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Street life
HUNTER ELEVATES CONSUMER WASTE TO THE STATUS OF FINE ART
Kenny Hunter: ‘Unreal City Square’
Liz Shannon opens her eyes to effluence in Kenny Hunter's
witty urban wasteland
eople who live in cities are disheartenineg
used to stepping over piles of rubbish from
split bin bags and negotiating street obstacles
such as piles of old furniture and abandoned
televisions. This phenomenon is international. and is
becoming ever more widespread as developing
nations industrialise and become capitalist consumer
societies. where products are designed to quickly become obsolete and everything is disposable.
Kenny Hunter’s new exhibition. A Shout in the
Street. takes this overly-familiar urban issue as one of
its starting points. Using Tramway‘s smaller. relatively new space. Hunter has filled the gallery with sculptures that echo the piles of urban detritus we see (and usually try to ignore) on a daily basis.
elevating our society‘s seemingly endless creation of
consumer waste. and the animals that live on it. to the status of fine art. These sculptural pieces exhibit Hunter’s familiar style. particularly in the moulding of the animals: uniformly smooth. unthreatening. almost cartoon-like creatures. without sharp edges or individual characteristics.
The works cleave to Hunter‘s recurring conceptual
starting point: that of challenging the conceit of
classical. monumental sculptural hierarchies. often through subtle subversion. There is no monumental scale here: a cast of a rolled piece of carpet leaning flaccidly against the wall is entitled ‘Broken Column‘. while the urban animals imbued with this elevated sculptural status are just life-size (although
the pigeons are rather fat. healthy-looking specimens
- there are no one-legged, broken-winged urban fowl
to be found here). Three poster works featuring text
cribbed from works by defining figures of modemity such as Marx and Baudelaire are designed to echo classical inscriptions. ‘Civic digestion/white goods’ features a cat strolling along the top of a carefully stacked ‘plinth’ consisting of a real fridge, microwave and miscellaneous white boxes, in a witty. small scale take-off of equestrian statuary. In another piece a fox sits atop a plinth of DIY furniture, while ‘The Wasteland’ features a pigeon perched on an oil drum placed upon a real tire. This integration of cast and real objects adds an additional level of interest. as though Hunter has been scouring the streets for appropriate urban debris to include in his work.
The use of the Tramway 5 space is intriguing, as, unlike Tramway’s main space, it has large windows that look directly out onto the street. While the wall is not ‘dematerialised’, it does give the viewer the sense that the boundary between the gallery and the street is a fragile one. thus reinforcing the concept behind the work. in addition, as part of the show’s impact is created through the works exhibition in a public gallery, it is interesting to consider how their meaning might be skewed if they were shown in a commercial, rather than public, context. Nevertheless, Hunter’s miniature high-rise blocks of pizza boxes. split bin bags and abandoned televisions, unified by their pleasantly muted colour schemes, succeed in encouraging a worn-down urban populace to look again at the very things that they so often avoid.
Kenny Hunter, A Shout in the Street, Tramway, Glasgow, until Sat 23 Aug em
THE BEST EXHIBlTIONS
fits Cathy Wilkes: Prices An excellent chance to check out the Glasgow-based current Turner Prize nominee, with an installation examining the relationship between female labour and commodity. Prices invites viewers to peer into cracks, fish tanks and jam jars in search of an event we appear to have just missed. The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Sat 6 Sep.
a: Altered States of Paint Brilliant group show that refracts the formal and sensory possibilities of painting through 19608 psychedelia and the death of the hippy dream. Includes work by Neil Clements, Rabiya Choudhry, Jutta Koether and Till Gerhard. DCA, Dundee, until Sun 7 Sep. 2’4 Kenny Hunter: A Shout in the Street Witty, subversive sculptures set inside an urban wasteland. Hunter fills Tramway 5 with what appears to be detritus, a cityscape ruled by pigeons and feral cats, and compels us to reconsider the waste we usually avoid. See review, left. Tramway, Glasgow, Until Sun 24 Aug.
it: Mark Neville: Fancy Pictures At the end of his residency at Mount Stuart, Neville turns in a photo documentary and short film capturing 21 st century Bute in wonderful living, breathing colour, shot through with a sense of place and the stark melancholy of domesticity. Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, until Tue 30 Sep.
all: Jo Spence Retrospective of the hugely influential British photographer (1934—92), comprising her mischievous, unsettling takes on class, femininity. self-image and the breast cancer which would ultimately kill her. Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Sun 16 Nov.
31 Jul—7 Aug 2008 THE LIST 4: