Kienholz: The Hoerengracht

Bathed in a dim red light, punters gawk at what's on offer in 'Hoerengracht', Kienholz's installation interpreting a lurid little portion of Amsterdam. Behind smeared windowpanes, fibreglass models cast from real women's bodies and crowned with mannequin heads, sit and wait. They wear cheap lingerie and a lot of paint. Quite literally, they're covered in the flesh-coloured stuff. Gloopy drips of clear resin run down their faces and over the cramped walls and furnishings, like tears or bodily fluids. Tinny disco music sounds discordantly from doorways. Exhausted undies hang in an upstairs window. Even the blurred flowers on the dingy wallpaper seem to weep.
This late work by Ed Kienholz, created with his partner Nancy, packs all the grotesquery you'd expect from the artist renowned for his furious take on political subjects - from Vietnam to child abuse. Typically, 'Hoerengracht', which translates as 'whore's canal', is a sweating, foul-breathed stage set combining all too realistic detail with gory Gothic theatrics. But chiefly it's horrible because the artists pose these women as sacrificial lambs devoid of their own agency. The seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of prostitutes, which the National Gallery has hung in the entrance to this show, are revealing by comparison. These depictions might be more restrained but they have a depth and psychological range lacking in the twentieth-century artists' moralising. Staring out through big dead eyes, Kienholz's dummy-women simply suffer meekly. Rather than engage us in the complex issues surrounding prostitution, Hoerengracht's implicit finger wagging is the real turn-off here.