Richard Hunt and the Death of Emmett Till

 

Artistic mediums suited to anger - or for that matter, any emotion - vary in how hard they hit. And on the surface folksong should be a powerful way of tackling the horrific murder of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old boy who was abducted, tortured and then lynched by two white men in 1955. Indeed, some seven years later, Bob Dylan wrote the song ‘The Death of Emmett Till’. It is throwaway, clumsy and full of bathetic and obvious rhymes. Any rage that is expressed feels affected. It’s certainly not Dylan at his angry, protesting best; for that you need to wait for later numbers such as the spat-out tour de force that is ‘Hurricane’.   

Alternatively, sculpture might be a somewhat abstruse medium in which to convey such a visceral crime. That is until you encounter Richard Hunt’s astonishing Hero’s Head. The biography and the aftermath of the murder prepare you. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, insisted upon an open casket for the funeral. America needed to see her son’s mutilated body. Perhaps then, the barbarous practise of lynching and the toxicity of racism might be exposed. The mourners filing past the coffin would get to gaze down upon Emmett’s bloated and battered head.  

Richard Hunt, Hero's Head (1956)

Hunt, a Chicagoan artist and the first black sculptor to have a retrospective at MOMA, makes Emmett’s brutalised head his focus. Placed on a white pedestal in the central thoroughfare of White Cube - the London gallery that is currently showing an exhibition of the artist’s work - the welded steel skull draws you slowly in and then jolts through you like electricity. 

Hero's Head

You prepare yourself for something abstract. But what you get is something that is deformed, broken, and ghastly. And yet all too clearly Emmett Till in his final resting place. As you settle and then circle, the head seems to come to life, giving you a stare both accusatory and salutary. And slowly - and this is where Hunt’s choice of material steel starts to do its work - you begin to think of Emmett Till as a warrior.

Sutton Hoo helmet 

An initial ghoulishness gives way to something more martial, something proud, resolute and raging. Indeed, the object that Hero’s Head brought to mind, lying just a few miles away on the other side of the river in the British Museum, was the Anglo Saxon Sutton Hoo helmet.

Hero's Head 

It’s both astonishing and sobering to think that Hunt created this work at the age of 20, and only one year after Emmett’s lynching. With its extraordinary combination of visceral anger and fearsome resistance, it halts you dead in your tracks.     

Richard Hunt, Metamorphosis - A Retrospective, is showing at White Cube, London until Sunday 29^th June.