Kenny Hunter
Arguing against the notion that history is made by the will and reason of great individuals, Kenny Hunter takes a familiar genre – the historical bust – and turns it inside out. The mass-produced historical bust was a carrier of ideas, certainties and allegiances. It is also the clearest artistic expression of what Karl Popper described as historicism: that history must have a plot, a destination or at any rate a meaning.
In this piece Osama bin Laden and Monica Lewinsky act as symbols, testimonies to the reality that an individual can become a player not only by reason and will but through also sex and terror.
“First used as Roman propaganda, the historical bust presented the faces of leaders as embodying the values of the state, rather than as a likeness of the subject itself. This genre has lasted right up to the end of the twentieth century, but has now become more of a curio. ‘What Is History?’ is my response to the collapse of the grand narratives and absolute belief systems represented by the traditional historical bust. I chose to re-animate the genre to confirm current consumption and conceptions of historical fact and truth.”
