Critical MAS: Vicki Amorose on Justin Stuck’s “Trumpa the Hutt”
Written by Vicki Amorose
Given the choice of 50 artworks in the 2019 Mayor’s Art Show, never did I predict I’d choose to write about a work depicting our 45th president. Thousands of artists all over the world create images of Donald Trump, from major contemporary Art Fairs to protest placards, from large-scale street art to myriad mocking memes. I like to imagine that someday I’ll see the best of the Trump-based visual art compiled in a coffee table book and assigned its own sub-category in art history. It is precisely this type of wish-fulfillment – the desire to see the current political era as past – that attracts me to the sculpture “Trumpa the Hutt” by Justin Stuck.
The sculpture immediately reads as a boxed toy or action figure. The artist employs sculpted and painted resin to create a distinctly “Trumpified” Jabba the Hutt (the Star Wars villain). A much smaller female figure, wearing a blue business suit with a rope attached to her ankle, stands next to the monster. The artist’s exacting details on the outer box delightfully mimic the packaging and graphic style of a collectable toy. Delight dissolves as a close look reveals images such as “Accessories Sold Separately,” including pajamas styled on a KKK robe.
Jabba the Hutt is a repellant grotesque, made more so when in proximity to the heroic Princess Leia. The Star Wars movie audience cringes at the thought of the Hutt ensnaring our female leader in space. In “Trumpa the Hutt”, the female figure stirs associations with current threats and dangers to women. Do her blue suit and brown skin signify something? Do aliens poop in space? These are not subtle references; this work is the plainly plastic mirror that reflects today’s Twitter feed.
The artist draws from Neo-Pop and Pop Surrealism to ignite associations with mass production, mass consumption and globalization. A Hollywood movie becomes modern mythology becomes globally distributed saleable objects of intractable iterations. A reality TV star becomes president becomes a profiteer in global damage to the environment and intractable injustices. Justin Stuck hit the gong of associative thinking with this work.
An online movie database describes Jabba the Hutt as “one of the galaxy’s most powerful gangsters, with far-reaching influence in both politics and the criminal underworld…[he] would ultimately fall victim to his own hubris and vengeful ways.” I’d like to believe our story ends that way: criminals punished, dark forces thwarted, justice restored, may the Force be with you. Collectible toys hold an inherent sense of the past, so the artist’s analogy offers the comfort of looking back on a story whose ending is known. Justin Stuck’s “Trumpa the Hutt” appeals to my desire to reduce and contain the scale of Trump’s influence.
To learn more about the writing in the Critical MAS series, go to Critical MAS: Introduction.