Fredric Hobbs

Fredric Hobbs is an American artist and filmmaker.Fredric Hobbs was born in Philadelphia and is a graduate of Cornell University. After service as an Air Force Officer, Hobbs maintained a studio in Madrid where he attended the Academia de San Fernando de Bellas Artes. In recent years, his studio has been located in San Francisco and Carmel, California.

Since the 1950s, the artist’s work has been committed to spiritual and environmental consciousness. In 1963, Hobbs created a radical new automobile art called “Parade Sculpture”. This concept had its origin in ancient religious processions and self-propelled tableaux. During the 60s, three parade pieces (“Sun Chariot”, “Three Thieves”, “Trojan Horse”) removed art from it’s museum environment, thereby confronting a mass audience under circumstances of everyday life. Driveable sculpture was exhibited in New York, California and as part of the famous national traveling show entitled “The Highway”.

In the early 1970s, Fredric Hobbs pioneered another art form known as ART ECO. ART ECO combines environmental technology, fine art, solar/nomadic architecture, and interactive communications with ecologically balanced lifestyle.

One person exhibitions of pioneering artworks have been held at museums and galleries including the Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Sierra Nevada Museum of Art and other venues in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Numerous works are represented in such important permanent collections as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of Art, the Sierra Nevada Museum of Art and others.

Filmography

*Troika (1969)
* (1970)
*Alabama's Ghost (1972)
*Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973)

During 1967-78 the artist created films, including four independent feature films for general audience release: Troika (1969), Roseland: A Fable (1970), Alabama’s Ghost (1972), and Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973). A documentary, Trojan Horse (1967), describing the creation of his parade sculpture and its impact on audiences nationwide, was shown in the National Gallery (Washington, DC) and in museums, on television and in other educational settings. In addition a docudrama, The Richest Place on Earth, was released in 1978.

“Hobbs’ approach to film courts comparison to Fellini in sweep and style, to Bergman in concentration and intensity, and to Truffaunt in the whimsical use of plagiarism and paraphrases of old movie classics and in deft juxtaposition of moods and genres, all adding up to a kind of one-man American New Wave.” Rolling Stone Magazine

“Where Federico Fellini is deified, Kenneth Anger respected, and Luis Bunuel’s ‘Andalusian Dog’ considered a classic, Hobbs will be hailed as a genius. Squarer technicians will acknowledge him as a big spender, a wild but talented modern artist, set decorator, costumer and sculptor, a disciplined film craftsman, not a bad comedy director, and possibly mad as a hatter.” Variety, Nov 1969

“Interesting photographic effects and the last section is a stunningly edited apocalyptic vision.” The New Yorker

“Godmonster of Indian Flats’ should be right up there with ‘King Kong’! It’s more than just a monster movie, it’s a parable for our times. I think the title itself gives you a clue…the poor distorted sheep is actually a reincarnation of Christ himself, crucified by an unfeeling world! And there are more subtexts yet...history versus capitalism, mediation on fascism and so much more. The weird character twists, like having Maldove a former Wall St. big shot, Barnstable a gospel singer, Dr. Clemons’ assistant a hippy girl…they all add to the intense individuality of the film! ...let the Wormwood Chronicles proclaim your genius to all the masses! ‘Godmonster of Indian Flats’ is a rediscovered epic for the new millennium! This Lamb has risen again!” Dr. Abner Mality, [wormwoodchronicles.com]

In the mid 1980s, Hobbs worked on FASTFUTURE and interactive television/museum exhibitions that had a global release. FASTFUTURE is an electronic triptych that interfuses ART ECO imagery and mystical interactive phantasmagoria with docu-performance by famous Post Theologian, Fr. Matthew Fox. Questions of the planetary survival are confronted in rare footage of healthy 135 year-old humans on location in the Sacred Valley at Vilcabamba, Ecuador.

“Fredric Hobbs is an artist who thinks Big. At a time when people are becoming increasingly distrustful of big government and big money – and when art and culture seem to be treading water – Hobbs’ peculiar mixture of visionary fantasy and old-fashioned American pragmatism may well become the concept to seize the popular imagination of the 1980s.” Thomas Albright, Art Critic, San Francisco Chronicle

ART ECO demonstrates a “small is beautiful” production design wherein communirarian, postmodern ideas become easily accessible to the global village. Vertical installation of ART ECO Icons, Color Drawings and motivational Perception Exercises enhances neo-gothic formal elements and leading-edge, spiritual content of the FASTFUTURE video.

In 1988-89, the artist co-produced a four-program mini-series for PBS Network programs called “Taiwan, The Other China”. The series, which communicates an East-West consciousness included paintings, Art Eco Icons and color drawings. This inspired a new Pacific Series of ART ECO ICONS.

Fredric Hobbs is the author of five books that include his portfolio of original artworks. The Richest Place on Earth: The Story of Virginia City in the Heyday of the Comstock Lode co-authored with Warren Hinckle (1978); Eat Your House; Art Eco Guide to Self Sufficiency (1980); The Spirit of the Monterey Coast (1990); and A Tale of Two Cats (2004).

“…recounts the discovery and exploitation of the fabulous Comstock Lode in a style as colorful as the characters involved…entertaining.” Los Angeles Times

“Hobbs’ book, Eat Your House: Art Eco Guide to Self Sufficiency, is a little like an open-ended script with sketchy sets and skeletal stage directions around which we might improvise roles that could be more constructive and gratifying than those that many of us usually play. Some of his ideas suggest a ‘greening’ of the 18th-century visionary Boulee.” San Francisco Chronicle

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Excerpts from Nightmare USA (Chapter 22, “The films of Fredric Hobbs”), a major book published in London (2007) by Stephen Thrower:

“There’s little to prepare you for Troika, an extraordinary piece of art that comes straight out of left field. It’s variously a wild and weird exercise in symbolism, a glimpse of late sixties political foment, and a visit to another world. Along the way it provides a humorous portrait of Hobbs himself, and a sardonic commentary on the processes that stand in the way of making art cinema in a country more routinely interested in popcorn entertainment.Okay, so this intro sounds a little grandiose. But Troika – particularly in its extended third movement – comes at you with banners fluttering, a phalanx of mysterious heraldry, and the pomp of alien orchestras blaring: it’s no wonder you reel away at the end, straining for superlatives. So to let the mist and madness subside and the mind refine its bearings; what exactly is Troika?To begin with, it’s a film about creation. The first thing we see is a brightly lit blank canvas, maybe ten feet square, occupying the entire field of vision. Into the frame comes Hobbs himself, striding with coiled yet calm purpose to the centre of the screen. With swift and steady application he attacks the canvas, pulling from the nothingness a shape and form, a violent tableau. A female figure reclines against nothingness, extending an arm from which hang faces and forms of flayed humanity. A bird (an owl?) sits triumphantly astride the extended arm, above the horrors dangling below. It’s partly a quotation of Goya’s ‘Great Dead!’ (one of his “Disasters of War’ series), but its very Hobbs, and it’s also a magnificent coup de theatre, a fantastical painting produced in real time before our eyes. (page 357)

As can probably be gleaned from this synopsis, the Blue People segment of Troika is a treasure-chest of visual riches and symbolic enigmas that has to be seen to be believed. The only point of comparison I can make is the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, but Hobbs is basically out on his own here, creating a mysterious realm populated by astonishing anomalous constructions and conveyed through exceptional dreamlike imagery. Every element is unique: the landscapes are either hauntingly alien or like desolate fragments of a decayed past.Along with the vivid sound design, Hobbs also unleashes his extraordinary colour sense. The final act of Troika is an orgy of deep, vibrant hues; cobalt blues, rich purples and glowing reds applied to the faces and bodies of his cast, and of course the sculptures themselves. Hobbs has in effect created a moving painting or a three-dimensional animated sculpture, incorporating machines, found objects, skies, fields, trains, derelict houses and human beings. The oft-stated desire to merge art and reality finds a credible praxis here. As the imaginary occupies the real, Hobbs’s sculptures are set free to encounter each other in a world beyond galleries, exhibition spaces, or museums. The cast too enter a world defined by Hobbs’s art, being encased in his sculptures or smothered in his paint. It’s incredibly imaginative: at a time when optical solarisation effects were so popular (as a de rigueur indication of psychedelia), it’s refreshing to see someone take colour and apply it directly to the actors; in other words, changing the reality before the camera not after it. Rather like Antonioni, who had swathes of grass painted red to suit his needs in Il deserto rosso, Hobbs enters the real world with his colour (and with less disrespect to the environment!).” (page 359)

External links

*imdb name|id=0387589|name=Fredric Hobbs
* [http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?_r=1&title1=Troika%20%28Movie%29&title2=&reviewer=HOWARD%20THOMPSON&pdate=19691126&v_id= Collage of Art Objects Marks Hobbs Film] . Review of "Troika" at the "New York Times" (requires registration).