WHAT: "John Chamberlain: Choices"
WHEN: February 24 through May 14
WHERE: Guggenheim Museum, New York City
WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: The late sculptor John Chamberlain’s soon-to-open retrospective at the Guggenheim is explosive, it’s a collision of brute mechanical force with visual finesse in an array of work that is impressive for its focus if not for its diversity. Car-wreck comparisons are inevitable, so let’s just get that out of the way at the start: Chamberlain’s twisted aggregations of metal, ranging from toy-sized to 22 feet tall, are scattered along the museum’s ramps like remnants of a demolition derby, laying in wait for the unwitting visitor, ready to surprise with their sensual surfaces and jagged-yet-graceful compositions.
Organized by Guggenheim senior curator Susan Davidson along with Helen Hsu and the artist himself before his death last December, the exhibition proceeds chronologically through Chamberlain’s career. At the bottom of the ramp, early works hint at the artist’s formative influences. “Calliope” (1954) and “Cord” (1957) bring to mind David Smith sculptures and Surrealism. Farther along, the artist settles easily into the groove that dominated the remainder of his long career, the masses of discarded metal and car parts that took Abstract Expressionism’s concern for the gesture into three-dimensional space.
Posing floridly on the floor or mounted onto the Guggenheim’s walls, the sculptures present themselves like frozen dancers. “Hillbilly Galoot” (1960) displays crinkled red plumage from one side and polished plain steel on the other; the pleasure is in the surfaces and in the process of moving around the piece, discovering new angles. “Velvet White,” 1962, is a symphony in the titular color while “Ultima Thule” of 1967 wrings more supple movement out of matte steel than anyone would have thought possible. Chamberlain, the curatorial text hilariously reads, likened his sculptures to “twisted bed sheets after a night of raucous sex,” and it shows.
The exhibition takes care not to pigeonhole Chamberlain as merely a fellow traveler of Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, or Minimalism. Instead he is, as Davidson described at the press conference, “in the middle of everything and in the center of nothing.” Chamberlain’s aesthetics had more to do with his idea of "fit," an intuitive sense of what went well together, than with any particular ideology. But the artist fit himself too closely into a single groove: There’s almost no change in his work from 1965 to 1995 other than its scale, which grows as visitors progress up the ramp. As art critic Jen Graves wrote, Chamberlain is “one of those artists who gets locked into the one idea he happened upon early in his career.” That doesn’t mean it’s not a thrilling ride, though.
Click on the slide show for a photo tour of John Chamberlain’s Guggenheim retrospective