Part of Amsterdam’s red light district has been recreated at the National Gallery, London, in an installation by American artists Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. In The Hoerengracht, visitors to the gallery are invited to walk around two blocks of Amsterdam brothels, while mannequins peer out of the windows looking for customers.
The Hoerengracht was created during the 1980s and preserves many day-to-day details of life at the time. At first, the piece reminded me of an exhibit at the Geffrye Museum, which specialises in recreating domestic interiors from earlier eras. My eye was caught by period details such as the old radios, a Joni Mitchell cassette and a plastic hanger in the shape of spread legs. While these items were interesting in themselves, the way Hoerengracht has aged now distracts from the serious subject of prostitution and even makes it appear slightly quaint.
The absence of men in Hoerengracht is very noticeable. In part, the intention seems to be to unsettle visitors by implicating them in the scene. However, there is also something dignified about showing the women separate from the men who define their lives. Standing alone in shop windows, the women look like religious icons –with glowing red lights and cigarettes instead of candles and rosary beads.
Trapped like animals
To start with, the piece felt weaker because of the absence of any direct reference to the women’s relationships with their male customers and pimps. When I looked closely, however, I became more affected by the loneliness and isolation of the women, trapped like animals in the windows of pet shops.
Photos in the introduction to the exhibition show the artists making casts of prostitutes in Amsterdam, which they used to create the bodies of the women in the installation. To emphasise the idea that the prostitutes in Hoerengracht are commodities, however, the artists put mannequins’ heads on top of the bodies. The blank faces of the mannequins staring out at us from the windows are surprisingly strong; they convey the tedium and numbness which must come from selling your body for sex on a daily basis.
Dripping with glue
The most striking feature of the installation is the transparent glue which has been dripped all over it. Coming down the sides of the buildings, the glue looks like rain and contributes to the cold and depressing atmosphere of the scene. On the inside of the windows, it might be interpreted as steam -a reference to what is happening in the bedroom, as well as emphasising how trapped the women are.
On the bodies of the prostitutes, however, the presence of this sticky glue can only be interpreted as sexual. Running down their faces and all over their clothes, it is the most powerful evocation of the misery, indignity and abuse of life as a sexual worker. The message is very powerful, but I am not sure that it affects viewers in the way which the artists really want.
The Kienholzs obviously felt sympathy for the prostitutes they met during their trips to Amsterdam in the 1980s. In the introduction to the installation, Nancy is quoted as saying: “I would only hope that The Hoerengracht is a kind portrait of the profession and that eventually the profession will be legal and the girls can get police protection rather than prosecution.”
Hoerengracht effectively evokes the misery of life as a prostitute and would discourage anybody from participating in it. But the Kienholzs have made the women in their installation look repellent by covering them in icky, sexually suggestive glue. Their intention seems to have been to improve the lot of prostitutes by rousing sympathy for them. In fact, the Kienholzs have further stigmatised and marginalised prostitutes, by putting so much emphasis on the idea that they are diseased and unclean.
Posted by Mariana. on November 20, 2009 at 12:49 pm
The installation seems very interesting. I’ve been recently to Amsterdam,I walked in the Red Light district and felt so sorry for those women standing in the windows. They became a kind of tourism atraction and it was clear that most of those tourists forgot that behind the window there is a human.