Ken Hruby

Cape Ann Historical Museum, Gloucester, MA

©by Marty Carlock, Sculpture Magazine, April 2002 Reproduced by permission.

Except for his earliest work, the art of Ken Hruby cannot be analyzed solely in formal terms. Its in-your-face political message obliterates other considerations. In the unlikely event you donÕt get it, HruibyÕs highly literate lables are there to clue you in. Make no mistake, his messags is a valid one, deeply felt and generated by his own life. For 21 years he was an Army officer, a West Pointer who served in Vietnam and Korea. The message is about war, its costs and its ironies.

Levity and wit lighten the weight of this sculptorÕs agenda. Even at his darkest, Hruby cannot resist a certain playfulness. His installation, Minefields of Memory, is composed of a mass of crutches and prosthetic feet, hung from the ceiling. No two crutches are alike. Some end in wooden feet, some of which are shaped like a womanÕs spike-heeled shoes. One crutch is topped by a winged form, as if its user might somehow fly. Implying the unwittingly passive sole of their user/victoms, the crutches hang from cross pieces like those used by puppeteers. Every two minutes a machine sets the assemblage shaking and clattering in a dance macabre.

The retrospective ÒTour of DutyÓ covers HrubyÕs entire career, beginning with his studies at BostonÕs Museum of Fine Arts in the mid-80Õs. Except for the amateurish student exercise Hyperbole (included perhaps to show how far Hruby has come), even the 1986 work is muscular and masculine. Cut from thick, dark steel that looks like bomb casings and weapons parts, the ÒUneasyÓ series succeeds as abstraction, incorporating appropriate detail and already displaying HrubyÕs talent for whimsical titles. Another work from the same period Chain Male is a helmet that resembles the butt end of a midieval cannon with an eye slit cut into it; steel springs hang from the back, something like hair and something like chain mail armor. Hints of a new direction - and of HrubyÕs propensity for puns and verbosity - appear in Goldpost , a satirical totem built of gold-sprayed football helmets and pads, hockey and lacrosse sticks supported by a crutch, a cricket bat , and a lumpily bandaged baseball bat. His lable speaks of our cultures fascination with the Òbroken, sacrificial bodyÓ of the athlete.

By the 1990Õs the emerging artist was ready to acknowledge and exploit his former identity. An amusing series of musical instruments, subtly employing military imagery, began the process - a bamboo trombone aith a fixed bayonet, a trumpet with bullets for its three valves, and a rifle with a stock of purpleheart wood and a bell at the end of its barrel. Juggernaut brought critical notice in 1995. Simplicity in action, a mammoth wooden wheel is fitted with perhaps 100 infantry boots, all pointd in the same direction. Poised at the top of a ramp, the wheel threatens to roll down in a path of destruction. Juggernaut adds additional meaning to this intrinsic tension: the momentum of politico-military zeal, the number of invisible, faceless human beings locked into senseless goals determined by some absent authority, and the endless cycles of history and life, repeating the same mistakes of violence and domination.

More black humor emerges in three modified helmets. Mounted on Organic Camouflage are half a dozen tiny flowerpots containing living chives, parsley, and basil. In Defolient Camouflage dead plants are stuck into the pots. Insight peels back strips of another helmer, giving glimpses of what may be on the wearerÕs mind: wiring diagrams, fragments of quotations, stories, musical scores, and a bit of red lace. Even military men are said to cringe at Army Regulation 670-1 (Grooming) a row of ears, strung on a beaded chain line dog-tags, reference one way that the front lines tallied body counts. Above, more ears are pinned to the wall by pencils through their centers, parodying the regulation that soldiersÕ side-burns may not be longer than that marker.

Much as we like to look at art without verbal explanations, HrubyÕs lables are not only useful but elegant and sometimes poetic. He writes, ÒLike mines, these memories are not always where I laid them...They shift and migrate in the bramble of my hippocampusÓ. From these brambles, Hruby has dug out art or originality, power and impact.