Ken Hruby
Conversations with Contemporary Artists Series: Ken Hruby
Artist Ken Hruby reflects on his 2008 presentation at the Cape Ann Museum:
"As a teacher, I was used to lecturing about my work, but to much younger audiences, generations younger. This talk was presented to peers, age wise, so I did not feel the need to explain many of the cultural references that students needed in order to link the works to their inspirational sources, i.e., the draft, agent orange, advisors, etc. But there was a need to do some translation of military iconography to a mostly civilian audience because the cultural gap has widened with the all-volunteer force now composed of less than one half of one percent of the U.S. population. There was also a need to peel back the layers for work that had all of the outward appearances of familiar military gear; combat boots, dog tags, steel helmets, in terms of transformation by choice of materials, scale, context, and other formal elements.
There is clearly no substitute for a live gallery experience where one can graze at leisure on the artist’s offerings. The visual and audio components of an exhibition can be captured and presented after the fact, and a viewer can get a relatively fair representation of the essence of the artist’s intent with such recordings, but olfactory elements go wanting. In this lecture, for example, the sculpture Goldpost, an assemblage of gold sprayed and gilded, well-worn athletic gear in the rough form of Winged Victory, using the trope of the “deification” of athletes, included an underlying exploration of perpetual injuries to athletes by incorporating “ace bandages” as a visual queue and “BenGay” as an olfactory queue; the former worked, the latter failed, lacking “smellavision.”
Olfactory elements also fail in the flesh due to our “adaptive” capacity for scents: site the piece at or near the entrance to the gallery and the viewer catches the visual and olfactory queues simultaneously, move the piece away from the entrance and the viewer will smell the BenGay and have adapted to it by the time the work is viewed and the impact is gone.
This lecture followed by seven years the “retrospective” of my work, Tour of Duty, mounted at CAM in 2001. Much earlier, circumstances gave me a rare opportunity to meet and spend time with Walker Hancock while I was a student and later on the faculty at School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Walker was nearly 40 years my senior, and was classically trained, but we shared an esthetic that transcended language and genre. Visits to his studio on a quarry in Lanesville were better than master’s classes while he worked on portraits of Chief Justice Burger, President George H.W. Bush and the Aviators Memorial for West Point. He was gracious, generous and went well out of his way to make me feel included in his creative process, asking what I felt about this or that transition or this scale change or that facial expression. While I have no direct evidence, I had a strong sense that his influence was an underlying factor in my being offered a retrospective at Cape Ann Museum a few years after he died in 1998."
