All photographs by Tom Vinetz, © Kienholz Collection of Kawamura Memorial Museum, Sakura, Japan, courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, CA and The Pace Gallery, New York unless otherwise noted.

Imagine entering an expansive, lowly-lit room, shoes crunching on a sandy dirt floor. You follow the footprints into the ever-expanding room. The scene feels as though you’ve stumbled into a movie set: five cars are parked in a circle, dramatic lighting emanates from headlights, framing the central scene. Tinny blues rift from one of the automobile radios, immersing you more fully in the tableau. Among trees and other vegetation, you are drawn inside until you encounter a horrific life-size scene: five white figures attacking an African American man.

What you have seen is not a dream, it is Edward Kienholz’s work Five Car Stud. Created between 1969 and 1972, its current showing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) marks the first time the work has been shown since its inclusion in documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany in 1972.

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All photos by Caroline Claisse for Art Observed.

“In Praise of Doubt” is the second half of two exhibitions currently staged by the Francois Pinault Foundation. It housed in the Punta della Dogana just a stone’s throw from Palazzo Grassi, where part one, “The World Belongs to You” can be found. The two exhibitions share a curator, Caroline Bourgeois, and both run in parallel with the Venice Biennale 2011.

The exhibition presents both historical pieces and new works, several of which are site-specific projects. The theme, as hinted by its title, is uncertainty, the questioning of identity, and revisiting intimate space in relation to the space of the artwork. The artists included are art world regulars Adel Abdesemed, Marcel Broodthaers, Maurizio Cattelan, Subodh Gupta, David Hammons, Roni Horn, Thomas Houseago, Donald Judd, Edward Keinholz, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Julie Mehretu, Bruce Nauman, Sigmar Polke, Thomas Schutte, Sturtevant, Tatiana Trouve, and Chen Zhen. Out of these twenty, a surprising half have never been exhibited before in an exhibition by the Francois Pinault Foundation.

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