Are We Killing Time or Is Time Killing Us?

The Beanery by Edward Kienholz via Wikimedia Commons

I still remember my astonishment at stumbling across the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam many years ago and encountering The Beanery by Edward Kienholz. A three-dimensional walk-in installation, I think it’s one of the most singular artworks of the late 20th-century.

But wait, I hear you ask, what on earth is a beanery? It’s a slang term that emerged in the United States in the 19th-century for a cheap restaurant. Which had only a limited menu, usually serving staples like pork and beans (yes, that’s where the word comes from!).

And the sculpture is based on a real place, Barney’s Beanery, a bar and restaurant in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, that started out serving chilli, onion soup and beer in a small shack. It grew from these simple beginnings. But retained its down-to-earth atmosphere, which was an essential part of its appeal. And became a famous hangout for movie stars, beatniks and artists. Including Edward Kienholz.

A glimpse into the past

Kienholz was prompted to create The Beanery by a Herald Examiner headline he saw on 28 August 1964 on the newsstand outside the bar’s door: “Children Kill Children in Vietnam Riots.” The story focused on an outbreak of religious rioting that had taken place in Saigon (between Buddhists and Catholics) as the political situation in South Vietnam unravelled and US military intervention escalated. Kienholz was struck by the lack of interest shown by the Beanery’s customers in what was clearly a shocking headline.

The finished work was first displayed in the Beanery’s car park in October 1965. When Barney, the owner, first stepped into it his response was priceless, “It’s the darnedest thing I ever saw.”

Modelled at two-thirds the size of the original Beanery, the work features life-size models of some of the regular customers. To enhance the immersive experience, a recording plays of conversations and juke-box music from the bar (made by Keinholz), while a fan pumps out the stale odour of beer and food.

One of the first things that strike you as you enter is that all the customers have clocks for faces. With the time set at 10:10, representing eyebrows, but also establishing a frozen moment in time shared by them all. Only the model of Barney has a real face.

Kienholz has noted that time is suspended in the installation to highlight the escapism of the bar's clientele: “A bar is a sad place, a place full of strangers who are killing time, postponing the idea that they're going to die.”

He also said that, “The entire work symbolizes the switch from real time (symbolized by a newspaper) to the surrealist time inside the bar, where people waste time, kill time, forget time, and ignore time.”

Things fall apart…

This is the main theme of the piece. The striking contrast between what was going on in the real world and how ordinary people tried to insulate themselves from it. In one reading, this makes the installation an anti-war statement at a time that was witnessing growing opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam War.

But Keinholz’s work didn’t become directly political until a year or so later. And he has said that he was making a point about how the bar’s customers preferred to ignore events in the wider world. Until the brutal reality of the war was brought home to people by television news as the conflict worsened.

So, what we’re left with is the sense that he was offering not so much a political critique of the Vietnam War itself, but a condemnation of a society mired in consumerism and escapism, desensitised to the violence that mars everyday life in the US.

But this doesn’t lessen the impact of the work. On the contrary. In this understanding, escapism and denialism become both a contribution to, and reflection of, a state of entropy as we retreat inside ourselves while the world disintegrates around us. And it begs the question about the scope we have as individuals to take responsibility for our own lives as well as contribute to wider society.

As the American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau said, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

Running out of time

Time is precious. And by killing time, we kill ourselves. We neglect our potential to become better than we are. Both individually and collectively. We destroy our future and effectively become voyeurs at our own funerals.

In an ironic twist, the work is slowly decaying. Conservators at the Stedelijk Museum undertaking a restoration of The Beanery in 2012 discovered that Kienholz’s resins – used to seal the objects and give them a shared appearance – were not properly mixed. With the result that the assemblage is inexorably degrading. Intentional or not, this decay deepens the metaphor.

Keinholz’s work has a strong moral element. And he used his tableaux to reflect on the social and political issues facing the United States in the late twentieth century. Transcending its time, The Beanery also offers us an acutely topical message as politicians fail to engage seriously with the scale of climate breakdown and humanity faces an existential crisis.

We have two choices in life. We can make an enemy of time. Or we can use time to enrich us all. This has always been the most serious challenge we face as human beings. Made all the more significant by the climate and ecological emergencies.

Image: Pemboid at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons