ART REVIEW : Taking a Spin on the Kienholzes’ ‘Merry-Go-World’

In rational societies, universal questions rapidly curdle into cliches. People who want to examine the mysteries of life soon find themselves blathering platitudes and are inclined to shut up out of embarrassment. It all just sounds too corny.

Ed Kienholz and his aesthetic partner and wife, Nancy, have never flinched from confronting the ineffable and wrestling it to earth. That comes clear again in their latest and, in some ways, most ambitious opus.

On view at L.A. Louver Gallery, it’s called “The Merry-Go-World or Begat by Chance and the Wonder Horse Trigger.” It cost them five years of effort and involved trekking to China, Africa, Europe and India, as well as through North and South America, to gather materials and inspiration. Kienholz, 62, says this is likely his last large work. Nancy says he always says that when he finishes a big one. The work views life as a cosmic carousel and wheel of fortune. On its face, that sounds hackneyed enough to give even the Kienholzes’ greatest admirers the willies.

Back in the ‘60s, when Kienholz worked alone, he invented the art world version of the tableau--baroque, life-size assemblages of poignant mannequins and symbolic junk fashioned into morality plays. He got the idea from watching the Christmas tableaux vivantes of the Nativity at a church in the small Montana town where his folks farmed.

The liturgical sources of the work were lost on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 1966 when Kienholz was accorded a retrospective at the County Museum of Art. Bureaucrats wanted the show shut down because it contained “Back Seat Dodge ‘38,” in which a couple of chicken-wire mannequins were up to heavy petting. Kienholz eventually won the battle and the work is now a prized possession of the museum.

Even back then Kienholz was into staring down life’s intractable questions. “Illegal Operation” pioneered artistic involvement in such a divisive social issue as abortion. He faced up to society’s exploitation of women in “Roxy’s”--a nightmare bordello. “The Wait” remains probably the most moving contemplation on the aging process since Rembrandt’s self-portraits.

Kienholz has long since decamped from L.A. He established a studio in Berlin, where artists are celebrated with appropriate gravity. That move certainly helped him establish his status as an internationally respected artistic inventor. He also keeps studios in Idaho and Texas.

When he returns to L.A. to show a major new piece, it’s an event of a magnitude deserving space at a leading museum. As it turns out, neither “Merry-Go-World” nor the 25 related works are diminished by being in a private emporium. Anticipatory fears that the work would be an extravagant monomaniacal indulgence were just plain wrong.

“Merry-Go-World” isn’t even all that large, just a 10-foot octagon with a space half that size for viewers to enter. The idea was Nancy’s. She wanted to deal with that crucial accident of birth that makes most lives seem fated rather than willed. The piece derives its wonderful aesthetic tension from an interlocking of the universal and the intimate.

The exterior carousel has all the trappings of a carnival merry-go-round--calliope music, flashing lights and the inevitable circle of animals. Carousels are by nature magical, even to adults. This one functions as a kind of cosmic bestiary. Animals normally regarded as benign are made ferocious by attaching real preserved heads. A carved pig with a taxidermic boar’s snout becomes a ferocious chimera out of the Tarot deck. A magnificent brass folk-art giraffe from Mexico walks on crutches. A stately elephant has an old phonograph amplifier horn for skull and trunk.

Artistic transformation makes the animals so intense they take on the force of astrological signs. But even symbolic status doesn’t exempt them from crippling deformation and absurdity. In the Kienholzes’ universe nobody escapes the vagaries of Chance, amusing herself at our expense.

Not even you and I.

The swinging-door entrance to the interior of the carousel bears the sign: “Whoa! One Person at a Time.” When your turn comes up you spin the Wheel of Fortune and enter. Inside, lights flash around like a ball in a roulette wheel, briefly illuminating the vitrines representing the thesis that geography is destiny.

The flashing stops. The vitrine you have spun remains illuminated. This is your life. If you’re lucky you wind up in Paris with a chocolate-filled silver ice bucket. Not so lucky and you’re Tank, an 11-year-old fatherless black girl in Houston. You might be better off as the Masai tribesman. At least he’s got a spear to kill things. Or a widower in Beijing. His place is humble, but the necessities are in place. Maybe it’d be OK to be an Egyptian craftsman in Luxor. He’s got skills to get by. You certainly don’t want to get stuck as Angel, an uneducated American Indian girl from Montana, or a gorgeous urchin named Carmen from the slums of Rio.

There is particular sympathy for the little girls with their vulnerability and limited options. Nearly all the artifacts in the “Merry-Go-World” were bought or bartered by the artists on their travels. They swapped, cajoled and had things fashioned and shipped by the people they met. The photographs are Nancy’s images of them. Tank, Angel and Carmen are real kids. The Kienholzes have devised various schemes to help them survive and get an education. Proceeds from the sale of a work dedicated to Tank will go toward her schooling.

You don’t need to know any of that to appreciate the show. Neither do you need to read Kienholz’s account of the Odyssey that will make up a late-arriving catalogue. Both, however, further understanding of a particular density of humanity that informs the main work and numerous of the related objects. A beat-up wooden shelf painted jade blue and dedicated to Carmen is especially affecting.

“Merry-Go-World” combines all the sharpness, craft and realism of the assemblagist’s art into a work that is tough without coarseness, wise without judgment, amused without condescension. It has sympathy sans sentimentality and decency relieved of self-righteousness. It’s a honey of a piece.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd. and 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Oct. 24 . Closed Sunday and Monday.