Arts: SCULPTURE: Stuffed Moose & Stacked Tibia

Stuffed Moose & Stacked Tibias There is something distinctly unsettling about the welded metal sculptures of Richard Hunt, 32, currently the subject of a major exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Center. They seem deliberately designed to elude description. Some are needly and spiky, reminiscent of a mosquito—or perhaps a reconstructed set of blood vessels. Others are bloated, like an octopus with tentacles waving, a man-eating plant, or an anchor squiggling into a second life as a giant sting ray. Still others are stalklike, stiffly articulated into a stack of tibias, and one hangs off the wall—looking for all the world like a pterodactyl. Or then again, maybe a stuffed moose.

What are these objects meant to say or suggest? No use asking Hunt, the softspoken, bespectacled, conservatively tailored son of a Chicago barber, who graduated from the Chicago Art Institute’s school in 1957, studied in Italy, and has in the past five years been hailed as one of the Midwest’s most successful sculptors. Hunt dislikes being typed, dislikes having his work classified as either abstract or figurative, dislikes even having it pinned down as either “large” or “small.” All that he is prepared to concede is that he spends at least eight hours a day pounding, twisting and welding together the sheets and found scraps of steel, aluminum, chrome, tin and copper that jam to overflowing the two back-to-back garages he uses as a studio on Chicago’s North Cleveland Street.

“I find fault in trying to develop a purified style that excludes a lot of possibilities,” says Hunt. “The artist’s development becomes predictable. He puts himself in a straitjacket.” Certainly no one could accuse Hunt of being predictable, yet the 41 works at Milwaukee, created over a ten-year period, betray an artistic progression. Hunt’s work has evolved from small, dark, intense, relatively small copper or steel constructions to larger, looser but still eerily vigorous ones in shiny aluminum. Hunt likes the polished effect that comes from disk-grinding the aluminum because “it changes its texture, and gives a volumetric quality to it.”