'In finding your place in sculpture, you need to find the material that offers you just the right resistance. As it turns out, car metal offers me the correct resistance so that I can make a form—not overform it or underform it.'
—John ChamberlainWith its distinctive twisted ribbons of brightly coloured metal and intuitive sense of form, Snatching Bookie Bob is immediately recognisable as the work of celebrated American sculptor John Chamberlain. Carefully balancing the gestural immediacy of Abstract Expression, Minimalism’s emphasis on industrial fabrication, and the vibrancy of Pop, Chamberlain developed a highly unique artistic voice that drew plastic volume and mass from everyday materials. The cornerstone of his practice, Chamberlain first started working with wrecked automobile parts in 1957, the beginnings of an inventive technical approach that would span six decades. Executed in 2000 and included in a solo exhibition of new sculpture with Pace Wildenstein in the same year, Snatching Bookie Bob is a confident expression of the mature artist’s technical mastery, generating complex spatial relationships in the folds and textures of painted and chromium plated steel that here take on a remarkable fluidity.

 

Chamberlain in Context

Having served in the US Navy during World War II, Chamberlain enrolled at the renowned Black Mountain college, a school particularly respected in the mid-century for its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and formal experimentation. Here Chamberlain wrote poetry under the tutelage of Charles Olson, whose notion of the poem as a vehicle for transferring energy from the poet to the reader, ‘a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy discharge’ clearly chimes with Chamberlain’s dynamic sense of sculptural form. Like poems too, his works can be seen as composed of distinct elements, extracted like individual words from their intended use and recombined in startling new relationships. In this respect, his practice is often described as developing a mode of three-dimensional collage, extending his earlier more painterly experiments - and the Abstract Expressionism that they drew on – into sculptural forms.

The energy of Chamberlain’s compositions, and the expressive plasticity he extracted from his industrially produced materials makes a fascinating correlation to the forms and themes of early 20^th century Italian Futurism, especially pronounced given the emphasis on the automobile in his practice. Indeed, it was an apocryphal car accident that gave birth to the first truly modern avant-garde movement, their 1909 manifesto detailing the symbolic rebirth of Futurism’s founder F.T. Marinetti from the wreckage of a car crash into the modern machine age and the moment ‘When I came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!’.

 

Although Chamberlain does not celebrate or fetishize the automobile in quite the same way, his commitment to it as a material, and as one rooted in 20th century modes of production and more conceptual notions of mid-century American aspiration certainly resonates with the aims and interests of the Italian Futurists. Not long after first experimenting with the sculptural possibilities of scrap metal, and car parts Chamberlain was included in the 1961 Art of Assemblage exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which emphasised these connections in showing his work alongside Futurist, Surrealist, and Cubist works.

Although he did expand his repertoire to include a range of other materials including plexiglass and galvanised steel, his sculpted automobile parts remain his signature works. Renewing his focus on the car in 1970, he developed his technical approach by cutting and painting the twisted strips of metal, as we can see in Snatching Bookie Bob. Sandblasting the original paintwork from the metal, Chamberlain reapplied a selection of bright and bold enamels by hand, juxtaposed against bare areas of polished chrome.

 

The Snatching of Bookie Bob

The title of the work is taken from a short story by American writer Damon Runyon, whose world of gangsters, hustlers, actors, and petty criminals in and around Brooklyn and Manhattan captured the social dynamics and slang specific to the city coming out of the Prohibition era. Collected in the 1950 publication Runyon on Broadway, The Snatching of Bookie Bob focuses on the failed attempt of ‘Harry the Horse’ and ‘Spanish John’ to make some fast cash by ‘snatching’ notorious bookmaker ‘Bookie Bob’ and exhorting money from him and his associates.

'Now I do not know Bookie Bob personally, but of course I know who Bookie Bob is, and so does everybody else in this town that ever goes to a racetrack, because Bookie Bob is the biggest bookmaker around and about, and has plenty of scratch.' —The Snatching of Bookie BobConforming to Runyon’s distinctive prose style and told entirely in the present tense, the story opens in 1931 in the shadow of the Wall Street Crash, ‘scratch’, and ways of securing it being particularly prominent. Taken under house arrest the wily bookmaker convinces his captors to place bets through him to pass the time, which in the end far outweighs the sum they were ransoming Bookie Bob for in the first place, leading to a further scheme from which he will financially benefit. Bumping into Bookie Bob and his wife some weeks later it becomes clear that ‘Bob’s ever-loving wife’ was the one that ‘put the finger’ on him in the first place.

In its wit, economy, and treatment of everyday, specifically American vernacular, The Snatching of Bookie Bob draws certain compositional comparisons to Chamberlain’s 2000 work: both the crushed automobile parts and Runyan’s use of contemporary slang both capturing something quintessentially American. While Chamberlain was always keen to highlight his use of crushed car parts as the result of availability rather than socio-political commentary, his works seems to speak poetically to the rise and fall of the American century, of Machine Age optimism, and aspiration. Building on these ideas and innovative approach to materials, Chamberlain has influenced a broad range of contemporary artists using recycled materials to directly address questions of consumerism, the environmental crisis, and global inequality today.

 

‘John Chamberlain: The Artist’, for the Guggenheim Museum. Curator Susan Davidson and artist Lawrence Weiner discussing the life and work of John Chamberlain.

 

Collector's Digest

•    Internationally renowned for his twisted metal sculptures and experiments with other industrial materials, examples of John Chamberlain’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Collection in London.

•    Over the years major retrospectives of Chamberlain’s work across a range of media including photography, film, sculpture, and painting have been held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

 

•    After a yearlong restoration, the building that houses 23 monumental sculptures by John Chamberlain in Marfa, Texas will reopen this April. 

 

ⁱ Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, 1950. 
ⁱⁱ Filippo. Tommaso. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), in Vassiliki  Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, eds., Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, Edinburgh, 1998, p. 250.