After his famed Los Angeles gallery Ferus closed, the artist Edward Kienholz spent the years between 1983 and 1988 traveling between Berlin and Amsterdam with his wife Nancy to work on a lurid, sensationalistic artwork that to this day retains the power to shock: The Hoerengracht. An installation replicating a section of Amsterdam's famous Red Light district, its title translates into whore's canal, a pun on the city's genteel Herengracht street. During the five years it took to complete, the couple gathered materials, made casts of friends to use for the model 'prostitutes' that inhabit the piece, and completed other intricate details, such as painting the bricks of the building's walls. Today the artwork has returned to the Netherlands, where it is on view at the Amsterdam Historical Museum through August 29.

The work functions as a composite street of the whole neighborhood of the Wallen, as the Red Light district is known in Dutch. While not a literal interpretation and definitely over-the-top — the prostitutes have old-fashioned cookie boxes over their faces to imply that they are a commodity — it fits with the actual Red Light district, which is like an extreme Disneyland for adults. The buildings, their rooms, and the life-size figures of prostitutes are all coated in resin, resembling tears or rain, which gives the installation an overall cohesiveness. In a way, the resin functions as a catalyst for a state of suspended animation — like the profession of prostitution itself, which, despite modern technology, has not changed much over the years.

By the time he began work on the installation, Ed Kienholz already had a history with Amsterdam, where he exhibited his installation Roxys, 1961–62, based on an American brothel, and The Beanery, 1965, as part of his 1970 "Tableaux" show at the Stedelijk Museum. (Roxys is currently on display at David Zwirner gallery in New York, through June 19th.) The Beanery, fashioned after the dive bar Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood, was later purchased by the Stedelijk in 1971. What made the latter work so memorable to a generation of Amsterdammers was the overpowering smell of beer and a soundtrack of chattering, rowdy patrons, creating an atmosphere of a real bar — despite the fact that Kienholz’s human figures are not entirely realistic. Their heads are made of clocks, all stopped at 10:10.

Like The Beanery, The Hoerengracht also elicits a strong response, although the viewer is stuck on the outside, looking into a world most would never otherwise experience. As curator Annemarie de Wildt admits, the show is “a bit of a hybrid exhibition, it’s not solely about art.” Upstairs, for instance, there is a room more specifically dedicated to the politics of prostitution — specifically Project 1012, an initiative named after the postal code of the Red Light district that the city of Amsterdam began in 2008 to shrink the prostitution nexus. The strategy? The project has donated 50 of the stretch's infamous display windows to artists and designers, and has also limited the number of coffee shops that legally sell marijuana, claiming that this will upgrade the neighborhood while simultaneously providing for an economic upturn and combating human trafficking and money laundering.

A complicated proposition to be sure, since prostitution and soft drugs are  one of the reasons many tourists flock to Amsterdam, but Project 1012’s stated goal is to shrink, not eliminate, the Wallen. On the third floor, there is a selection of contemporary artists that address issues of prostitution, including a video documenting Marina Abramovics performance Role Exchange, 1975, in which she traded places with a prostitute for four hours during the opening reception of a solo exhibition she was having in Amsterdam at the time. Still, art can often only go so far in addressing harsh realities: in an audio interview on MoMA’s website, Abromovic admits that she did not have sex with any clients during the performance.