WUNRN
UK - NATIONAL GALLERY EXHIBIT
RECREATES
RED LIGHT DISTRICT OF AMSTERDAM
The Installation recreates the alleyways of the Dutch capital's most notorious quarter – complete with life-size figures of blank-faced women.
17 November 2009
A section from The Hoerengracht at the National Gallery. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
Charlotte Higgins, Chief Arts Writer
Amsterdam's red light district has landed in the National Gallery, London – and it's not pretty.
Ed and Nancy Kienholz's immersive
installation The Hoerengracht ("whores'
canal"), which opens at the gallery tomorrow, is a re-creation of the
alleyways of the Dutch capital's most notorious quarter – complete with
life-size figures of blank-faced women posing in the windows of brothels.
According to Nicholas Penny,
director of the National Gallery, the installation "does not in any way
glamorise or romanticise prostitution".
Out of the darkness, dimly lit
figures loom from carefully remade shop fronts. Their anguished faces at times
recall paintings of the Madonna one can see on any stroll through the rooms of
the National Gallery.
Showing such a piece is an
unprecedented move for the gallery. Its collection comes to an abrupt halt at
1900 and, except in the context of its artist-in-residence schemes, it rarely
shows contemporary art.
But the point of showing The
Hoerengracht – which was made by the American husband-and-wife artists in the
1980s – is, according to curator Colin Wiggins, the light it can cast on the
other works in the gallery.
"We're full of prostitution.
Take Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode – one scene from that work shows a weeping
child prostitute being presented to an aristocratic man," he said.
"But because our paintings are shown in gold frames they look safe and
pretty."
He also referenced Courbet's Les
Demoiselles Au Bord de la Seine, which shows prostitutes. And, he said, in the
background of Monet's Bathers at la Grenouillère a bathing-suit-clad woman can
be seen propositioning a man.
There is a particular
relationship, said Wiggins, between The Hoerengracht and the gallery's
collection of Dutch 17th-century paintings – a number of which show scenes of
prostitution.
In Godfried Schalcken's A Man
Offering Gold and Coins to a Girl (circa 1665-70) the theme is clear since, in
this candlelit scene, a woman sits on her bed as she receives money from an
amorous-looking man while Cupid looks on. In other works the theme is less
clear, but it is subtly indicated, said Wiggins. In Pieter de Hooch's A Musical
Party in a Courtyard – which to innocent eyes merely shows an elegant gathering
– a man offers a woman an oyster (then, as now, regarded as an aphrodisiac),
while she dips her knife suggestively into her glass of wine.
Ed Kienholz died in 1994, but
today Nancy Reddin Kienholz was at the National Gallery to oversee the
installation of The Hoerengracht.
On having her work displayed in
the gallery, she said: "I've been telling my friends I've won the Oscars
on this one. For a living artist there is no better place to be shown – hands
down – than the National Gallery."
She described the work as "a
piece for voyeurs" and "not against prostitution, but rather for
prostitution". She said it was "a kind portrait. It has a calmness
and a contemplativeness about it."
The work, she said, "opened
up discussion" about the status of prostitution. "It's certainly
something that is there in every major city in the western world," she
said. "Any taxi driver in any city can tell you where it is."
The work was constructed in
"They didn't like women
coming into the area and I was the one doing the photography," said Kienholz.
"But once they realised we were offering 50 guilders for a five-minute
photoshoot they got more friendly."
"The point of showing The
Hoerengracht is to shed light on the permanent collection," said Wiggins.
"It's easy to go round the gallery and miss the fact that many of our
pictures are far more repellent and horrible than Hoerengracht. The National
Gallery is full of gang rape, incest and bestiality."
As regards incest, he pointed to
the paintings in the gallery that show a biblical incident in which the
daughters of Lot feed their father wine and then seduce him in order to
guarantee the continuity of the family line (Lot's wife having been turned into
a pillar of salt).
For bestiality, one need look no
further than the copy of Michelangelo's Leda and the Swan, once regarded as too
indecent for public display (it was hung in the director's office in the 19th
century).
And Rubens's thoroughly
unpleasant Rape of the Sabine Women does not spare the horrors of the incident
in early Roman history in which Romulus's men supposedly seized and kidnapped
the women of the neighbouring Sabine tribe.
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