Meditations on Gun Violence: Edward and Nancy Kienholz’s "Still Live" Tableau and Drawings

In 1974 in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, American artists Edward and Nancy Kienholz produced and exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts the most dangerous participatory tableau of their collaborative oeuvre. Titled “Still Live,” the Kienholzes constructed a furnished living room environment within which a participant sat 6 meters from a black box gun mechanism containing a live cartridge controlled by a randomized timer. The artists did not know when the timer would trigger the gun mechanism to fire the bullet at the seated individual. Participants were required to sign a waiver acknowledging their consent to risk their lives in the tableau. The Kienholzes also created four related assemblage works each titled “Drawing for Still Live” which function as conceptual mediations upon specific aspects of the larger tableau. This paper interrogates the repeated presence of gun violence in the artworks of Edward and Nancy Kienholz, which I argue can be contextualized by the dramatic rise of shooting deaths, assassinations, plane hijackings, and state violence in the United States and divided Germany during the Cold War. During the exhibition the West Berlin police confiscated the gun mechanism and charged Edward Kienholz with illegal possession of a firearm and attempted homicide. Through an investigation of court records, I argue the termination of the criminal case by the U.S. Ambassador was a contentious geo-political maneuver that called into question the judicial and criminal powers of West Berlin government institutions regulated by both the West German constitution and the occupying Allied Powers.