is one of the last major pieces produced by the couple before Ed died in 1994 and, until the 21st of February, it will be on display in the Sunley Room of the National Gallery.

It aims to recreate the experience of walking through Amsterdam’s red light district… and this is something of a challenge given that it now finds itself situated on the first floor of the opulent yet weirdly austere late Georgian palace of artistry which is the National Gallery. It’s difficult not to be curious about whether The Hoerengracht it was more (or perhaps even less!) congruent with some of the other environments in which it’s been situated over the years. It’s present environment is mostly definitely a strange one though and, word of warning to those planning a visit, making the same mistake I did and visiting at half five on a Saturday afternoon would not add to the realism of the installation. There’s something about loud crowds, a cacophony of polyphonic ring tones and, bizarrely, Beyonce playing over the P.A. which can serve to turn even the most jolly causal art fan into a malicious cynic.

Even so it must be granted that the initial effect is impressive. When you enter the exhibition it feels like you have definitively left the National Gallery. The lavish hallways and the classical art give way to a dark entry point, containing all manner of history and context, uniting the gallery outside with the red light district inside. When you proceed on into the room with the tableau you seem, at least initially, to have entered another place: cobbled streets, ramshackle houses and women soliciting business from within them. However this initial shock and the force of the juxtaposition between this world ‘in here’ with its garish red lights and the gallery ‘out there’ with its grandiosity soon begins to fade. The momentarily compelling attention to detail and seemingly compulsive realism (see the litter on the floor, the china in the window, the bikes chained up) soon starts to seem a bit, well, unreal.

You learn from the history of the installation displayed outside that the artists moulded the women inside the houses from real prostitutes in the red light district (and this in itself begins to seem somewhat puerile and fetishistic once you take it out of context) yet the result feels paradoxically fake. All the women have their heads surrounded by tin cases; a weird effect which, we are told, is intended to represent the split between mind and body in their working life but, in practice, serves merely to undermine the blunt realism which the artists otherwise tried so hard to sustain. In a way this sums up the installation as a whole: intriguing, initially powerful but ultimately a self-defeating let down. It’s still worth a visit though because, faults notwithstanding, it represents an engaging approach to negotiating the boundary between art and life.

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Click here for more information. The exhibition will run until February 21st at the National Gallery.