It's a dark room that has been turned into a dark night. The scene is the woods. Five cars, spotlights shining, are parked radially around a group of white men wearing masks, holding down and castrating a black man whose face wears a mask of a scream.

In one car, a white woman—presumably, the black man's date—sits with one hand over her mouth, holding back a retch. She is visible because the car door is still open from the black man having been dragged out of it. A masked white man with a shotgun—possibly, the woman's brother or father—stands guard at this open car door, overlooking the horrible central scene like a supervisor. Inside another car a boy sits, white, watching through the windshield.

The body of the black man is unlike the realistic bodies of the white men; his torso is a tub of water, in which float capital letters like the ones a child puts on the refrigerator, forming various combinations. I saw something like: "I," "G," "N," "E," "G," "R." I didn't put together what this spelled; I was far too shocked to do anything as calculated as a word scramble. The penis that is being stretched in order to be cut off is metal.

The action of the figures is frozen, but the dirt underfoot is accumulating footprints as you walk through the scene. Suddenly, there are your prints, too. You will wear this dirt out of the gallery with you, as the artist wanted.

I saw this piece—Ed Kienholz's Five Car Stud—with my fiance, on a recent trip to LA. We happen to be black (him) and white (me). There were a few other people in the room when we entered, fellow explorers on this island of horror. One was a well-heeled older white woman. She wore a pink suit, pearl necklace and earrings, and a badge I could have sworn said "TRUSTEE." She was pushing in a wheelchair an older white man wearing an expensive suit and shined shoes.

"This is yucky," she burst out. "I don't like it."

"What," he joked. "They're just turning him into a soprano."

Is this type of response part of the reason why one of my favorite critics, LA-based Ed Schad, refused to see Five Car Stud when it opened in October after having been in storage for 40 years? Schad wrote,

If one finds oneself properly engaged with the subject matter, is the gut punch of seeing the piece in person not just gratuitous? What use is the dropping of the stomach, the pallor on the cheek, the torpor of helplessness?

Agreeing with Lionel Trilling, Schad writes, "the direct contemplation of cruelty cannot help but make us cruel ourselves." That sounds dramatic, but isn't there something to the fact that my understanding of (and depiction of) those two older folks is now reduced to a stereotype?

For all I know, the older couple's comments were their equivalent of monster masks, worn to protect themselves from the extreme discomfort the piece made them genuinely feel. Does that make a difference?

Either way, we walked out immediately after we made the complete circle and the couple made their awful comments—my fiance fastest. It was terrible enough to be in there in the first place, and now it felt impossible. I have never spent less time with a monumental work of art that affected me. I did the closest thing I could to not seeing it while seeing it: I did a drive-by.

I was left with this question: Who is it really for?

The story of Five Car Stud is a saga. Kienholz grew up in Fairfield, Washington, a little town in Spokane County that was no stranger to woods like these. By the time he made Five Car Stud—between 1969 and 1972—he was living in LA, where he had already created a stir with another piece, a sculptural depiction of two drunken figures in the throes of sex in the back seat of a '38 Dodge. The LA County Board of Supervisors had labeled that piece obscene, and threatened to shut it down when it was shown at LACMA in 1966. In 1962, he'd made another in-your-face portrait of a tough subject: The Illegal Operation, which features a sack of oozing concrete on an abortionist's chair.

There was no way LACMA was going to touch Five Car Stud only five years after its brush with the Board of Supervisors. So after it was finished, it was installed briefly in a parking lot in LA as a kind of rehearsal, then shipped over to Germany, to the international exhibition Documenta in Kassel (itself created by German culturati to live down the Hitler years of persecution of artists). It was seen there, then in Düsseldorf and Berlin, and later that year it was bought by a Japanese collector and put away for decades. Now, it's been restored, and it's for sale. (In a conversation yesterday, Lawrence Weschler suggested the Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton should buy it for her new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas; I sort of love and despise this idea at the same time.) It will also be seen in Europe in 2012, on a tour organized by the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen. Holly Myers wrote the full, storied tale of the construction and restoration in the LAT. Its display at LACMA is part of Pacific Standard Time, this year's panoply of exhibitions on California art history.

One source told me last week that she feels that Five Card Stud is the elephant in the room of Pacific Standard Time. Responses to it have been intense. At a public conversation about it, LACMA guards told of people falling to their knees, crying. One person etched the word "COWARDS" into the dirt. An explosion of rage this huge and monstrous leaves an impression.

Yet I can't help but feel that there's strategic reason for the relative radio silence of critics on Five Card Stud. When you've got a whole show of underappreciated black artists across town at the Hammer, why give airtime to a white artist making a piece about racism, even if the piece has never been seen before in the United States? Isn't reviewing Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 a better use of time and space? A better way of being, as Ed Schad might say, "properly engaged with the subject matter"?

I came away from Five Car Stud with mixed feelings. While I understand that the metaphor that we all have the same dirt on our shoes is supposed to be humanizing and ultimately liberating, even that idea is worn, simplistic, and ultimately a little racist. We don't all have the same dirt on our shoes. Being angry about something is not the same thing as fearing it will happen to you, and Kienholz's sweeping, punishing, universalizing piece doesn't make room for that important distinction. Five Car Stud also reinforces the idea that racism, or any oppression, can be reduced to literal acts of shocking, easily detestable violence.

The presentation at LACMA is, thankfully, bracing. Hours after we visited Five Car Stud, my fiance was still reeling from being reminded that it took a concerted campaign to end lynching in the United States—a history documented in the room that leads you into Five Car Stud. The curator, Stephanie Barron, deserves credit. She saw the piece in Germany back in 1972, so she's had years to think about how to present it, and her presentation is grounded in facts, timelines, and photographs. That's where the real story is.