With his audacious juxtapositions of thrift-shop junk and the polychrome steel structures it dangles from, Robert Hudson epitomizes a particular Northern California penchant for wacky humor. His idiosyncratic constructions have exuberantly embraced an assortment of irregular forms since the mid-’60s. Then, in counterpoint to East Coast Minimalism and as progenitors of the kind of bizarre conglomerations that art historian Peter Selz would term “funk,” Hudson’s free-form assemblages of twisted geometric shapes and distortions of identifiable objects were fabricated entirely out of steel and painted in bold patterns of high-gloss solid colors. By the mid-’70s they incorporated such found items as a beach ball, tree branches, toys, and metallic fringe, and came with punning, tongue-in-cheek titles; the lighthearted play was amusing, yet as evocative works of art these pieces were insubstantial.
The recent work here, all from 1982, continues to display the hand of a compulsive collector and a wit more silly than sly, but the most arresting sculptures are controlled, cohesive compositions that occasionally achieve pure elegance. Figural references predominate among the ten pieces, which range from 29 to 103 inches in height. Some represent only the face—through a dangling two-sided metal mask; the body of a guitar transformed by the addition of false teeth, nose, and eyes; or a woman’s smiling face on a bar tray. But the latter work, for example, depends too heavily on this attractive image for its appeal. The large circular tray is suspended from a leafy architectural decoration and is accompanied by spiky antlers, a crescent moon, a thick chain, and geometric elements such as cruciforms, circle, ball, and cone. Entitled Grin, the nonsensical miscellany and the broad smile on the face do prompt a grin on the part of the viewer, but more through the sculptor’s rampant eclecticism than through the sculpture’s formal power.
The taller figures such as the 91-inch-high Hot Water are generally the focus of more consistent themes. This gangly statue extends a spindly leg to balance one point of a cube on the tip of a rod/foot. Three more compressed cubes hang from an outstretched arm, and the ball/head is ringed by a half-black, half-white orb, suggesting a yin-and-yang spiritual equilibrium. All of these balancing acts of geometric form are counterweighted by a rustic teakettle at the end of a long vertical arm, suggesting the “hot water” of the piece’s title and, as double entendre, the trouble brought on by trying to juggle these amalgamations of the abstract and the earthy. This intriguing metaphor is more interesting as an idea than as an image; the sculpture’s diverse tubes, bars, and cubes have a deliberate, naive awkwardness that is only partially compensated for by a spectrum of vivid color along intersecting planes of the orange steel.
One construction among the group is unique in its striking lyricism. Broad, blond, palmate moose antlers serve as both foot/stand and uppermost disk of Balance Point. Between them streamlined arabesques of steel rods and curving, jutting-out horns wind upward, ending in a dramatic spear point as the pivot for the upper antler. The natural tones of antlers and horn are in textural contrast to the steel, which is expressionistically painted in an effusion of dots, splashes, and swaths of color. Beyond juxtaposing the found and the fabricated in a characteristically free-spirited manner, this rather simplified formal abstraction radiates a composed beauty. One hopes that this mood does not remain the aberration it appears here, but adds a new demeanor of harmony to Hudson’s expansive repertoire.
—Suzann Boettger
