PERSPECTIVES: A veteran's experiences shape violent sculpture
By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 2/20/2002
WEST NEWTON - Ken Hruby's new work is a theater of violence - at times chilling, at times comical. For the past 15 years or so, to come up with fodder for his art, Hruby has plundered his 21-year career as an army officer who served in Korea and Vietnam. He's picked apart his experiences so each exhibition has a different focus. There was a work about the soldier-and-gentleman irony of West Point ballroom dance lessons followed by combat practice, and another about parachuting, a lyrical and even otherworldly activity that ends with an abrupt bump.
There's nothing lyrical in his new installation, ''Fire Fight,'' at Boston Sculptors at Chapel Gallery. The show is part of artists' current examination of bellicose behavior, domestic to global, which is also the subject of ''The Culture of Violence,'' a major group exhibition now at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. At the exhibition, high-profile artists including Mel Chin, Barbara Kruger, and Leon Golub tackle such issues as hate crimes and child abuse. The catalog notes the horrifying fact that more children are killed by firearms in America than in any other First World nation.
Firearms are one of the main elements in Hruby's installation. Most of the artists in the Amherst show have observed violence at a distance, or merely read about it: They haven't been direct participants. Hruby has. And as a machine gunnery instructor in the '60s, he's taught others to shoot. You have the feeling that this involvement means he will never be free of his subject matter. He's doomed, like the Flying Dutchman or Sisyphus, to relive the past eternally.
''Fire Fight'' is a gallery within a gallery, a three-walled theater built within the existing space. All you see of the installation at first is one of the outside walls: Hruby guards the mystery and surprise that are only revealed when you turn the corner and face the piece. Your presence triggers its action, just as the enemy's presence triggers a battle. On opposite sides of walls and floor covered in heavy paper are five imposing triangular pedestals on which are five ''guns'' made of electrical piping. Old motors and pumps from heating oil companies are in full view, as are sewer pipes (unused, the artist specifies.) There are wires all over the place. The homemade quality suggests a high school science project or a mad inventor toiling in a garage. The wacky ingredients include drawer slides from Office Depot, substituting for far more expensive bits of technology. As in one of those theatrical productions with the stage stripped of its backdrop and wings, Hruby acknowledges basic realities.
No attempt is made to camouflage the mechanics of this work that is in part about camouflage. The five guns shoot green, brown, and black food coloring at white paper cutouts. Eventually, these targets blend into the rest of the room, which is also being sprayed. The cutouts are anonymous people, just the outlines of heads and torsos on sticks that turn them into human lollipops. Like victims tied to a tree, they can squirm and twist but can't escape their fate. For the 25 days of the show's duration, the targets will be replaced daily by fresh recruits. The used ones hang from a wire grid in a small upstairs gallery, like aging game, or torture victims on display. A soundtrack of a male and female voice saying ''blah, blah, blah'' at each other underscores the idea of opposites, and the repetition of the nonsense syllable seems to symbolize the meaninglessness of war.
Hruby is very much a sculptor and very much not a painter, so it's interesting to see him working for once with colored liquids. He's hands-off, though. There is an element of chance in where the colors fly, an improvisational quality reminiscent of 1960s Happenings. Hruby doesn't know what the walls and floors will look like by the time the show closes on March 17. Maybe a giant pointillist canvas? Maybe a Pollock drip painting? Maybe just a sea of mud? Pollock, the quintessential macho artist, exerted a certain control over his gestural spatters. His egotism was slightly scary. Hruby's approach is even scarier: He gives up control by allowing unthinking machinery to do the dirty work.
And dirty it is. Like Yves Klein dragging a nude model through paint, like Blue Man Group, Hruby revels in a kind of sheer little boy sloppiness.
Hruby has become a significant sculptural voice in Boston, if not beyond. He produces his increasingly intricate pieces at an exceedingly slow pace. There aren't many, and they wouldn't travel well. Packing them and taking them on tour would be roughly as complex as a military campaign. Hruby's best exposure to date was a retrospective last year at the Cape Ann Historical Museum in Gloucester, where he lives.
That he enjoys the processes involved in the challenges he sets himself is evident in the work: It's always clearly his, but it always takes a fresh direction. That he doesn't take himself too seriously is obvious in the way he presents the work. On the outside wall of ''Fire Fight'' is a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer about entering at your own risk. The nod to America's litigious nature is probably not necessary: The only hazard would be if one of the guns went out of control and shot paint onto your clothes, which seems unlikely.
Hruby's price list is always a hoot, because sales, at least of his big pieces, are virtually nonexistent. ''Fire Fight's'' machine guns sell for $3,500 each but seem impractical for residential use unless you want to be surrounded by - and be part of - a neo-Impressionist environment. The targets are $125 apiece, and because the food coloring is fugitive, the colors won't hold up for the long haul. To Hruby, that's part of the work: Fading hues are stand-ins for fading memories.
It's become de rigueur for installation artists who incorporate sound to put out a CD of the work's score, whether or not it holds up on its own. Hruby pokes fun at this pretentiousness with his own CD, which lasts 20 seconds and sells for $20. The price, he notes, works out to 50 cents per ''blah.''
the Boston Globe on 2/20/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.