ART REVIEW: "TOUR OF DUTY" SCULPTURE by KEN HRUBY

CAPE ANN HISTORICAL MUSEUM

27 Pleasant Street

Gloucester MA 01930

Tel: 978- 283-0455

June 23 through October 20, 2001

 

© From a life of war, provocative pieces.

Sculptures by former Army officer turn out to be anything but uniform.

By Christine Temin, Boston Globe Staff, 7/27/2001 GLOUCESTER, MA.

At one time or another, almost everybody suffers from sore feet. The near-universality of that pain is one thing that makes Ken Hruby's sculpture - which is ostensibly about war - accessible to people who have never been anywhere near a battlefield.

Hruby's own feet danced and marched at West Point, where he'd have a tango lesson and bayonet practice on the same afternoon as part of the making of an officer and a gentleman, then in Korea and Vietnam.

Until now, Hruby, an Army officer turned artist, has mostly shown discrete bodies of work, with biennial outings in Boston Sculptors at Chapel Gallery in Newton. His new exhibition at the Cape Ann Historical Museum marks the only time his 15-year oeuvre has been gathered together. ''Tour of Duty'' reveals Hruby as a major American sculptor, an original whose art is rigorous and refined in both thought and execution. His work is profound, poignant, at times witty, even slapstick. But it will make you weep more often than smile.

He is anything but prolific. The Cape Ann show - which occupies one huge room, a small one, and a foyer - represents 90 percent of what he's produced so far. But his art is so layered that it's a lot to digest. I spent three hours in the exhibition, losing myself in the work. This is an important show, one that should travel before the sculptures go back into hibernation.

After Hruby traded a 21-year career as an Army officer for one in art, feet became fodder for his work. But not right away. He'd come back from Vietnam at a time when the United States was in denial over the war. Studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the early 1980s, he didn't talk about Vietnam, nor did he use it as source material.

''Maybe art represented a purer, higher calling,'' writes Carl Belz in the catalog accompanying Hruby's show, ''and maybe that's why he initially practiced it by making welded and abstract steel sculptures.''

The exhibition opens with its chronological end: a section of Hruby's most recent installation, the 1999 ''Free Fall.'' Made for the Chapel Gallery, the work originally featured 10 parachutes whose cargo of video monitors showed, among other things, Hruby jumping out of planes and floating in midair. To a soundtrack of soothing melodies by Satie, Mozart, and Beethoven, the parachutes rose slowly toward the ceiling. Then, one by one, they crashed, stopping just shy of the floor. You felt as if you'd awakened from the loveliest of dreams, and that life had literally let you down the same way it did Icarus, who plummeted to earth after flying too close to the sun.

The quartet of parachutes in the Cape Ann show don't rise - the ceiling is too low - yet the piece is just as potent, a succinct and sophisticated summation of war and its aftermath. There's Hruby floating on one monitor, suspended between heaven and earth. On a second monitor, there's you, captured in real time, implicated in Hruby's saga. Hanging from a third parachute is a pair of battered army boots that speak of the sheer toil of war. Hanging from the fourth is a prosthetic leg.

Prostheses are a staple of Hruby's vocabulary. In most figurative sculpture, the bronze, marble, or wood is effectively transparent: You read the piece as a foot, not a bronze foot. Hruby makes you hyper-conscious that his legs are wooden. There's a yearning quality to these limbs, as if they, like the puppet Pinocchio, desperately wanted to be real flesh.

Hruby has liberated himself from his initial medium - steel - and now uses video, kinetic elements, sound, and whatever else gets his complex messages across. With hindsight, though, it's possible to see the future in his early steel pieces. They're rhythmic; he's the most musical of sculptors. They suggest the figure without spelling it out. They're gangly, like a newborn colt finding its legs, and they look eager to move. They also come with provocative titles. Several of them are plays on Shakespeare's line ''Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.'' ''Uneasy Chair'' is a metal whirl with one leg a ribbony loop that finally collapses on the floor, exhausted from the effort of all that twirling.

