Still Causing a Fuss After All These Years

“I suppose that there will be the outraged matrons.”

--Edward Kienholz in 1993, on a recent work.

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Somewhere in the cosmos--or wherever you end up when you ask to be buried in a 1940 Packard with a deck of cards, a bottle of wine, a dollar bill and your dog’s remains--the hell-raising artist who wrecked Stephanie Riseley’s career as a docent is probably laughing to beat the band.

Or maybe the spirit of Edward Kienholz is secretly astonished that, after more than three decades, his “Back Seat Dodge ‘38” still can get Californians worked up about morality. Only an old-fashioned moralist, after all, would have come up with Kienholz’s famously tawdry take on his own first sexual experience: a chicken wire man, a faceless woman, a car, his hand on her crotch, a whole lot of beer.

It’s serious art, one of the gems of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s collection. It’s also provincial-feeling, like the farm town where Kienholz was born. Or the Central Valley burg that sent a group of fifth-graders this spring on an ill-fated field trip to LACMA and gave them to poor Riseley to show around.

By now, you may have heard about Riseley’s dismissal by the museum’s Docent Council. A volunteer tour guide for six years, she was faulted for telling that group of 10- and 11-year-old Visalia girls that Kienholz’s piece was about, well, sex. Riseley maintains that she stuck to an approved docent script, based on her research of the artist’s intentions, and that she twice warned the girls and their chaperons that the upcoming artwork was so controversial that it once almost shut the museum down.

No matter. The kids and chaperons gathered around it. (Why was the man empty? Why was the woman faceless?) They peered inside. (Mirrors!) Then, Riseley says, “I asked them, ‘Why did he go to the trouble of putting your reflections in there? What big piece of art are you responsible for?’ I said to them, ‘This artist is a man who died five years ago, but he’s trying to communicate. What is he trying to say to you?’ The girls answered, ‘You only have one first time, so make it sacred.’ ‘Right,’ I said.”

Their principal begged to differ: Visalia had an enlightened sex education program, he said, but this trip to the museum wasn’t part of it.

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It’s the luxury of this era that situations like Riseley’s have become a kind of public parlor game. Was she the urban voice of reason versus the churchy hicks and the uptight docents? Or was she just pushing what her fellow matrons referred to as her “agenda” on a bunch of uncomfortable kids?

Pick a side. Pick an argument. Anyone can play. You might ask, for instance, what sort of school would send a bunch of kids to a serious museum if they didn’t want them exposed to tough artistic truths. Or maybe wonder whether Riseley and her council had some other bad blood between them, whether there was more than philosophy going on.

What I wondered, as I read about Riseley’s firing and spoke to her later, was what Kienholz would have made of this. His art was famous for its no-holds-barred candor; his room-sized installations featured shattering interpretations of things like child abuse and back-street abortions. One is a life-sized bordello that literally stinks.

And yet, it’s hard to say where Kienholz might have come down on this dust-up: He was raised in the Washington boondocks and died in the Idaho boondocks, but spent most of his life in Los Angeles and Berlin. In the mid-1960s, when “Back Seat Dodge ‘38” was first displayed at LACMA, the county supervisors excoriated it as “pornographic.” Undiscussed at the time was the fact that the gruff, goateed Kienholz was a single father in Laurel Canyon, raising two little kids.

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“Isn’t it ironic?” the artist’s son, Noah, marveled from his own Laurel Canyon home last week. “Still!” Now 38, Noah Kienholz thinks his father would have had mixed feelings had he been alive to see his work’s latest mischief: On one hand, the artist applauded open communication. On the other, he detested arty critiques.

“I believe he would have stood up for [Riseley’s] rights,” the son said, “But, you know, he was never one to advocate the interpretation of his work for somebody else.” And what about the children? “Hey, by the time I was 10 or 11, I knew what sex was. Kids today do too. I applaud her for trying to inform them.”

Interestingly, Noah grew up to become a talented carpenter and prop builder. He’s happily married now, as is his sister, who is raising a family in Oregon. Which perhaps raises another question, about what art and truth really do, in the end, to children. Another irony that probably has the old spirit in the Packard laughing to beat the band.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com