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Untitled
Untitled
Untitled

Untitled

Maker (American, 1927-2011)
Date1963
MediumWelded, painted, and chromium-plated steel automobile body parts
DimensionsOverall: 36 x 50 x 53 in. (91.4 x 127 x 134.6 cm)
Credit LineGift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard L. Selle
Object number1972.3
Object TypeSculpture
On View
Not on view
John Chamberlain was born in 1927 in Rochester, Indiana. He spent most of his childhood in Chicago, however, and after serving in the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946, he returned there and enrolled in the School of the Art Institute. Early on, Chamberlain’s work demonstrated the strong influence of the abstract sculptor David Smith [See Accession no. 1998.8] (American, 1906 –1965), who was active at the time. From Smith’s welded metal sculptures, as well as his industrial materials and processes, Chamberlain discovered that sculpture could be defined broadly, as construction in space, and he decided that his work should involve industrial materials and processes. In 1955 Chamberlain continued his studies at the multidisciplinary and highly experimental Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. The ethos of Black Mountain reinforced Chamberlain’s appreciation for the spontaneous creative process promoted by the gestural painters within Abstract Expressionism. While he was at Black Mountain, Chamberlain’s work took a radical turn, as he began to use people’s castoffs—colorful, so-called junk—to make collages and sculptures. In 1958, now living in New York City, Chamberlain began to collect discarded steel automobile parts, which he found “just lying all over the place”—first in a friend’s yard, then in the scrap piles of auto-body shops. He then exhibited his first sculpture composed entirely of automobile parts. Although he would continually return to this signature (and invented) medium, Chamberlain spent the 1960s and ’70s exploring the surprisingly rich formal possibilities contained in common, industrially produced materials such as urethane foam and paper lunch bags.

Most of Chamberlain’s sculptures are composed exclusively of automobile parts, his readymade medium, which he has consistently prized for its strong connection to everyday life but has even more often praised for its specific aesthetic qualities. Over the decades that he used automobile parts, he consistently selected materials that inspired him visually— interesting textures, intense colors, crumpled shapes. To make sculptures such as Untitled, Chamberlain did not sketch the form in advance, but rather worked intuitively and experimentally, testing various fits among spontaneously selected parts. He declared the sculpture finished when it held together both visually and physically. Although subsequently welded for safe transport, Untitled originally cohered through gravity alone. In interviews Chamberlain frequently discusses his sculptural work in quasi-scientific terms, as so many investigations of materials and material processes. Chamberlain can thus be seen as an artist who both anticipated and continues to participate in “process art,” which emphasizes the activity of making art over planning its creation, composition, or ultimate appearance.

Quotation is from a 1983/4 interview with Chamberlain by Julie Sylvester, published in John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Sculpture, 1954-1985, New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1986.
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