When Edward Kienholz made "The Illegal Operation," the sculpture gave intense visual form to an experience many knew, but one that remained submerged in the culture's shadows.
The wretched back-alley procedure that the artist saw his wife endure was fresh in his mind. She was able to survive. There are dirty rags, a dirty bedpan, a trash-filled bucket, filthy medical instruments and tools, a brass standing lamp with its tattered shade askew, and a dirty shopping cart chair in the sculpture. The woman, Kienholz's wife, is depicted as a bag of oozing matter, with a lump on the seat.
There is a homey but stained hooked rug in this picture. The abortionist sits next to the patient's wire seat on a dirty pink stool that is just outside the viewer's space. The analogy of the shopping cart to a commercial transaction is made clear.
The artist was 35 years old at the time. He died at 66 years old. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had taken shape in the city where it was found. It is on view in the third floor galleries of the BCAM building. A work of art that gives form to the callous violence regularly done to desperate women is embodied in a living moment in time, when civil rights movements were churned and change from the insulated, socially repressive postwar years seemed possible.
The illegal operation was transformed after eleven years. The Supreme Court ruled that state regulation of abortion was unconstitutional. One legacy of misogynistic brutality had ended. The present's art became an artifact of the past.
It stayed that way for half a century. On June 24th, time traveled yet again to the illegal operation.
The Supreme Court created a third political branch of government in order to establish law that the legislative and executive branches wouldn't. The future is described by the sculptural present. Five conservative Christians clad in the blackest of robes decided that their religious beliefs should trump medical science and secular law in order to cheer on the inevitability of illegal operations.
The opinion was written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and references a notorious 17th century English predecessor who condemned to death witches for being evil. The barrister was raised by a Puritan father. After a draft of the opinion was leaked, the misogynistic reasoning of Alito was ridiculed by legal circles. The opinion was joined by four other justices, including Alito who is a conservative Catholic.
A man is accused of sexual harassment of women, a woman is accused of attempted rape, and a woman is affiliated with a cult with a doctrine of male superiority. The cruelest and most devastating image of Kienholz's sculpture is the gray lump of nameless matter. Alito's abortion opinion barely acknowledges that women will be affected by it, and the artist understood how difficult it would be to dehumanize women. Kienholz fled small-town eastern Washington to get away from his fundamentalist Christian mom. The center of his scene is a bag of cement that is open.
Alito and his cronies might as well have been making a decision about the fate of the lump of the sort. The women who will suffer and die at the hands of abortionists have not been considered. Everyone knows that the court's ruling will end abortion safety. The procedure has been turned into an illegal operation that will kill thousands of people.
Every poll shows that Americans don't want this evil to happen to them. Four of the five judges who made the decision were rejected by voters three times. The authorities ordered Americans to be quiet last week.
Don't think that will happen. Kienholz's "The Illegal Operation" is powerful for its depiction of a ruthless scene of cruel treatment that can only be hidden. The nature of art is like that. Such is the purpose of a museum's permanent collection, where paintings and sculptures sit patiently cared for as time passes, until suddenly, a moment calls for them to step forward and take us by the hand.
The story was originally published in the LA Times.
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