The Ozymandias Parade, 1985, Kienholz: The Signs of the Times Exhibition view. © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Photography: Norbert Miguletz

When Edward Kienholz died of a heart attack aged 65 in 1996, his burial arrangement could have been one of his own installations: his embalmed body was stuck into the front seat of an old brown Packard coupe; he drove off into the good night with a dollar and a deck of cards in his pocket, accompanied by the ashes of his dog in the back and a vintage bottle of Chianti beside him. If the stance of aggressive defiance followed him to the grave; such must have been the confrontational quality and persistent rebelliousness of Kienholz’s oeuvre when he lived and worked that his accusatory cries of a reality gone sour are still heard far, loud and wide nearly 2 decades after his death.

Kienholz: The Signs of the Times is an extensive survey of Edward Kienholz’s and Nancy Reddin Kienholz’s collaborative works spanning three-dimensional smaller objects to the conceptual room-filling tableaux in their horrifying, squalid glory at the Schirn Kunsthalle. While not quite a retrospective, it is a show that captures the antagonistic spirit (in variations of form, material and structure) of rebellion (buoyed by the angry years of the 1960s and 70s) that Kienholz is best remembered for, broadcasting generally, a similar theme of humanity’s fallen state.

Edward Kienholz, The State Hospital, 1966, Inside view. Plaster casts, fiberglass, hospital beds, bedpan, hospital table, goldfish bowls, black fish, lighted neon tubing, steel hardware, wood, paint 245 x 360 x 295 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm © Kienholz. Photography: Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Above all, there is a visceral, scabrous rage that palpably underpins this exhibition which reads like an extended exercise in the finer points of accusation. Here, subtlety, as it seems, holds no place of honour in art that has been created for the purpose of indictment. The installations rail against the perennial injustices Kienholz thought assailed and fractured American society at that time: ethnic conflicts, the Vietnam war, the sexual exploitation and commodification of women, the manipulation of the unsuspecting middle-class through by media conglomerates, and the treatment of those who lived on the margins of “acceptable society”. The State Hospital (1964-6) presents a constructed cell of a psychiatric ward, drawn from Kienholz’s own memory of his work as an orderly, in which a naked mental patient with a fishbowl for a head lies strapped to his bed. In the bunk above, an identical figure lies in a similar state of dismal existence, a reinforced symbol of an already broken institution.

Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, The Pool Hall, 1993. Plaster casts, wigs, clothing, antlers, photographs, pool table, queues, lamp, light box 245 x 250 x 138 cm. Collection of the artist, Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA © Kienholz Photography: © Kienholz, Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

In Rhinestone Beaver Peep Show (1980) triptych, the plaster cast of a pliant woman yields before the voyeuristic viewer, while in The Pool Hall (1993), a headless woman with splayed legs straddles a corner of a pool table surrounded by men with antlers and a mask taking shots around her vagina: an exploration of the brutal masculine gaze that positions the woman as an anonymous object of consumption. The Jesus Corner (1982-3) plays host to misfits who live on the margins; while it is a reference to the motley band of anti-establishment crew who live as outcasts like Christ and his disciples, it is ultimately, an ironic declaration of institutionalised religion’s divisive power.

Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, The Jesus Corner, 1982/83, Installation view Wood, glass, hangers, curtains, cans, leaves, textiles, lighting, photographs, framed print, cardboard, books, pegboard, candles, paint, polyester resin, devotional Jesus objects, 252 x 453 x 152 cm. Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture/Eastern Washington State Historical Society, Spokane, Washington, Museum Purchase and gift of the artists © Kienholz. Photography: © Kienholz, Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.

Giving material expression to Kienholz’s uncompromising vision is the sheer number of found objects scavenged from junkyards and flea markets used to assemble his installations, a concept that was unthinkable in his day and age. It was a novel but viable method of sourcing: exponentially increasing consumption made for interesting trash; the more junk material there was to sift through and acquire, the more complex his assemblages also became. Discarded scraps that were symbolic of Western consumer culture – car parts, pieces of furniture, toy soldiers, cigarettes, signs and flags – inevitably found their way into his creations surrounded by other castaways, lending their protesting voices which, combined, produce a chorus of acrimony and pleading. The allegorical Ozymandias Parade (1985) could very well encapsulate this creative process and its subsequent scale of production; it is a sprawling tableau that swiftly strips Shelley’s evocative tale of an ancient statue languishing in the sands by presenting the subjugating tyranny of latter-day rulers in the form of the president who dangles from his white horse, surrounded by an impotent army of fools and helpless tax-payers who have been fleeced of their last cent.

But unlike Marcel Duchamp’s readymades that assaulted notions of art’s traditional modes of production, Kienholz made no attempt to disguise the object’s original incarnations and their purposes. Where the Duchampian dialogue on signification and object displacement begins, there ends Kienholz’s vision; instead, implicit in the insistence on a creative practice drawn from disused matter is perhaps, the hope that out of the detritus of decay and disillusioned humanity, seedlings of social awareness (that would eventually galvanise some sort of action) would have sprouted. This creative bent was balanced with unusual business sense; Kienholz typed details of works he had intended to create, each already containing a title that would be made should a buyer decide to fork out the money for it. Yet in utilising language as an initial, but necessary apparatus for ascribing meaning and perceptual experience to object that were not yet made, Kienholz’s pieces were also to become prototypes for later conceptual practices that would carry a heavier ontological focus by engaging vigorously with language as a framing device while confronting the limitations of the art object.

Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, 1993-4. 76 J.C.s Led the Big Charade. Mixed media: 76 wall-mounted pieces, dimensions variable, installation view, Schirn Kunsthalle.

It seems appropriate that these three-dimensional, sculptural assemblages were labelled by Kienholz himself as “tableau[x]” – a term appropriated from the design of theatre sets – in order to emphasise the experiential potential of his pieces while defying the late Modernist style of pictorial flatness and the conventional passivity of art viewing. As with sculpture’s tendency to reinforce interest in context by sanctioning the viewer’s presence in its ambience or physical area of influence, the volumetric intensity of Kienholz’s installations similarly locates the audience inside the work rather than outside of it. Packed to the brim with junkyard assemblies and hemmed in by the gallery walls, his cluttered tableaux are an oppressive plague on the senses, offering no recourse to those who want to look away.

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Edward Kienholz was born in Fairfield, Washington on October 23, 1927 and died in Hope, Idaho in 1994. Nancy Reddin Kienholz survives her husband, and lives and works in Hope, Idaho, Houston, Texas and Berlin, Germany. Kienholz: The Signs of the Times is at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt until January 29, 2012. From February 22 to May 13, 2012, the show will also be on display at the Museum Tinguely in Basel.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises evoking a multitude of emotions over engaging the intellect. A large, white spherical entity around which alchemic instruments are scattered sits on a pile of sand; music seems to leak out from all sides of the wall, surrounded by glass-protected ancient Icelandic calfskin parchments that record supernatural accounts of a medieval Scandinavian world inhabited by witches, trolls and dragons. The installation is populated with elemental components of the earth such as dust, dough, fire, blood, burlap and fur, but also overlaid with textures that are fur- or hair-roughened. An accompanying video bolsters the already-surreal installation as a narrator weaves a showy mythological universe with his droning words: a man guts slimy fish, a figure lithely unfolds itself out of clay “legs” and “helmet”, a figure wrapped in tattered cloths hikes laboriously across a sandy wasteland with another strapped to his back towards the self-same spherical entity.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Crepusculum’s allusive and mystical atmosphere appears to be as much a personal aesthetic journey as it is a collective memory of Iceland’s histories. Materially, the exhibition is about Friðriksdóttir’s continued creative experimentation with diverse materials and media that has been in part influenced by the breadth of Swiss/German Dieter Roth’s artistic processes and vocabulary. Friðriksdóttir’s starting point for Crepusculum is rooted in her own dreams – intangible tendrils of thoughts that bleed into each other are first allowed to drift unassisted into esoteric realms and subsequently thematically developed through a combination of simple sketches, sculpture and film. The overall effect is an imagistic universe comprising a choir of overlapping voices, an aggregate of signs and diverse earthy components, but it is hard to see beyond Crepusculum as an oracular endeavour to present nebulous connections to sexual psychology and pop culture while casting light on deconstructing traditional patterns of narratives located within Norse mythology .

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

But Crepusculum is also Friðriksdóttir’s personal re-imagination of a time in Iceland when folklore, gods and magic were fundamental tenets of existence, and where elaborate stories of creation were punctuated by moments of horror, melancholy and unquestioning didacticism. Augmenting her exhibition are twelfth century manuscripts and almanacs loaned from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík for the first time; such is the reinforcement of the historical investment in Iceland’s national cultural heritage and the revelation of the intense grip that these traditions and mythology still have on twenty-first century Icelandic culture. Perhaps then, for Friðriksdóttir, this is simultaneously a profound ambassadorial undertaking on behalf of the Icelandic people, a cultural burden so complex that it could only be presented in ambivalent spaces as metaphysical considerations.

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Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum will be on show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until January 8, 2012.

Peter Weibel-- The Public as Exhibit; 1969

These artists created radical works that questioned the role art played in society. They fought with video cameras to reclaim the world of art from the dominant cultural threat: bourgeois passivity (That sounds so utopian today). The work had to be accessible and yet inscrutable at the same time. In 1969 at the Galerie Junge Generation in Vienna, Peter Weibel had an exhibition of some electronic noise machines that worked by waving your hands around. At the opening, Weibel interviewed on camera random members of the audience about his work. These video feeds were broadcast in the gallery. The conversations that they recorded were entirely about the politics of art and society.

More recently, Paul Wiersbinski‘s King Nothing (2008), is a chaotic art walk in a warehouse squat lead by a man with a whip. The farcical group of patrons only ask how much things are and if they can buy them. The world of art is shown to be run by the evil influence and false worship of wealth.

If these works were not punk enough, then how about a performance of Einsturzende Neubauten from 1981 at the Festival of Genius Dilettantes? Complete with wooden plank and hammer for percussion, this was the sound of divided Berlin. Equally punk, is Ulrike Rosenbach‘s Good Luck for a Better Art, (1977). Rosenbach spits milk at the camera over Klaus vom Bruch‘s shoulder as he whispers the title of the video.

