FOR a long time sculpture meant statues: stone provosts, bronze soldiers, or dukes on horseback, all on plinths in city squares. These figures are always men, and their stony dignity is usually undermined by pigeons roosting on their heads. It is a p
onderous kind of art, an anachronism inherited from ancient Greece and Rome with little apparent bearing on the modern world. Nevertheless we shouldn't dismiss it. It articulates our urban spaces and, notionally at least, inhabits them with images from our collective memory. The individuals commemorated are meant to embody the virtues we most admire, or as they are usually the first targets in any revolution, those we hate.
Alternatively too, it is striking how hard it has been to find anything meaningful to replace this kind of statuary; how badly contemporary sculpture usually sits in these same urban spaces, how out of place it looks. Trying simply to breathe new life into the old forms and so personify classical virtues as Sandy Stodart has done with his recently installed monumental statue of Adam Smith in Edinburgh is at best a partial answer: an attempt to face down history by declaring that nothing has changed.
Kenny Hunter has also tackled the problem of urban iconography and its dependence on the classical tradition, but he has done so from the very different perspective that comes from embracing change and grasping the tension at the heart of urban living that powers it: tension between the permanent and the transient. He is unusual among contemporary sculptors in the subtle and imaginative way that he has understood all this and in a series of public sculptures redeployed the classical language of sculpture, not slavishly, but inventively so that it can again serve our changing needs.
In his current show at Tramway, A Shout in the Street, he has even accommodated the pigeons. The last vestiges of the memory of the stone men and the bronze soldiers have disappeared. The pigeons have replaced them. In Unreal City Square two pigeons, modelled with neoclassical simplicity, roost on a plinth. Hunter has moved away from the overtly classical form of the single standing figure that he has often used before, however, to deploy instead assemblage and found objects. This plinth, for instance, is composed of grey painted casts of old television sets and cardboard boxes. As with any classical urban statue, the plinth is set in turn on a base, but instead of stepped stone, this is an industrial wooden pallet. The rough wood is sanded smooth, but otherwise it is unchanged, the humble object made of barely modified natural material which supports the whole of global commerce. This conjunction subtly epitomises one of the themes of this show, the continued presence of nature in our urban world, its adaptability and our continuing dependence on it.
In a work called The Wasteland, a single pigeon roosts on a cast of an oil drum. The drum sits in a tyre. Together they form a rudimentary classical column. All three elements are black. The oil drum and the pigeon are painted, but the tyre is a beautifully made replica which exactly reproduces both the colour and the texture of the original.
The oil drum and the tyre are both waste and wasted and the piece is named after T S Eliot's great poem, but Unreal City is a quote from Eliot's poem too. It is an apposite reference. Eliot's Wasteland was definitively modern, but it also deals with the persistence of the classical and its enduring relevance even in a world as dislocated and alienated as the one it evokes. Kenny Hunter deals with these themes too. The classical is there in the form of the column in The Wasteland. Another work,Broken Column, is a cast of a crumpled roll of felt. It invokes "sunlight on a broken column", a line in another Eliot poem, The Hollow Men, and the enduring power of the classical, even when ruined.
The counterpoint with the modern continues in Hunter's use of assemblage and found objects, but also in the formal language of the things he makes with them. Here and There, for instance, is a piece composed of two neat stacks of old pizza boxes. Cast as two units, they look like model tower blocks. The pizza is as ubiquitous as the modern style in architecture. You can find both practically anywhere in the world and to complete the circle wherever you find tower blocks there are no doubt empty pizza boxes blowing around in the wind.
Hunter does not stop there, however. The towers invoke the architectural language of modernism, but the stacks of pizza boxes could also be minimalist sculpture. Them and Us is equally minimal. Four neatly cast, sealed cardboard boxes sit on another pallet base. Thus classical plinth and base become a free-standing piece of sculpture. That kind of modernism is profoundly indebted to the classical tradition, he suggests, but then he also raises the whole question of the apparent conflict of values between the found object and the craft tradition of making and he deliberately uses both. In Civic Digestion/White Goods a white cat is standing on an actual fridge sandwiched between casts of a microwave and cardboard boxes. In all the casting little accidents are recorded, especially in the cardboard boxes. The dented corners and the binding tape, are faithfully recorded. The craft is superb, the found object transfigured. These are exactly the sort of internal plays that Eliot uses. He even incorporates pieces of text as though they were found objects.
The Wasteland theme goes further in Hunter's show, however. As well as pigeons and the cat, Animal Virtues II is a homage to the urban fox. The fox is sitting on a formal plinth made from casts of old boxes, but the artist has designed its figure with reference to the classical ideal of three-dimensional sculpture. Like a group by Giambologna, as you move around it, its profile changes, but remains aesthetically satisfactory.
The fox in keeping with its legendary reputation for cunning has learned to take advantage of the environment we have created. However much it might seem to belong to wild nature, the urban fox has become as much part of our cities as the statues that decorate our streets. It is ongoing evolution and, to make the point, a picture of Darwin's Finch is fixed to the base of the work.
With another neat twist in the profile of this intricately thought-out show, however, even more than the pigeons, urban foxes have made themselves at home in our cities by living off our rubbish. Waste is incorporated into all these works, but a beautifully sculpted rubbish bag, split, as though by a fox, and spilling its contents, sits on the floor at the centre of the show. The items of rubbish, all neatly cast, include a paintbrush that the artist used to make the bag.
The polemical key to this show is in a series of vivid prints carrying slogans in densely blocked script in a single colour with black or white type. Initially these were fly-posted around the city. They were the shout in the street and they take his art back to the city. The slogans marry Baudelaire with Marx, or are adapted from Nietzsche, Goethe, or Joyce: "Things fall apart all over again" or "If I stand fast they will dig my grave", for instance. The latter clearly applies to the fox: adapt to survive, as it has done. It deserves its monument.
• A Shout in the Street is at the Tramway until 24 August.
The full article contains 1293 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
