It’s [checks watch] and the world has not yet ended. So to take our minds off of the calamities, let’s return to the state of John Chamberlain’s foam sculptures, which are all disintegrating irreversibly.
In 2005 Marianne Stockebrand organized the first show of the foam sculptures at Chinati. Rejected by the market and largely unknown, Stockebrand tracked down 30 of the 84 then known. Most were made in 1966-67, and a few more through 1981. I’ve seen the number 100 mentioned since. “Chamberlain looped cord or rope around a bunch of plain or painted urethane foam,” Christopher French wrote in Glasstire in 2006. “Tightening the cord, Chamberlain created all manner of dynamic tension, which he occasionally heightened by further cutting or tinting. The result is a fluid, intuitive origami that transforms a quotidian industrial material into evocative abstractions.”
“They have a playfulness and immediacy, and seem necessarily related to the human body, and somewhat sexual,” Gavin Morrison wrote more frankly for the Nasher, which received the 1970 sculpture on the cover of the Chinati catalogue. Chamberlain knew they wouldn’t last. “The only factor in this that people might shudder at in terms of maintenance is the fact that it deteriorates faster than cell tissue. The material evokes a relativity, so that humans reject it if it deteriorates faster than they do.”
Chamberlain, of course, made other works of foam that are also “somewhat sexual”: the F—–G Couches. The orgy-sized ones are called Barges. Dia has one, and Chinati has one, too.
Chamberlain made Barge Marfa in 1983, when he and Donald Judd created a permanent installation of metal sculptures. It’s made for lounging and watching videos.
Despite its material fragility, it gets regular, even heavy, public use. The Chamberlain Estate has offhandedly, but not yet officially, rejected the possibility of refabricating a couch or barge, by which they apparently mean replacing the foam. Yet Chinati replaces the draped and tucked canvas cover every year.
These insights come from Project Report: Documenting John Chamberlain’s Barge Marfa (1983) –A Photogrammetry-Based Approach to Documentation as Preservation, a remarkable document published in 2022 by Shelley M. Smith, who was then conservator at Chinati. Without the current possibility of replacing the foam, Smith and her colleagues decided to measure, monitor, and protect it from excessive deterioration. Working through the early COVID lockdown, Chinati and a photogrammetry firm in California set up a remote scanning and documentation system, and built a high-res, 3-D model of the Barge.
Looking at the model, the biggest issue seems to be compression on the side most people climb onto. The Barge has non-frictional layers and padding over the raw foam blocks, and without UV damage, the biggest issue seems to be compression. Would they not want to at least rotate it periodically, and even out the wear? The barge was too big and fragile to relocate during a renovation of the Chamberlain building, so they built a little house around it. But still, couldn’t they rotate it in place?
Anyway, besides monitoring compression, Chinati’s approach to conserving the Barge includes placing a non-frictional textile layer between foam and canvas to minimize abrasion. The coverings themselves minimize UV damage. None of this is applicable in any way, unfortunately, to conserving the sculptures, which are exposed and uncovered, but not handled. But the photogrammetry, structural analysis, and monitoring could be directly useful, even imperative, for these more vulnerable objects. Is anyone doing this? No single sculpture owner would go through all the legwork Chinati did, but if it was plug & play, and you just sign up to have your sculpture scanned, who would refuse?