John Chamberlain passed away yesterday at the age of 85. In his memory, ARTINFO is reposting this account of visiting the artist's fabled Long Island studio to see his last works. It was originally published on September 19, 2011.
Walking through John Chamberlain's home and studio on Shelter Island, one is reminded of a basic fact: the man likes cars. Parked in the driveway outside his ranch-style house is a small fleet — a Mercedes-Benz G500 SUV, a black BMW sedan, two other SUVs, another sedan. Other signs of automania abound inside, from the set of artist-themed vanity plates (a melted Salvador Dalí plate, a drip-spattered Pollock one, et cetera) covering an exposed beam to a novelty couch shaped like the tail of a pink 1959 Cadillac. This is natural, considering that the 84-year-old artist entered the pantheon of American art on the horsepower of sculptures that, since the mid 1950s, have been built from the painted metal husks of junked automobiles, contorted into shapes that stand as high points of the Abstract Expressionist impulse.
What is unusual, however, is that the art filling much of his studio, and piling up in the hallways of his home, has nothing to do with cars whatsoever. Instead, these new works are an amalgam of photography and painting, remixed digitally in a way that looks like a product of the Internet generation. As the art dealer Steven Kasher puts it, "If you just saw them at random you'd think they were by some really cool 30-year-old from Williamsburg."
The youthful nature of the works, 11 of which are now on view at Steven Kasher Gallery, belies the poor health that has afflicted Chamberlain in recent years. In fact, while Kasher was giving a tour of the Shelter Island studio to preview the new series, the artist was in a Manhattan hospital undergoing treatment; then, last Thursday, a bout of illness prevented him from attending his show's opening. But somehow, through sheer indomitability, Chamberlain has been remarkably productive of late. Since leaving the Pace Gallery earlier this year to join Gagosian, he debuted a show there of new work — made, controversially, via a team of Belgian fabricators — and he is preparing for a 2012 career retrospective at the Guggenheim that opens in February.
All the while he has been working on his "pictures," as he calls his new photographic canvases, making roughly 26 in all. "Chamberlain is very much racing against time," Kasher says. From the creative tumult in the artist's studio, it shows. Not only are there dozens of artworks in various stages of completion, the house itself has been undergoing an ambitious expansion, with an entire wing added and an enormous indoor pool being dug.
As for the new canvasses, they smack of the devil-may-care experimentation one often encounters in late work. Each is composed of several vertical panels containing photographs that Chamberlain took and then had an assistant distort on Photoshop, blowing them up with fun-house-mirror effects, inverting them, splicing them together, shooting them through with sizzling tropical hues ("his color sensibility is definitely felt in the pictures," notes Kasher), and pixelating them in a way that makes them resemble video-game stills. The earliest ones have a flat, decorative look reminiscent of Bonnard; the most recent are zippy, loud, and baroque. All of them have an unsettling, pastiche quality. "The way Chamberlain sees photography is the way he sees cars," Kaplan explains. "He tears them up he rips them up and he uses what he wants."
Most notably for the work of an artist known for defiantly non-objective sculptures, the pictures are not abstract but representational, presenting distorted images of confederates ranging from the late artist Dennis Oppenheim to New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham to Chamberlain's children to the artist himself — usually wearing reflective sunglasses, and sometimes appearing three times in a single work. (It's also possible to make out the Eiffel Tower and other landmarks from the artist's beloved Paris.)
The canvases range from three to eight bolted-together panels apiece, priced at $50,000 per panel, according to the dealer. "They're a real bargain," he says. "It's actually unbelievably cheap — you can buy my entire show for the price of one of the good-sized pieces in the Gagosian show." (Chamberlain, it might be noted, has never put much stock in having exclusive relationships with art dealers, and has been known to sell sculptures directly to collectors who knock on his studio door.)