Also among the early works are helmets that would cover almost all of a warrior's head, protecting him but also preventing anyone from identifying him, like the hood an executioner dons to become an anonymous instrument of death. The theme of hiding recurs in helmets painted in camouflage, sprouting real greenery. Hruby ridicules military headgear by turning it into planters.

''Migration Eastward'' is based on his return to the United States after he became gravely ill at the end of his Vietnam tour. In the work, lead is draped over a series of distorted wooden stretchers in undulating horizontals that suggest movement over water. Lead is one of his favorite materials, one that suggests weight and impenetrability.

Male aggression is an important theme that Hruby explores through rifles, pistols that stand in for limp penises, sports equipment, and military gear scaled down to toy size to suggest that belligerence begins in the sandbox. In ''Goldpost,'' he heaps football helmets, tennis balls, and hockey and lacrosse sticks into a totem, one of his signature forms; bathes them in gold paint; and gives them a four-pronged base that includes a crutch and a lumpy bandage. The shape suggests a missile, a metaphor for athletic competition gone ballistic.

Most of Hruby's sculpture is exceedingly quiet. But in a walled-off section of the main gallery there's visual cacophony in sculptures made of horns, bullets, and convoluted plumbing equipment, all in knotted, tortured forms. Music converts to mayhem. But the transition, bothphysical and psychological, is tough. In ''Instrument for War and Peace (NEA meets NRA),'' he goes beyond his love of punning titles and incorporates a punning material: purple heart, the wood, not the military honor.

Civilians won't understand the source of ''Army Regulation 670-1 (Grooming).'' It's a rule that sideburns can't be longer than the horizontal level of a pencil stuck in the middle of the soldier's ear. But there's room for interpretation in the row of extremely convincing latex ears studded with pencils and the chain of ''trophy'' ears beneath, each the proof of having killed an enemy. ''Army Regulation'' is oddly ethereal, and putting its label and wall text around the corner is a brilliant stroke. Any text near the work would have crowded and cluttered it.

Three large installations - ''Fix Bayonets, Let's Dance'' and ''Juggernaut,'' both from 1995, and the 1997 ''Minefields of Memory'' - anchor the show. In ''Fix Bayonets,'' Hruby muses on the irony of having dance lessons and bayonet practice on the same afternoon. Footprints marking intricate choreography, bleached into squares of parquet flooring, eventually give way to boot prints in what looks like thick mud.

In ''Minefields,'' crutches engage in a macabre dance over fields of shifting sands and magnets. The crutches have individual personae: One ends in a high-heeled shoe, another is winged, a third takes the form of a harp. They angle every which way. In the catalog, Belz compares them to the spikes and lances that dominate Paulo Uccello's 15th-century painting ''Battle of San Romano.'' Hruby's crutches are the sequel of the battle, though, which makes their formal similarity to weapons particularly creepy.

''Juggernaut'' is an immense wheel outlined with boots, poised to roll down a ramp. I'd seen ''Juggernaut'' in more spacious settings, where you had the sense you could move out of its path. In Gloucester, it's in more claustrophobic quarters, and it seems inescapable.

Like artists such as Robert Gober and Kiki Smith, Hruby is obsessed with lifelike body parts. He also shares the late 20th-century tendency to uncover painful or shameful political realities and transform them into art. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission resulted in rafts of art addressing apartheid's legacy. In redesigning Berlin's Reichstag, architect Norman Foster ripped out walls to expose nasty graffiti scrawled by Russian soldiers, as if airing it would rid it of its stench.

Hruby emphatically does not fit into the ''war art'' category, work that is generally either gory or cathartic or mawkish.

''Tour of Duty'' comes with a useful video made by Hruby, who takes his work more seriously than he takes himself. At the end of one segment, the words ''This video has only lasted four minutes and 40 seconds. Can you believe it?'' flash onto the screen. The show also has fine wall texts, some written by the artist, whose eloquence extends from lead and steel to language.

Hruby, 62, intentionally did not label his show a retrospective, a term that suggests looking back. He's on a forward track; his work has only gotten better and broader. Like such giants as Matisse and Titian, he looks likely to become one of those artists who keep evolving into great old age.

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