John Chamberlain

There has never been a consensus on how to classify and evaluate the art of John Chamberlain. In the early 1960s, when his art matured, it seemed to many to be the quintessential, if belated, Abstract Expressionist sculptural statement; its vigorously gestural, visceral abstract idiom was seen as falling within a direct line of descent from the art of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.1 To others who focused less on its form than on its material—crushed automobile parts in sweet, hard colors, redolent of Detroit cars of the 1950s—it was more appropriately aligned with the contemporary work of many Pop artists.

By the end of the 1960s, Chamberlain had replaced his signature materials initially with galvanized steel, then with urethane foam and mineral-coated Plexiglas, and finally with aluminum foil, all in the guise of pristine raw material that was variously wadded, compacted, and compressed according to its individual structural properties. Alignments with Process art were then discerned. Affinities with the art of Donald Judd, Chamberlain's longtime supporter and most discerning critic, were also detected, as at other moments in this heteroclite's career. In the mid-1970s, further eluding easy classification and forestalling prediction, he reverted to using automotive parts after a seven-year-long sabbatical.

Chamberlain has since continued to deploy this distinctive material in increasingly inventive ways. While encouraging assistants to improvise freely on his established set of elements by further cutting, crushing, torquing, and crimping them, he has also elaborated their enameled surfaces by spraying, stenciling, dribbling, graffitiing, and airbrushing additional coats of brilliant hues—hot, jazzy, tropical, and even raucously patterned. Ever ready to capitalize on accidental and chance occurrences, Chamberlain has occasionally resorted to a more restricted palette of, say, luscious black, cream, and chrome, as found in Dooms Day Flotilla of 1982. Such temporary restraints only enhance the sumptuous efflorescence of his usual ebullient rainbow spectrum.

Chamberlain's range of given forms has likewise expanded over the years. As an indigent young artist he was drawn to scrap metal primarily because it was free and plentiful. Consequently, he embraced a miscellany of secondhand metals, found in such diverse objects as kitchen cabinets, buckets, and steel benches, as well as the more ubiquitous crushed car parts.2 He later ordered boxes constructed to his specifications in galvanized steel or Plexiglas and appropriated metal barrels fresh from the fabricator. When he returned to automotive material in the mid-1970s, he streamlined his repertoire by concentrating selectively on particular car parts—fenders and bumpers at one moment, truck chassis at another. The recent works' parts—which have been transfigured into narrow, crenellated, ribbonlike forms—have less decipherable industrial origins: devoid of rust or other evidence of aging, they bear few traces of their past lives. Such formal shifts and feints in Chamberlain's vocabulary over a period of some four decades reveal the restlessness of this obsessive, agile artist, whose oeuvre extends beyond sculpture and related modes to film, printmaking, painting, relief, language, environmental sculpture, and even more exploratory vehicles, not least of which are the remarkable "barges" and smaller foam couches.

Read the left part of this Essay by Lynne Cooke at Dia Art Foundation

Guggenheim John Chamberlain s biography

John Chamberlain on Gallery Walk