ART REVIEW: "MINEFIELDS OF MEMORY
by Christine Temin, Globe staff
THE BOSTON GLOBE
11/2/1997
Mine Poems
In "Minefields of Memory," sculptor Ken Hruby proves a brillient guide to his past and ours.
In 1962, US Army Second Lieutenant Ken Hruby was ordered to lay a minefield on the DMZ in Korea. In 1969, Major Ken Hruby was ordered to clear the same minefield, so the land could once again be used for farming. But the mines had migrated. He couldn't find them all. The mission had to be scrapped.
In 1997, sculptor Ken Hruby has created an installation, "Minefields of Memory," whose seed lies in that shifting ground. The work - at Boston Sculptors at Chapel Gallery - resonates with current events, current thought. But long before the Princess of Wales joined the crusade against antipersonnel land mines, long before this year's Nobel Peace Prize went to the head of a Vermont-based group campaign to ban mines, minefields were on Hruby's mind. Sifting through his thoughts, he has come up with a powerful sculptural environment that is oceans away from a simplistic statement about how land mines are evil and we ought to get rid of them immediately.
His art grows out of his experiences as an infantry officer in Korea and Vietnam - and out of pondering the relationship between soldier and society.
Most Vietnam art is angry venting: Hruby's is full of ambiguity, irony, even wit, and that opens it up to all of us who didn't go to war. "I like the word 'dignity' in relation to Ken's work," saysCarl Belz, director of the rose Art Museum at Brandise University. "Art with a social or political target is so often one-sided; Ken's has a balance. And it's important that he comes from within the experience; he's not taking pot shots from outside. He's lived through war and ruminated on it. I respect that."
Hruby makes poetry, not propaganda. His new poem is an epic. But like most of his work, is is marked by an elegant economy, and its elements are few: the kind of wooden crosses from which marionettes dangle; a cast of 36 crutches, each a distinct character; three long, shallow beds willed with substances, black, white and gray - two opposites and their murky marriage. Look closely and you'll see the beds move, shuddering slightly. The work's allusions are as rich as its elements are spare.
Hruby has a talent for combining disparate objects so that they spark like sticks rubbed togeather to make a fire. The combustion here suggests an unseen puppet master mainplating limbs maimed by unseen explosives hidden in the fields below. It's about land mines, to be sure, but it's also about any lethal game where the rules change along the way and the dangers are invisible. Don't we all, Hruby asks, negotiate metaphoric minefields every day?...