Ken Little: Little Changes
Southwest School of Art and Craft
- Anjali Gupta -
Ken Little, Little Changes (Installation view), 2003
Little Changes surveys the ongoing career of San Antonio-based sculptor Ken Little. This wide sampling of work––including early ceramic portraits and more recent bronze, neon, and steel hybrids—reveals a balance of high craft and a preternatural proclivity for ideological nuance. In meeting the artist, it’s easy to picture him as a small child on the high plains of Amarillo, a Red Rider BB gun in one hand and a Silver Surfer comic book in the other. That very collision of past and present—of resonant myth and futuristic fantasy—occasioned a strange formative environment indeed. Each of Little’s objects harbors a telltale, self-conscious irony. Like their creator, they are doggedly engaged in a philosophical do-si-do that typifies the head-scratching absurdity of the contemporary American experience.
Paint, ceramics, clay, hay, papier-mâché, shoes, bronze, leather, neon, steel, taxidermy forms…Little is obviously not content with one area of expertise or mode of expression. His tendency for variance is not a manifestation of creative scatology, but a primary indication of an active and ever-changing relationship to the world at large. In essence, Little’s exploration of each medium is a clearly attenuated thought drawn to a logical conclusion, upon which it is affectionately retired. Each phase of this evolution is represented in his retrospective.
After graduating from Texas Tech University in 1970 with a BFA in painting, Little migrated to Salt Lake City, Utah, for his MFA. There, his interest in painting waned in favor of ceramics. In the seventies, ceramics existed at the very edge of artistic practice, straddling a blurry distinction between pure academia and the “outsider” art of the uneducated masses. Little began mixing clay and found objects with ceramic shards, and fabricating flamboyant hybrid sculptures including the large-scale ceramic “portraits” that earned him national attention as he crisscrossed the country over the next ten years.
Once settled in San Antonio in 1988, the artist’s muse evolved again, this time selecting bronze as its mode of expression. A belated return to Texas also evoked nostalgic philosophical stirrings. Ken Little’s psyche was molded in West Texas during the 1950’s, a period of flux between a romantic, Technicolor past, and an uncertain, technology-driven future. In this era, the quintessentially American ideal of the rugged individual became a source of social controversy. The individualistic rebel was no longer a hero but a dangerous, antisocial loner—a new, negative construct that systematically supplanted the iconic hero on horseback. With this ideological shift in mind, it is not surprising that Little often turns to the animal kingdom for solace, employing its many players in a sort of mock mythological eulogy of the imperfect human condition.
Little’s well-known bronze animal masks of the late eighties and early nineties are a coy yet heartfelt attempt at circumventing the ideological perils of modernity—at re-linking man with his unpolluted, prehistoric state. Instead of employing fragile and ideologically tainted human forms, Little anthropomorphizes wild beasts, creatures that flourish in spite of their environment. He imparts their truncated heads with an inhuman resilience while at the same time giving them distinctly humanoid physical attributes, expressions and quirks. Their frozen faces lament the widening dislocation between humans and their natural environment. They also subtly hint at a possible reconciliation between man and nature by gently reintroducing man to carefully chosen, ennobled aspects of his own animalistic nature.
Ken Little, Burn, 1985
Shoes, Bible pages, dictionary pages
72 x 26 x 46 inches
Little’s later steel sculptures—skeletal animal forms reconstructed from molds of discarded shoes, and bulky humanoid carriages meticulously tiled in authentic greenbacks—furnish a semiotic reversal but reveal a consistent flow of philosophical suppuration. They exist like elegantly decoupaged tortoise shells; funerary objects glaringly poached of meaning and sucked dry of intent. They dangle in feigned flight or coerced restfulness, also attempting a reconciliation with nature but purposefully and plaintively failing in their endeavor.
Ken Little’s ongoing, self-reflexive critique of the American condition exists without malice. He celebrates humanity’s fickle contradictions, and reminds us—through shared myth and gentle supposition—that it is our flaws that make us human. These days, it is not uncommon to meet a well-known video artist who has no earthly idea which way to point a camera or an artist working in bronze who can’t make a mold to save his life. Little’s sheer skill and level of craft with each medium he explores distinguishes him from the current legion of conceptual artists who tend to hold concept far above hands-on execution.