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Kienholz, as a Northwest farmer's son who has made Los Angeles his home, feels like the puritan visiting Gomorrah. Says he: "The bigness of this city is a sickness. This need for space, grading the hills and filling the valleys, it's all part of man's inhumanity to man multiplied a million times, grinding against each other daily." Living in the city of five-level freeways, of supermarkets that never close, Kienholz searches for timeless values and tragedies in a metropolis that thrives on the fleeting present.
Embalmed Nostalgia. Kienholz's strategy is to preserve the past in his works, coating his junk assemblages in a rock-hard veneer of fiber glass. He handles decay as a time clock between the ever fresh present and the fullness of a lifetime, meticulously reconstructing the scene, down to an original 1943 calendar pinned on the wall of Roxy's. The mustiness that he seeks to enshrine, however, is not embalmed nostalgia. "I think of my art as laying a trail for people," he explains. "They can follow it, and at a certain point I disappear. Then they have to make a decision, even if it's only to get the hell out of there. No one can walk past a tableau; he has to walk into it. And if one person ends up being better, then I'm completely vindicated."