Critical Mass.: MINING WAR FOR ART
©by Beth Surdut, artsMedia Magazine, Sep. 15 - Oct. 15, 2001
| A friend of mine, a Vietnam veteran, enlisted when he was seventeen. That's right, a kid. You should have seen the pictures he took: the pretty local girl who was his drug dealer, a close up of an opium poppy dripping with thick sap. My favorite photo was the one a friend had taken of him parachuting with three other airborne boys aloft in quiet blueness. "Minutes after I took the picture of this rice paddy we were attacked," he said, showing an idyllic scene that looked like a shot out of a tourist brochure. He extended his tour because, he said, he couldn't deal with playing soldier in the National Guard when he came back to the states. I met him in 1971. For the first two years I knew him, not a day went by without a reference to war. A walk in the woods was a learning experience of good places for booby traps and a carÕs backfire sent my friend diving for cover.He carried a P-38 (a can opener issued by the military) on his key chain.
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| The gentlest of men, he warned me that I should never touch him to wake him up, because he might kill me. He said he worried sometimes that some night in a bar some asshole would push him too far, that then heÕd kill someone. | "Army Regulation 670-1 (Grooming)" (detail, synthetic rubber, ball chain, pocket knives, 1988 |
I have more stories of other indelible but not necessairly visible scars from veterans, but so does artist Ken Hruby, who tells his stories so well. Hruby demands our attention, as should anyone who has gone into war and managed to come out the other side. Interaction is the key, which is why it is necessary to haul your sorry ass out of the chair and into the fray. The ballsy smirk of "Short Arm Inspection" and the crushing power of the "Juggernaut" wheel of combat boots live in the same world as Hruby's images of learning to dance (with male classmates) while becoming a soldier at West Point. The main room sings an eerie lullaby from the "Minefields of Memory" installation triggered by a motion detector. Creaking moaning crutches spasmodically swing and clack over beds of rice grains and compasses. Some of the crutches end in feet; others have entrails sliding down the gray wood. The effect is mesmerizing.
 | Hruby sometimes blatantly rips open your heart with a P-38 (as with the collection of ears that can cause instant distancing for protective purposes) or more subtly curls back a protective helmet to show what lies beneath. His written stories are the most effective, not the accompanying comments of curators, and with the case of the pseudo musical instruments, the story is more powerful then the physical consturction.
"I never told anyone about the Vietnamese regimental surgeon, the flute and J. S. Bach. It seemed too insignificant. There were some real war stories to tell, after all, " Hruby tells us. The stories are walking around with us in the minds of veterans, and Hruby prods us to acknowledge that war is not contained in a measured place or time period. |
| "War Story", Boot parts, rice paper, silk screen, 1995 |
How can anyone be expected to live a "normal" life after participating in war, this most inhumane of human rituals? As a society we try to forget the wars and in the process negate the people who fought in them. Hruby's ability to connect us, to help us understand, is his gift to us.