KAREN WILKIN
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The exhibition,
Four Americans: Aspects of Current Sculpture,
at
the Brooklyn Museum this spring, was fairly typical.
It
brought
together approximately ten years' work by Joel Fisher, Mel
Kendrick, Robert Lobe, and John Newman, all about forty years
of age, in one direction or the othe(, and all working in New
York. Their work is faintly organic, or, at least, not strongly ge–
ometric, and they all seem indebted, in varying degrees, to
European sculpture other than Cubist construction in metal.
Beyond this, they are quite unlike one another.
The show provided capsule views of each sculptor's devel–
opment. Joel Fisher, for example, had his recent attentuated
bronzes set in the context of drawings and sculptures from the
late seventies and early eighties, spare images that teeter between
geometry and allusion, and biomorphic bronzes from the mid–
eighties, like homages to Rodin, Arp, and perhaps Brancusi.
Fisher's distaste for the vernacular American idiom of, for exam–
ple, David Smith, and his preference for a more elegant, semifig–
urative brand of prewar European modernism is palpable. It's po–
tentially a stimulating notion, to judge by his earliest works in
the show, but in his recent pieces, it seems to get in the way of
what his sculpture is about. The recent works are skinny bronze
"drawings," adapted rather directly from Fisher's stripped-down
drawings in two dimensions, in turn evocative of Arp's dropped
string pieces. The laboriously cast and worked bronze seems at
odds with Fisher's nervous line. Surely steel, with its ability to be
both very thin and very strong, would have been more suited to
those linear forms, but maybe that's the point. Still, there is some–
thing perverse about Fisher's insistence on this kind of physical
alliance with the past. It makes his recent sculptures a little too
precious, a little too crafted, a little too much like Art.
Mel Kendrick is probably the most interesting sculptor fea–
tured in the Brooklyn show. He's certainly the one with the
broadest reach, from the delicacy of his early wall-mounted con–
structions of laminated, painted wood to the sturdy articulations
of his freestanding wood and bronze structures of a few years ago.
Kendrick's modestly sized works immediately suggest Cubist
ancestry, but he seems to take as his point of departure the blocky
sculpture of Henri Laurens or Jacques Lipchitz rather than the
metal constructions of Picasso. The Mrican carvings that en–
gaged the Cubists' attention in the first place appear to fascinate
