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
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.
John Chamberlain Foam Sculptures, installation view, The Chinati Foundation, 2005-06, photo: Florian Holzherr via Nasher Sculpture Center
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.”
John Chamberlain The Foam Sculptures, 2005, Chinati, with the Nasher’s Venus of Willendorf-lookin’ 1970 work on the cover
“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.”
John Chamberlain, Liu Ting, 1966, foam and cord, 17 x 22 x 24 1/2 in., sold yesterday at Freeman’s
John Chamberlain’s foam sculptures are some of my favorite works of art in existence, partly because they are crumbling before our eyes. The pace at which they will cease to exist is fascinating. What could possibly be done to thwart it? Nothing? What’s being done? Nothing?
Yesterday a Chamberlain foam sculpture that belonged to Seth Siegelaub sold in Philadelphia. It was $11,520, which was within the estimate, but whatever. It feels impossible to say what it is worth [sic], but that’s not so interesting. A bottle of wine or a superbowl ticket could cost that much, and it’s tedious to hear about.
The point here is, this is an artwork whose fate is known, and finite, and whose condition is extraordinary. From Freeman’s [emphasis added because holy smokes]: “As noted in the catalogue raisonné, because of the vulnerability of the material to light and air, the sculptures have had a tendency to disintegrate. Piece has yellowed with age and is crumbling throughout, as expected. There is an approximately 5 inch wide crater and some other, smaller areas of loss. Scattered surface soiling and hairs throughout. Areas of discoloration throughout, possibly inherent to medium. Inscribed with inventory number “Dwan 1990” and “G SS-15″ in ink. Please request additional images.”
I am not an uptight person, not easily grossed out or shocked, I’m pretty go with the flow, I think. Until I read the phrase, “hairs throughout.” Did I request additional images? Oh, absolutely.
Because hairs throughout notwithstanding, these disintegrating, crumbling sculptures demand to be seen in the round, from every possible angle. And they reward that exploration by almost always refusing to disclose how they were made, or what their constituent parts–a block of foam and a cord—began as. This opacity is often missing in Chamberlain’s car part sculptures, which somehow reveal their sources more readily.
Plus they stay bent. With these foam chunks and a lasso, I feel like Chamberlain executed a virtuosic sculptural gesture, and froze it, trapping a tension inside. Have any of them ever been released and unfurled? Have any been rebound? Refabricated?
These extraordinary, ephemeral sculptures, made of a simple, even banal operation that is nonetheless unspecifiable, unknowable, unrepeatable, are all disintegrating. How many are already gone? What is being done to study and document and understand them while they still survive? It’s like waiting until someone’s in hospice to ask for their oral history. There should be an international mission to scan and model and record Chamberlain’s foam sculptures, systematic experiments to repeat the form and fold and tension of their wrapping, mapping the choreography, building the vocabulary, live performances by Chamberlain re-enactors. So much that could be done before they…
Too bad no one’s gonna do any of that for an $11,000 sculpture.
installation view of Furniture Designed by Artists, with Marc di Suvero’s swing hanging in the center of Leo Castelli Gallery, Sept. 1972, photo: James Patrick via LCG Archives at AAA
TWOMBLY FURNITURE?? CLICK TO OPEN! Yeah so far, nothing, and the Warhol might be a Campbell’s Soup print on the wall. [Yeah, no, there is a typical Castelli invite for the show on ebay that lists six furniture artists: Chamberlain, Di Suvero, Judd, Lalanne, Rauschenberg, Charles Ross, and Gus Spear. Maybe everyone else was just art artists.]
installation view of Lalanne’s Sardine Bed, 1972, at Furniture Designed by Artists, Leo Castelli Gallery, Sept. 1972, photo: James Patrick via LCG Archives at AAA
But if I hadn’t clicked, I’d have definitely kept missing this Lalanne Sardine Bed. Which was a one-off, commissioned by the show’s organizer, Jane Holzer, of the Warhol Factory Jane Holzers, who at 31, had rebooted herself as an impresaria. Leo Castelli was apparently involved in her artist furniture startup Daedalus Concepts, which, except for the Times puff piece for this show, exists only in the provenance listings of of various John Chamberlain sofas.
Tony Feher, Untitled, 2009, space blanket & binder clip, 18 x 14 x 11 in., selling from the estate of Brent Sikkema at Christie’s Feb. 28
One of the works I’d love to live with is a John Chamberlain foam sculpture. Just to be able to study its topology, reverse engineer in my head the gestures and knotting that produced it, shade it from the sun, gently sweep up the crumbs from around its pedestal as it crumbles to dust. ars brevis, vita brevis.
