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PARTISAN REVIEW
Kendrick as well. Unlike any of his colleagues in the show, he
seems to have some idea of how his American predecessors re–
sponded to this heritage. Like David Smith's totemic figures,
Kendrick's chunky structures are more or less human in size and
stand before us, like fellow beings, perched on rather expedient
table legs. The best Kendricks of this type are personal and
animated, with a rough-hewn character (literally) that provides
relief from his tendency to overembellish his sculptures with
drawing, color, and finicky divisions.
Unfortunately, Kendrick's proclivity toward craft seems as–
cendant in his more recent works, where overly careful delineation
of form struggles with polychrome lamination and drawn lines.
Kendrick may be aware of the problem, since some of his newest
sculptures, less scrupulously finished and apparently more directly
made, suggest that he is increasingly interested in the unworked
state of his materials, possibly in the way his sculptures look at early
stages in their evolution. In these, however, the character of the
original chunk of wood remains all too evident, so the sculpture
has an unfortunate overtone of chewed tree trunk. Kendrick's
work of five years ago or so promised better than this, and I suspect
that he is a more interesting artist than the selections in the
Brooklyn show implied.
Yet Kendrick is not alone in succumbing to a fascination with
craft or in relying too much on overliteral allusion to nature,
perhaps in an effort to load his work with "meaning." Robert
Lobe's sculptures are essentially transcriptions of hunks of actual–
ity, like three-dimensional rubbings of bark textures or wood
grain. Lobe hammers sheets of aluminum over selected boulders
or tree roots, or both when trees have obligingly grown over
boulders, using the natural configuration as a base for
repousse
modelling. He says that he likes the way his technique produces
the appearance of mass with a thin skin of metal, and he likes, as
well, the contrast between his industrial materials and his or–
ganic, out-of-door subject matter. About a year ago, I saw a large
piece of Lobe's installed above a descending stairway. Walking
beneath it was extraordinarily unpleasant, since the piece was
both threateningly rock-like and, from some viewpoints, nastily
sharp-edged. The works in the Brooklyn show had none of this
sense of menace, but that is the most that can be said for them. I
kept thinking of Saul Baizerman's
repousse
copper figures, of the
