It seems like everyone who’s written about John Chamberlain’s foam sculptures since has quoted Amy Sillman discussing them, but all I can say is, it is not enough. Sillman has published her notes for a 2012 gallery talk on Chamberlain at the Guggenheim [pdf], but she also spoke about Chamberlain in 2008 as part of Dia’s Artists on Artists series, and that video is online, and the whole thing is fascinating.
She puts the foam sculptures squarely in—and ahead of—much of the development of process art in the post-minimalist 1960s. They’re just one example of Chamberlain making very current/advanced new bodies of work that get largely ignored by the subsequent leaders who emerge. And she goes broad and deep and long on Chamberlain’s experience at Black Mountain College and the influence of its director, poet Charles Olson.
But the money shot has to be when she quotes Michael Kimmelman on Chamberlain, who worked throughout the 1950s as a hairdresser, in the NYT in 2003: “The connection between his sculptures and bouffant hairdos is an unexplored avenue of art historical inquiry.”
[It’s not clear from Kimmelman’s review that the bouffant idea doesn’t come from dealer Allan Stone’s text for the show, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s a very Kimmelman thing to pick up on.] And it doesn’t spoil Sillman’s punchline to repeat it here as screenshots
