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October 2024

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JOHN CHAMBERLAIN’S AUTO SALVAGE

Art - regardless of when it was made - is one of the few things in the world that is never boring, and, it costs nothing. You don’t have to own it, you just have to perceive it; art is free. As an artist I give away more than I would if I ran a beauty shop. John Chamberlain, 1982

John Chamberlain abandoned the traditional sculptural techniques of modeling and carving in favor of welding in 1953. He began to incorporate automobile parts sourced in metal scrapyards into his work in 1957. The dour Shortstop (1958), was his first sculpture composed entirely of crushed car parts.

Encrypted in Chamberlain’s car parts sculptures is a history of postwar, American automobile design. Changes in industrial and consumer culture are registered in the shifting palettes, size and shapes of his materials. His sculpture is also an indirect by-product of the auto industry’s financial success. The sales of millions of Impalas, Skylarks and Galaxies 500 that eventually filled the junkyards, provided Chamberlain with an infinite source of cheap materials. If it were produced today, his work would be viewed as the recycled state of an industrial product. Like ancient marbles, Chamberlain’s junkyard museum of battered, fragmentary sculptures allow us a glimpse of a heroic industrial age.

Despite the very obvious and direct dependence of Chamberlain’s work on the American auto industry, the artist adamantly rejected interpretations of his work that treated the car as subject matter or content rather than a neutral material. The titles of his sculptures never allude to cars He stated that he was not interested in the material’s industrial or commercial origins or its cultural valence while it was in its first use. He noted that crushed car parts were cheap and plentifully available, came in good colors and were pre-formed in suggestive shapes. He offered one interviewer a historical analogy: Michelangelo had had a lot of marble in his backyard. After reading one too many interpretations of his work as representations of car accidents that functioned as a “commentary” on the violence of contemporary American culture (precisely the kind of commentary Andy Warhol made in his disaster paintings), Chamberlain stopped making sculpture from car parts for six years in protest.

Purist display techniques (seen in the Chinati Museum in Marfa above), remove Chamberlain’s sculptures as far as possible from any contexts that might suggest unwanted associations in order to underscore their the abstract and formalist dimensions. These venues make it clear that Chamberlain’s art is neither a simple celebration, nor a critique, of car culture, and given the the obvious aesthetic ambitions of the work, it is obvious why, as an artist working with industrial techniques and materials, Chamberlain felt the need to distance himself in the mind of the public from auto-body shops and mechanics.

That said, the importance of the car to American ideology, identity and culture in the 1950s and 1960s cannot be overstated. Therefore, it seems unlikely that works of art fashioned from auto parts in no way participated in a broader construction of and/or cultural discourse concerning cars. To phrase this differently, if Chamberlain had been based in Sweden, where plainly styled, modestly-sized Volvos and Saabs stayed on the road for 300,000 miles, his would have signature style would have looked very different, developed more slowly, or never have developed at all.

Inextricably bound up with the florid color, brash styling, and vulgar excess of the domestic auto industry at the height of its prestige, Chamberlain’s aesthetic is the high-end of a period sensibility. Chamberlain’s exclusion of his material’s cultural baggage from his work recalls Jasper Johns’ disingenuous assertion that painting American flags in 1955 was a purely formal and ontological act. Chamberlain may not have been interested in, or in control of, the valence of his chosen medium, but it had one.

#american sculpture - 20thc.#john chamberlain #donald judd #minimalism #auto salvage #detroit #american cars