Ernst Mitzka-- Valeska Gert: The Baby, Death; 1969

In 1969, the year before receiving a life long achievement award from the Deutscher Filmpreis, Valeska Gert made a video for Ernst Mitzka that was never exhibited until now. Gert first imitates a baby then immediately acts out the moment of death. In 1981 Michael Morgner, after being smuggled into East Germany, went out with a plein-air painting group and staged what he claims to be the first video performance in the GDR by walking out into a pond and delivering a messianic message.

Michael Morgner-- M. Crosses the lake at Gallenthin; 1981

Wolf Kahlen‘s Warning: Filming (1980) is a chaotic mess. Kahlen filmed with a army surplus surveillance camera noisy jazz improvisations and A.R. Penck painting on glass panes that were placed over the monitor. These paintings were then turned into a silk screen portfolio and smuggled out of East Germany.

Wolf Kahlen and A. R. Penck-- Warning Filming, 1980

The concerns that these works engage echo up to us today. This is just the tip of the iceberg of unknown early videos.

Record > Again! was produced by ZKM and exhibited at the Goethe Institute, Boston from April 27—May 11, 2011. The catalog and educational copy of all 43 videos are available from ZKM and the Goethe Institute.

I am always interested in the fine line between design and art. The conversation usually erupts in pursed lipped dialogues that are wonderful in their tenuous confusion.  Designers and artists too often set up in one rigidly defined camp or another and fly flags proclaiming the value of the emotional emphasis of art or the pragmatic necessity of design. The ideologically large—but practically small—ravine separating the two is fiercely guarded and both worlds potentially (depending on the stringency of ones alliance) suffer for it.  The new work of German artist Sabrina Siedt is a lovely tightrope between the two worlds and one she walks with great elegance. Identifying herself as both a fashion photographer and conceptual artist, Siedt weaves the ideal bodies of her subjects with sculptural elements, the purpose of which is not immediately identifiable nor necessary.

Siedt says, “I connect values with the environmental material and create photos with an emotional language and absurd aspects.”  The photos are clearly influenced by and arguably benefit from Siedt’s training in fashion photography and while they come with editorial trademarks—contorted bodies, gravity defying hair and disjointed story lines—they ultimately read as a set of art works.

Siedt studied photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmun. She has exhibited at  Vernissa Ge KSK-Ausstellung in Bochum and at the Welten Am Fluss in Recklinghause.

Katharina Grosse’s solo exhibition, Hello Little Butterfly, I Love You What’s Your Name, is occurring until November 7th at ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, in Ishøj, Denmark, within breath of Copenhagen.

Grosse makes canvas of architecture, erecting varicolored walk-abouts by using hundreds of litres of spray paint; mounds of earth; mammoth, leaning discs; and other big, wadded-up shapes. Viewers are not allowed any of the usual aloofness in their relationship to the artwork, as they literally walk through an airbrushed terrain. That status quo is dissolved. At once dreamy and seemingly protean, the space still renders you surefooted but takes your wit from you, bringing you into an unfettered realm. Appropriately, all of her installations are a one-time deal—they are site-specific and short-lived, as if reveries.

Born 1961 in Freiburg, Germany, Katharina Grosse is a graduate of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she studied with Gotthard Graubner and Gerhard Richter. She now lives and works in Berlin. Her last group exhibition was at the Miami Art Museum, Miami Space as Medium (2009); and her most recent solo exhibition, prior to the Arken, was Shadowbox at Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin.

Austrian-based artist group Gelitin is comprised of four artists — Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither and Tobias Urban. The artists are internationally known for their ambitious and absurd projects and performances. Pictured above is a giant 200-foot long and 20-foot high bunny sculpture, stuffed with hay in the hills of Artesina, Italy. The pink bunny was installed in 2005 and will remain in place, left to decompose until 2025. In 2005, the group exhibited arguably the world’s largest urine-based icicle during the Moscow Biennale with a work titled “Zapf de Pipi.” Viewers were asked to step into a room built off of a second-story window in the gallery and urinate into a bucket. This would freeze before hitting the ground, eventually forming the world’s first museum ice sculpture. In 2006, Gelitin exhibited “Group Therapy” with MUSEION, Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea in Bozen, and “Hugris” with the Kling & Bang Galleri in Reykjavik. To view the video of “Rabbit” the bunny sculpture, including images from Google Earth, click here.

Artist Darina Karpov will open an exhibition titled “New Work” tonight at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y. The drawings exhibited contain elements of both abstraction and figuration as forms take on multiple connotations. The organic compositions are comprised of images from art history and advertising and images archived from the artist’s life. These images are combined to create a mini-world of activity. Karpov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and initially studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg. In 1991, the artist relocated to the U.S. to study art at the Maryland Institute, College of Art (1999), and later received her MFA from Yale University School of Art (2001). Since her graduation, Karpov has shown widely in group exhibitions in Leipzig, Germany, and New York City, including AG Gallery in Brooklyn (2005).