While many will see the works as a radical departure for the artist, they are in fact deeply rooted in his oeuvre. Born to a family of tavern keepers in 1927, Chamberlain dabbled in careers as a hairdresser and a poet — arranging "found" words from the everyday landscape into new phrases — before a stay at Black Mountain College committed him to sculpture, which he began making out of used car parts in the late 1950s. (He has always argued that he isn't interested in "car parts per se" or in cars as a theme, but "just the sheet metal" — though there was a period when was known to endow non-auto-part sculptures with the Chamberlain touch by hitting them with his car.)
He also experimented with film, as in the case of "The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez," a 1969 movie that the artist made with Warhol regulars Ultra Violet and Taylor Mead, which lives on today mainly through Internet notoriety. (It "features nudity and gymnastic sexual liaisons in a variety of places, including trees," according to one fan bulletin board. "Most likely this trashy underground film is of no interest to those other than naked-flesh fanatics." The artist Lawrence Weiner is said to own a still from the film.)
In the '60s, Chamberlain was also introduced to the Widelux swing-lens panoramic camera, which he began using to take photos — not in the traditional point-and-shoot manner, but by sweeping the camera through the air and snapping away without looking through the viewfinder. In 1993, he had an exhibition of these photographs at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton. Walking through Chamberlain's studio, it's clear that his interest in the medium has only grown. Lining walls of the cluttered space — which is filled with film reels, old art magazines, unusual detritus (a Homer Simpson clock), and tabletop models of new sculptures destined for the Guggenheim show (many resemble twists of foil bent into ankh-like shapes) — are dozens of photos waiting to be Photoshopped by the artist's 23-year-old assistant, Nicholas Alessandro Pissarro Sherman.
"He's taken all the pictures he wants, and now he just wants to do something with them," according to Sherman. One that might yet be used in an work shows Chamberlain looking dazed, his head bloodied. "He was in Florida and someone broke into his home and hit him on the head with a cinder block," says the assistant. "He didn't want to call an ambulance or anything — he just wanted to take a picture."
However intriguing the photographic works are, the overwhelming draw in visiting Chamberlain's studio lies on the other side of the compound, where a massive, clerestoried barn is home to more than 20 metallic sculptures that the artist is either working on or, as with several colorfully painted anemone-like pieces from the '80s, is keeping for himself from his back catalogue. (An earlier triumph that he has also held onto, "Miss Lucy Pink" of 1963, sits in the photo studio.) All around this phantasmagorical forest of art are heaps of raw auto parts, including two vintage Plymouth hoods and other pieces of classic hardtops that the artist acquired two years ago from the estate of an eccentric European car collector. The big blue machine he uses to crush the cars stands to the side.
In the middle of the room, facing three towering pieces he is currently working on — the size of campers or mini-firetrucks, they resemble mangled Transformers standing at attention — is the red rubber chair that Chamberlain occupies as he directs his team of fabricators at work. "Three or four guys who work with John cut the metal with an oxy-acetylene torch while he sits there, and that's how he made all the Gagosian stuff," says Sherman. "He is working ferociously to complete these monumental pieces." Chamberlain has been in the sculpture studio "seven days a week for the past five months," he says.
To leave the studio, one has to walk through the artist's living quarters, where it is both touching and instructive to encounter Chamberlain's cherished memorabilia. Hanging next to the honorable discharge he received from the Navy (after joining at 16), an advertisement for his 1957 debut solo show at Chicago's Wells Street Gallery, and a handmade sign that reads "I ♥ Pops" is a black-and-white photograph of an aged de Kooning, whom Chamberlain idolizes. Further towards the door is a personal hall of fame, with one wall covered in photographs of the artist's artistic peers and heroes, including Rothko, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Rauschenberg.
The photographs are not only indicative of Chamberlain's proud position in art history, but also a reminder that the late work of these artists is only now coming under reconsideration — to great profit in the case of MoMA's new de Kooning retrospective. That Chamberlain is still fighting the odds to make new creations, and to take new risks with the photographic pieces, is inspiring indeed, and promises that more surprises will be in store when his Guggenheim show opens next year.
To take a virtual tour of John Chamberlain's studio, click the slide show at left. (Publication of photos showing sculptures in progress was not permitted.)