Edward Kienholz

Edward Kienholz (1927-1994) was an American artist who commented on social and political issues such as sexuality, organized religion, racial inequality, and war in his art. In the 1950s his work took the form of paintings, collages, and mixed-media assemblages, and by the early 1960s he was creating life-size sculptural environments. Kienholz used found materials, body casts, and other constructions in his objects and tableaux. During the 1960s and 1970s, his work had become so ambitious in scale and expensive to produce that he began to present certain ideas like The Non-War Memorial in a form he called Concept Tableau in order to gain funding for them.

A Concept Tableau had three parts. The first part consisted of a metal plaque inscribed with the title, date of conception, and artist's name; a framed description of the finished tableau; and a contract defining the option to buy the work in two additional parts. The second part was a drawing of the project, and the third part was the environment or installation itself.

Kienholz conceived part one of The Non-War Memorial in 1970. In his description of the completed tableau, he explained that the finished work would be constructed on a 75 acre meadow on a river in Idaho. The land, originally a field of alfalfa and clover, would be plowed or chemically destroyed, and approximately 50,000 army uniforms would be filled with wet clay and placed on the field at random. The purchaser of the tableau would pay workers, who would be "…artists, students, activists, etc. willing to spend a summer making visual a non-war and local residents interested or curious enough to help." Five hundred uniforms would be placed on the land per day for seven days a week. The work would take more than three months, and when it was completed, the tableau would be entrusted to a museum for five years. By that time, the uniforms would have rotted and the clay dissolved, so that the land could be plowed and replanted in alfalfa.

Two years after his initial conception of The Non-War Memorial, Kienholz completed part two of his Concept Tableau in the form of The Non-War Book. A page of notes in the front of the book indicates that the Los Angeles Times reported 45,647 [U.S. forces] killed in action through February 24, 1972, in the Vietnam Conflict. Also listed is the number 10,023, for others who died by "suicide – disease, etc." The remaining 1,142 pages of The Non-War Book are prints of 45,647 military uniforms splayed across the ground. These bodiless forms give a sense of the impersonality of reports from that time about the deaths occurring in Vietnam.

Kienholz never created the finished tableau for The Non-War Memorial. In 2002, however, the artist's wife and collaborator of twenty-three years, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, completed the work as it now exists in the Whitney’s collection. Eerie, lifeless figures in the form of military uniforms filled with sand surround a pedestal that holds The Non-War Book, a memorial to the thousands who died. Hanging on the wall next to the book is Kienholz's title plaque and description of the "non-war" he hoped to wage in a fertile meadow that would become a fallow field of disintegrating "corpse-bodies." In typical Kiehnolz fashion, The Non-War Memorial creates an environment that engages the viewer physically, mentally, and emotionally. Whether in the field or on a gallery floor, the victims of Kienholz's "non-war" become reminders of the tragedy and destruction of war, and of the artist's hope that the land and the country may become fertile once again.

Text by Carrie Springer, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art