Paste-and-resin hookers displayed 15 miles from the real thing

RENO, Nev. - The irony is manifest.

In Reno, it's art. Fifteen miles away at the Mustang Ranch brothel, it's business. At the center of both are the prostitutes. In each setting, they make eye contact, but the eyes are focusing somewhere behind you.

The Nevada Museum of Art is hosting "The Hoerengracht," a room-sized tableau of Amsterdam's red light district in its second American presentation. It was last seen in San Diego in 1993, the year before artist Edward Kienholz' death.

The mood is dark. The symbolism is vivid.

Eleven life-size prostitutes are surrounded by weathered wood exteriors. Dry leaves dust the walkway around the buildings, adding to the autumnal tones of faded gray and brown. A wheelless bicycle sits outside a brothel, its chain lying limp on the ground.

The women's mannequin heads are enclosed in clear boxes with lids that can be shut to hold thoughts and dreams inside while the rest of their bodies belong to the next bidder.

"Even for Nevadans, who live in a state with legalized prostitution, the exhibit represents a lifestyle they probably couldn't imagine," said Steven High, executive director of the museum.

"'The Hoerengracht' seeks not to criticize prostitution, but to signal its presence," he said.

Nearly five years after his death, Kienholz still gives a playful nudge with his exhibit. Even its name.

Abutting one of Amsterdam's many commercial waterways, it refers to a street named "Herengracht," or "gentlemen's canal."

While that's actually in an affluent area apart from the red lights of his artwork, Kienholz couldn't resist the temptation to insert an "o" that translates from the Dutch as "whore's canal," or HOOR-en-grahkt, to title his show.

"It represents how prostitution is dealt with in Amsterdam," High said. "In most places, it's illegal, criminal. There, the police protect the women. It's relatively safe. It's a business. We wanted to put it in the context of Nevada brothel politics."

Nevada has three dozen brothels, mostly in rural areas. Bordellos are forbidden around Las Vegas, Carson City and Reno. The Mustang Ranch is legal in Storey County, half an hour east of Reno.

"The Hoerengracht" was Kienholz' second artistic foray into prostitution during a career that never shied from thorny social issues such as illness, madness, abortion, sexuality and the neglect of the aged.

His 1961 "Roxy's" was his first assemblage and a far grittier work based on a brothel near Las Vegas he visited in 1943 when he was 16.

"It was a work more negative. Women were represented in a different way - more abstract. This contrasts with that piece," High said.

Robert L. Pincus, an art critic with the San Diego Union-Tribune, calls "Roxy's" shocking with a grim sort of humor, while he sees "Hoerengracht" as more haunting.

"I think that he always felt that art should be somehow able to communicate its images to people who didn't look at that much art," he said.

"Part of that is to loosely resemble the real world. You're walking into the painting, but walking around in a sort of everyday surrounding."

Joanna Frueh, a professor of art history at the University of Nevada, Reno, rates it a fabulous show.

"I think it's beautiful. I think it's very moving," she said.

She calls the trademark Kienholz use of drizzled resin on the models' faces melancholy, the trickles that continue down their bodies overtly symbolic.

"You feel that it's raining tears," she said. "It's very clear what it's about, but it's not like banging you over the head. It's subtle and it's poetic."

In a 1993 interview some nine months before his death at the age of 66, Kienholz told the Los Angeles Times he was drawn to Amsterdam's red light district in 1970 by the color and lights.

"The streets are exploding with color," he said.

"Another reason I wanted to do the piece is that I simply like whores. You can learn more from them than you can from most people because they've experienced a hell of a lot more than most people. And, of course, the subject appeals to the voyeur in me."

It's a voyeuristic stroll through the streets where the women stand on display under the red bulbs or sit and wait. One touches up her lipstick, a tiny television and half-empty pack of cigarettes on the table behind her.

Bric-a-brac and tacky figurines clutter shelves. White light fills the cribs. A radio plays. A minute timer sits next to a romance magazine.

Keinholz' widow, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, who was born the year he visited Roxy's and collaborated with him on "Hoerengracht," doesn't share his admiration of the girls.

"What he's describing is totally a male fantasy. Amsterdam's red light district looks like a tough day on the job to me," she said in the 1993 "Times" interview.

Kienholz contrasted the work with "Roxy's," in which one woman was basically a garbage pail with the word "Love" painted on it.

"With 'The Hoerengracht,' the figures are immediately identifiable as girls," he said.

"The girls in this one are a lot prettier," his wife conceded.

The plaster bodies are castings of friends that Kienholz and his wife borrowed during the 1984-88 construction of the work.

Pincus said the couple inspired his master's thesis, his doctoral dissertation and his book "On a Scale that Competes with the World: The Art of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz."

"Nancy always said this was a piece that came primarily from him," Pincus said.

"His common thread always seemed to be an interest in people at the margins of society - people society has seen as marginalized people."

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"The Hoerengracht" is on display through June 27 at the Nevada Museum of Art, 160 West Liberty Street. Hours are 10 a.m.-4p.m. Tuesday-Friday and noon-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. It is open until 7 p.m. on Thursdays and is closed on Mondays.

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