Niggling revulsion is much missed

THERE was a time when Ed Kienholz's work represented some of the most engaged art of an extremely engaged era. Often macabre and pointed to equal degree, his visceral flea market assemblages seemed to force viewers to register a complex, unavoidable relationship between the social and material discards of modern America.

By the 1990s, however, his commentaries on the darkness of consumerism seem to have lost most of their edge. This, at least, is what is suggested by The Merry Go World Or Begat By Chance And The Wonder Horse Trigger, a large scale environment that the artist made in collaboration with his wife, Nancy.

A macabre hybrid of haunted house and carousel, the Kienholzs' sculptural assembly of discarded fairground animals, photographs and artfully displayed babrac, offers visitors the promise of seeing how their lives might have been, had they been born in different circumstances.

Visitors must spin a wheel of fortune before penetrating to the heart of the machine. Each time somebody enters, one of a series of little chambers of horrors lights up to reveal another miniature Kienholz environment. At one turn we see the face of a melancholic street child, at the next we may be greeted by a wheelchair bound native American, staring from a window, or a child in a dishevelled kitchen.

There is no finesse to this critique, and the piece never gets beyond the rather prosaic suggestion that poverty is less pleasant (but more photogenic) than wealth. The sense of unease, the tug of niggling revulsion for which Kienholz is celebrated, has disappeared, only to be replaced by the drowsy, sentimental cliche's of exotic poverty reportage.