Imagine the sound - being in a deep forest and hearing
the clink, clink, clink, of hammer on metal. Only a hundred years ago it wouldn't have been so unfamiliar
as smiths and masons did their work.
Imagine the sight - coming across a figure, bent over a rock or standing
next to a tree and hammering over it a gleaming sheet of metal. It's an image elfish and folkloric, yet
the reality is neither. The figure
is Robert Lobe, the metal is aluminum, and the work he's engaged in is making
sculpture. Lobe's technique is a
type of repousse, but rather than hammering thin sheets of metal into the hollow of a form, he
hammers around
rocks and trees. Lobe leaves the
marks of the tools and hammer to mimic the textures of bark and stone. Even when using the percussive force of
pneumatic equipment, the intensity of the time and closeness to the subject
turns the labor from the power of hammer blows into the love of a caress. In their tenderness and individuality
the sculptures approach the character of portraits.
Rocks and trees are among the small collection of
landscape elements which form the bases of almost all figurative sculpture from
the Greeks through the early Twentieth century when the base began to be
considered old fashioned and unnecessary, and gradually disappeared in
sculpture considered to be modern.
This little bit of landscape defined the territory of the figure above
and declared, now you're in my world, now you're in the presence of art. If one is familiar with this history there is enough
similarity to the accustomed landscape of bases in Lobe's sculpture that an
echo is produced and the absence of a figure becomes a noticeable one. It isn't that every one of Lobe's
sculptures is identifiable with another from history that has a figure. The feeling that something is missing
is more teasing and general than that.
Lobe gives a nod towards the figure in Bacchus at the Leap. He's hammered in the god's attributes of grapes
onto the rock, but where is Bacchus at Bacchus at the Leap?
Gray, a forest of gray. The color of winter, of leafless trees in rain, and
granite. Leaves are to a tree as
color is to sculpture - distractions that interfere with the clarity of the
more fundamental quality of structure, the bones of both tree and
sculpture. What gives sculpture
its structure are its physical qualities, the thrust and concentration of its
mass and volume. For trees its
their enduring elements of trunk and limbs. For the most part Lobe dispenses with the distractions and
leaves his work both leafless and the silver-gray of the aluminum,
concentrating our attention on the light and shadow which molds and defines
them. When he does add leaves its
only a small sprig. When the
sculptor Alberto Giacometti made the tree for the first production of Samuel
Beckett's Waiting for Godot he placed on it a single leaf. The effect was a tragicomic absurdity that was fitting for
the play. We know that Lobe's
leaves aren't the result of hammering and they look stuck on, like a
sentimental afterthought. So full
and resonant are his sculptures already, the leaves don't add anything . Like the absence of a figure, were the
leaves not included they would still be there as an absent presence.
Far from being the sublime and heroic landscape forms of
art and imagination, Lobe's sculptures have the character of memorials. They cease to fulfill the expectations
for landscape, especially those of an American landscape. For truly no landscape has been viewed
as heroically and imbued with so much of a nation's aspirations and personae as
has the American, particularly that of the Northeast United States where Lobe
lives and works. This is the
territory of the painters of the Hudson River School, the birth site of the
vision and aesthetic of the American Landscape. From here came not only the artists and writers of the
aesthetic, but the consciousness that led to the founding of the National Park
System beginning with Yellowstone in 1872 - the world's first national park.
What makes Lobe carry his sheets of aluminum out into the
forest to pound over rocks and trees?
The reason for this is probably the same as for the
continuing success and necessity of his sculpture even though relatively
unchanged for thirty years.
"Men must retire from the world from time to time" the German
author Goethe wrote, "for the world with its lewd and superficial activity
interferes with the awakening of the best." The site of that retreat and awakening is the wilderness -
desert, ocean, but very often forest.
It lies deep in our arboreal ancestry, a memory of which is stirred by
Lobe's sculpture.
