Kenny Hunter: Works in Color
Until November 17; Conner Contemporary Art, Washington DC

As political temperatures in the USA reach boiling point, Glasgow artist Kenny Hunter has a unique opportunity. This is the man who brought us Three Foot Thatcher, Citizen Firefighter, and a pair of bookends depicting Osama Bin Laden and Monica Lewinsky. With a solo show taking place just minutes away from the Whitehouse, will we see a Three Foot Bush? Citizen Cowboy? Saddam’s long-range water pistol?

Before he left for Washington, I got the chance to see the contents of the artist’s packing crates. There was a full-size standing figure of a girl with a rucksack, whose bronze twin recently took up residence in the Gorbals. There were three little figures, similarly anonymous and in various classical poses, and finally a small version of Feedback Loop – the fashionable Japanese teenager who occupied CCA’s front lobby this time last year.

What happened, I ask him, to all that political anger?

“Do you think I’m selling out here?” he laughs. “I think I’ll never get it out of my system, I think that’s my nature; my identity is quite strongly political. But sometimes in the past I could’ve been accused of being much more sledgehammer than laser.”

That said, the sledgehammer-style work was a big hit in Washington two years ago, despite the fact that one of the pieces – made in 2000 – showed a jet fuselage crashing into a wall. “This was not long after 9/11,” Hunter points out, “in the government town, so I expected people to be quite prickly. I had sculpted Bin Laden before anyone had heard of him; that piece was on show there as well, so I was watching my back for Republican flack. But they were actually really good, engaging in discussion about it.”

In fact the exhibition was so successful that Hunter was asked back for this, his second show in the gallery. Still, there was something about the last exhibition’s response which worries the artist. His bookends, he says, addressed very singular issues. “I’ve shied away from using famous people now,” he says. “I might go back to doing it again,” he admits, describing his current work as “more of a social statement than an overtly political statement, about how we live now.”

Those social statements take various forms. For Washington he’s reversed the usual tradition of the erotic, reclining female, putting a fully-clothed man in this pose instead. “Women are more active in redefining their image within society or culture,” Hunter feels, “and men are more reflective at the moment.”

The main figure in the show is the girl with a rucksack, a monument to people on the move. Created originally for the Gorbals, with its history of migration, Hunter thinks it should work in Washington too. “It’s essentially the same piece talking to different audiences,” he says, “but I hope there’s some sort of overlap, some kind of common ground.”

The Gorbals statue is a pale green colour, while the Washington version is red, white and blue. I ask Hunter whether the colours are politically significant, and he gasps at the suggestion. “The red, white and blue did worry me a little bit,” he admits, “but it was a kind of workerist blue I was looking for, quite a Maoist thing, the worker’s denim. Denim is a ubiquitous thing, it’s kind of invisible.”

Hunter scoffs at the idea that his work could have “any tangible effect” on the outcome of the presidential election. But, he argues, he made a political point “with a small p” in the French town of Lille, where another exhibition of his closed just last week.

The works in Lille, which he’s keen to show in Scotland soon, were of urban animals sitting among heaps of rubbish. A fox, a pigeon and a cat – none of them too cute – represent the kind of animals which have thrived in the wake of human activity. We tend to view some of them as vermin, but in Hunter’s view it’s us humans that are the problem. “We’re the biggest plague on the planet, we just cover everything.”

Through this work Hunter has developed a fascination with refuse, which he describes as “quite apocalyptic”. He can’t walk past wheelie-bins now without noticing what’s heaped up around them, and his sculptures contain a cheeky mix of sculpted bin-bags, boxes and carpet rolls along with real bins and bits of discarded furniture. So if you live in Anniesland, and you wonder what happened to your wheelie-bin, perhaps it’s worth checking with Hunter.

You might think that carpet rolls and pigeons are a far cry from the overt politicism of Three Foot Thatcher. However, Hunter is hard at work in his studio on something which takes him right back to the heart of British politics. He’s been commissioned to make a public artwork for Barnsley in recognition of its coal-mining heritage.

Hunter plans an enormous column, six figures high, with a child on top. He’s researched the geology of the area, and the column will show coal at the top, with seams of mudstone, silt and sandstone further down. “What I like about this,” he says, “is that the inclusion of the child is making the human feel small against the vastness of this coal seam. And also the vastness and the brutality of the industry and the cost of getting it all out.”

As part of his research, the artist went down a mineshaft at Orgreave, now synonymous with the notorious battle between miners and police during the strikes of the 1980s. “I went down in a coal mine lift,” he tells me. “It took us about three minutes and we were going down really fast – it felt like we were just dropping. And all we could hear was the sound of the wind rattling around this metal cage, and it was like that for a few minutes.”

“But even then,” he continues, “I didn’t really imagine or grasp the physicality of what was happening. When we actually saw the working coal face, then I realised how far down we were, because it was really claustrophobic and noisy and dusty.”

For Hunter, working alongside the miners is the sort of thing he likes doing best. “It’s an antidote to the gallery world as well as much as anything,” he says. “It’s much more about negotiation and trust, and not knowing what you’re going to get at the end of it because it’s not just about yourself, what you feel.”

Between the Barnsley monument, the Lille animals and the Washington figures, Hunter has confounded those who would categorise him as a purely political artist. This week, however, there’s no way he’ll manage to resist entering into the political fray. “All we do is just drip a little change into the balance of the scales, don’t we?” he muses. “Every conversation we have, every friendship – you talk to your neighbour, the person who lives round the corner from you – that’s all political, at the end of the day.”

Catrìona Black, 24.10.04