REVIEW: "MINEFIELDS OF MEMORY"
Hampden Gallery, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA March - April, 2000
ART ON VIEW by James Hoff Hampshire Gazette, 21 March 2000
Artist Mines WARTIME MEMORIES
Haunting installation explores a soldier's struggles with his past.
To create a work of art that consciously addresses the personal and political impacts of war, or any large-scale political phenomenon, is to run the risk of heavy-handed moralism, self-absorbtion or unbearable self-conscious symbolism. One also runs the risk of creating a context that limits the work to little more than a statement, as if to speak the thing were enough. But thankfully, Ken Hruby, who has made a career as an artist by exploring the experiences of his career as soldier in Korea and Vietnam, has had the good sense to avoid the pitfalls of the typical political artist.
"Minefields of Memory," Hruby's 1997 work is about memory and minefields. But freed from its political context, "Minefields of Memory" becomes an exploration of the very tenuousness of our human existence. More importantly, perhaps, Hruby's installation is complex, layered and conveys a meditative beauty at odds with the nature of the inspiration. According to Hruby, "Minefields of Memory" was inspired by an event that took place early in his military career. In 1962, then a young lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Hruby says he was ordered by his superiors to plant a minefield. A full seven years later, Hruby was asked to disable and remove those same mines, but according to him, the task was impossible. The mines themselves seemed to have shifted position over time. Similarly, our memories, particularly the ones we would rather not remember, the ones most dangerous to us, seem to shift and change over the years.
Recalling the incident years later, Hruby was inspired to create a work that addresses the metaphoric link between memory and minefield. Indeed, the sense one has upon entering Hruby's exhibit is tantamount to what must be the near-breaking-point tension of walking across a minefield.
The first thing one notices when entering the gallery is actually incidental to the visual and kinetic aspects of the installation. The steady, quiet hum of a small motor and the squeaking of wood greet the viewers' ears, while at the same time the gentle movement of Hruby's dangling "crutches" captures the eyes. Suspended from marionete-like crosses, the many crutches - placed almost haphazardly at opposing angles - swing and sway in a cycle of increasing and decreasing intensity. At the height of the movement, the objects begin to clamor and knock against each other creating a primal percussive sound, only to slow down again to an almost still point of tension, like a wind chime between gusts.
Underneath each of the three separate sections of hanging crutches is a platform containing a different landscape of sorts. In one box there is a layer of neatly combed dried rice, like the sand in a rock garden. Another contains glittering black sand; and still another is filled with black metallic powder and scattered with compasses, whose needles lose their bearings and spin out of control at regulated intervals. It is difficult to assess the reasons behind Hruby's choice of three different landscapes, but it's clear that the variety of kinetic energy creates a dynamic tension and points perhaps to various realities of memory.
But Hruby's crutches, if one can really call them crutches, are the real focal point of the work. Painted a dull gray, with vein-like streaks of red and blue seeping from beneath the chipping paint, Hruby's crutches are actually only the faintest shadow of their more utilitarian cousins. Hruby, reaching into his memory, has distorted the crutches of the human need to rationalize the past and turned them into something both more monstrous and real. Among the many shapes that Hruby has created, one resembles harp, another is clearly a scythe and many of the other crutches show what appear to be hip or shoulder bones while other have feet, high heels or burgeoning wings. Swaying uneasily over the threatening landscape below the minefields of Hruby's past, these anthropomorphic objects create an uncanny mixture of almost meditative anxiety. The viewer is drawn into and hypnotized by the cyclical sway of the dangling objects, all the while expecting the worst, the end at any moment.