An Ugo Mulas photo from 1969/70 of the biggest Chamberlain foam sculpture I’ve ever seen, in the Franchetti-Twombly’s palazzo in Rome, as published in Cy Twombly Homes & Studios
I think this gorgeous Tony Feher sculpture made out of a crumpled gold mylar space blanket and a binder clip does a lot of the same thing, while also catching the sun. Though their material is doomed, the foam pieces would at least, presumably hold their shape when handled. I don’t know how Feher deployed that binder clip, but I imagine keeping this shape requires considerably more care. From the estate of Brent Sikkema.
The cover of Cy Twombly: Homes & Studios, 2019/2020, available for retail at Gagosian and Karma
While the arrival of Carlos Peris’s lovely book did not give me much to add on the subject of Cy Twombly’s photography, the arrival of Cy Twombly Homes & Studios has filled the content pipeline to overflowing.
First, don’t sleep on such a book when it first comes out; I missed the hardcover edition by my own negligence.
Second, Nicola Del Roscio is an international treasure, and he should not be forced to write to share his insights and experiences alongside Twombly; sit him down and record him talking, Hans Ulrich Obrist-style, for as long as it takes. For every buck wild story about how much Twombly loathed studio visits, and when a Qatari royal made an unexpected visit to Gaeta via helicopter, he scrambled to set up a decadent luncheon in the courtyard that is included, how many treasures and priceless memories are left out?
We just need to get it all while we can, and while he can. [And while recounting this history, maybe someone will ask Nicola how, while making this book in the midst of the first public disclosures of sexual predation against him, it was decided to use Bruce Weber’s 1994 photo of Twombly’s studio for the frontispiece.]
“Picasso drawing on chair,” reads the 2019 caption of 56 Bassano, a 1991 photo by Deborah Turbeville listed as 56 Bassano in Homes & Studios, which, well,
Homes & Studios, 2019, contains fleeting mentions of the following (non-exhaustive): the palazzo purchased in Tonnicoda, which Twombly felt guilty for abandoning, so he named some works after it ; the castle Twombly almost impulse-bought in the name of either Nicola or his studio assistant Viorel. And at least the third cringe mention (all, I think, posthumous), of Twombly’s closeness with his former nanny, a Black woman named Lula. There is a dissertation or ten to be written about Twombly’s relationship to the South (and Rauschenberg and Johns, for that matter; Twombly told Sally Mann their joint biography should be called, Dickheads from Dixie. Mann also noted that Lula was barely a decade older than Cy; she began working for the Twomblys when she was just thirteen.)
Anyway, point is, my most urgent takeaway from Homes & Studios is that we need more information on Twombly’s Picassos: How many are there? And are they actually Picassos? Because the one above, in Deborah Turbeville’s 1991 photo from Bassano, captioned in 2020 as “Picasso drawing on Chair,” was revealed in 2023, at least, to be a 1985 drawing by Twombly, either of a Picasso or in Picasso’s mode. If this can be mislabeled as a Picasso, what about the others?
Dealer Leo Castelli in a December 1969 interview with Paul Cummings, discussing the early work of John Chamberlain:
Then before that, he had done those foam rubber sculptures, which were really very, very good. At that time, people were more squeamish about the durability of materials. Had he produced them now, they would have been an immense success. At that time, people just were very hesitant and very doubtful about getting things that they think or feared would disintegrate very rapidly. They turned out very well. Some people wouldn’t mind so much any more whether it would endure or disintegrate, because one has gotten used to works of art as just traces in the snow in winter.
The site is a smallish, park-facing room in writer John Hersey’s Dakota apartment. Much of the space is taken up massive, chest-high foam blocks lashed together with cords, which a gruff Chamberlain, dressed in full Pacific Theatre-veteran style–work shorts, mermaid tattoos, back hair, and suspenders–casually carves into one of his trademark sofas as a clutch of jaded groupies look on. Unlike the low-slung prototype Chamberlain famously made for Donald Judd, Hersey’s couch stays high enough to climb into.; and it has two seating pits, not one; also, it doesn’t get the sleek, silk parachute cover, just a bunch of striped navy sheets, probably from Bloomingdale’s. Also, as far as I can tell, no one videotaped the inaugural line of coke being cut on Judd’s sofa. The scale of Hersey’s sofa, plus the rawness of its fabrication remind me of Andrea Zittel’s space-filling Raugh Furniture series in a way that both Judd’s and Yvonne’s more furniture-like sofas don’t. And watching Chamberlain, it’s impossible not to think of whale blubber being carved, either, which brings to mind–of all people–Matthew Barney. For all the car crashing of Cremaster 3 and the Vaseline-slice&molding of Drawing Restraint 9, I’d never thought of these two sculptors together before. Anyway, if you’ve always wanted a Chamberlain sofa, but didn’t want to spend five figures for it, this is a great how-to video.
2025 update: Perich re-uploaded a slightly improved version from the one 16 years ago:
