Five Car Stud, 1969-1972 is the best installation on racism I have ever seen. Odd that it should have been done by a white man, but when you know the artist is Kienholst, it makes perfect sense because Kienholst has a way of getting down to the nitty gritty of his subject matter, whether it’s two California kids fucking in a car or, in this case, five white men castrating a black man for raping a white girl.
Is it jonly about racism or is it about something more? The room is as dark as an underground temple and the scene of mutilation is lit by car headlights as shadowy as sacrificial torches. This is not just about those bad southern men. It is about everyone in the room – it’s about us. The discovery of the black man with the white woman is the excuse to torture an innocent black man, just like extramarital sex is considered reason enough for a Turkish brother to kill his sister. From insane clitoridectomy to healthy circumcision, humans can be as ugly as cannibals or as proud as a nation sending her sons to war. Natives mutilate as a sacred right but we have evolved. We torture in the name of justice for revenge or national security. Animals don’t go there but we humans do and we don’t know why.
This is precisely why Five Car Stud is good – it makes us look at something inside of us we can’t understand. The fact that it is an installation that you have to walk around in makes you feel like a participant as the horror is felt. If it were a painting on a flat plane, you would be removed, and if it were a story in the newspaper, you would feel safe. If it were a movie, you would chalk it up to entertainment. But stumbling through this dimly lit scene is like a ritual – you are affected whether you want to be or not. Like a ghost returning to the scene of the crime, you are horrified because you share in the shame and guilt and just saying “gee that’s awful” is not going to make the grade.
Are the five white men performing justice? No, they are trying to wash away their own sins because if you are a sub-intelligent white rapist, the way you cleanse yourself is to pick someone different than yourself, (what could be farther away than an innocent black man?) and under the guise of taking the law into your own hands, you punish him for your crime. A better way is to look at the horror that lies inside us and admit guilt by experiencing it in some deep emotional way. Only art can reveal the unspeakable. Words can explain it but the visual can make you feel it, and the more it is revealed, the less it will be done.
I know this sounds like I am for public executions or the religious sacrifice of some poor virgin, and I would like to think that we have graduated beyond the Roman circuses, and being a woman , I would love to think that only men do things like this, but it’s impossible…because standing in Five Car Stud I feel guilty not because I am white but because I am a human.
Artillery Magazine Vol 6 no. 3 February/March 2012