Edited by

Susan Davidson

Essays by

Susan Davidson

Donna De Salvo

Dave Hickey

Adrian Kohn

Charles Ray

Chronology by

Helen Hsu

Lexicon by

Don Quaintance

JohnChamberlain Choices

Edited by

Susan Davidson

Essays by

Susan Davidson

Donna De Salvo

Dave Hickey

Adrian Kohn

Charles Ray

Chronology by

Helen Hsu

Lexicon by

Don Quaintance

JohnChamberlain Choices

In memory of Walter Hopps (1932–2005)

Published on the occasion of the exhibitionJohn Chamberlain: Choices

Organized by Susan Davidson

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New YorkFebruary 24–May 13, 2012 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain March–September 2013

C O N T E N T S A Sea of Foam, An Ocean of Metal

SUSAN DAVIDSON

16

John Chamberlain: Steel Couture

DAVE HICKEY

30

Soft Future

CHARLES RAY

40

Understanding Unlikeness

ADRIAN KOHN

4 4

Nerves of Steel:

John Chamberlain’s Extra-sensory Expressionism

DONNA DE SALVO

56

65

Fitting In Time: A Chronology

HELEN HSU

192

Rhyme and Reason: A Limited Lexicon

DON QUAINTANCE

230

Selected Bibliography

Compiled by HELEN HSU

236

Index: Illustrated Works by John Chamberlain

2 46

Essays

Plates

Documentation

John Chamberlain: Choices

© 2012 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. All rights reserved.

Artworks by John Chamberlain © 2012 John Chamberlain/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ISBN: 978-0-89207-417-4 (hardcover)ISBN: 978-0-89207-426-6 (softcover)

Guggenheim Museum Publications 1071 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10128 guggenheim.org

Available throughArtbook | D.A.P.155 Sixth Avenue, Second FloorNew York, NY 10013Tel: 212 627 1999Fax: 212 627 9484artbook.com

Design: Don Quaintance, Public Address Design, and design/production assistant: Elizabeth Frizzell

Production: Jonathan Bowen Editorial: Katherine Atkins, Kara Mason, Jennifer Knox White, Helena Winston Typography: Caecilia (display) and Chaparral Pro (text)

Cover: Lord Suckfist, 1989 (detail, plate 87)

Back cover (clockwise from top left): Malaprop, 1969 (detail, plate 48), Penthouse #50, 1969 (detail, plate 54), Luna, Luna, Luna (In Memory of Elaine Chamberlain), 1970 (detail, plate 56), and Stuffed Dog 6, 1970 (detail, plate 43)

Frontispiece: Chamberlain in front of NUDEPEARLS ONE (1986/2009), More Gallery, Giswil, Switzerland, 2009

Printed in Germany by E & B engelhardt und bauer

Distributed outside the United States and Canada byThames and Hudson, Ltd.181A High Holborn RoadLondon WC1V 7QXUnited Kingdomthamesandhudson.com

The Leadership Committee for John Chamberlain: Choices

is gratefully acknowledged.

This exhibition is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

A Glut of Likenesses

Here is just some of what we are given to understand John Chamberlain’s

art as being like: car wrecks and dancers, artichokes and mummies and

giant phalluses, drapery, a football player, ornaments for an immense

Christmas tree and monstrous jungle gyms, a sucked egg, and Titans

beside themselves with rage.1 Next, a long list of the art-historical

movements that his pieces have brought to mind: the baroque and

rococo, neoclassicism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, both Abstract

Expressionism and Pop, and Minimalism and Process art.2 And, lastly,

a very long list of the artists whose works Chamberlain’s are said to

resemble in one way or another: Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Peter Paul

Rubens, Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Georges

Braque, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and Willem

de  Kooning, David Smith, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg,

Mark di Suvero, and Donald Judd.3 Chamberlain himself has taken

part in this frenzy as well. He mentioned in various instances how his

objects are like jigsaw puzzles, like a girl he used to know in Philadelphia,

like lasagna, and like sex.4 And why not? Certainly some will judge this

breathtaking list of likenesses as ample proof of artistic achievement,

a body of work so wide open that evidently this or that piece corre-

sponds with about anything you could want it to. But one might also

pause to marvel at the forced associations across fifty years of writing

on Chamberlain’s art and wonder why we cannot get over trying to fig-

ure out what his creations remind us of, what they evoke, what they

are similar to. We risk missing all that is new in the work when we cast

about for likenesses to everything we already know.

“As to unprecedented information or knowledge, when some-

thing’s new, you take, look, listen,” Chamberlain submitted.5 Usually

Understanding Unlikeness

A D R I A N K O H N

fig 27

Digital collage of Chamberlain titles mentioned in accompanying essay

44 —–45

Swift perception of relations, hall-mark of genius.

—Ezra Pound

A Glut of Likenesses

Here is just some of what we are given to understand John Chamberlain’s

art as being like: car wrecks and dancers, artichokes and mummies and

giant phalluses, drapery, a football player, ornaments for an immense

Christmas tree and monstrous jungle gyms, a sucked egg, and Titans

beside themselves with rage.1 Next, a long list of the art-historical

movements that his pieces have brought to mind: the baroque and

rococo, neoclassicism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, both Abstract

Expressionism and Pop, and Minimalism and Process art.2 And, lastly,

a very long list of the artists whose works Chamberlain’s are said to

resemble in one way or another: Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Peter Paul

Rubens, Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Georges

Braque, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and Willem

de  Kooning, David Smith, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg,

Mark di Suvero, and Donald Judd.3 Chamberlain himself has taken

part in this frenzy as well. He mentioned in various instances how his

objects are like jigsaw puzzles, like a girl he used to know in Philadelphia,

like lasagna, and like sex.4 And why not? Certainly some will judge this

breathtaking list of likenesses as ample proof of artistic achievement,

a body of work so wide open that evidently this or that piece corre-

sponds with about anything you could want it to. But one might also

pause to marvel at the forced associations across fifty years of writing

on Chamberlain’s art and wonder why we cannot get over trying to fig-

ure out what his creations remind us of, what they evoke, what they

are similar to. We risk missing all that is new in the work when we cast

about for likenesses to everything we already know.

“As to unprecedented information or knowledge, when some-

thing’s new, you take, look, listen,” Chamberlain submitted.5 Usually

Understanding Unlikeness

A D R I A N K O H N

fig 27

Digital collage of Chamberlain titles mentioned in accompanying essay

44 —–45

Swift perception of relations, hall-mark of genius.

—Ezra Pound

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46 —–47

we take in a piece of art by feeling, looking, and listening for a bit of

familiarity amid the overall oddity. And this extension of prior knowl-

edge to explain new phenomena seems to work pretty well most of the

time. In fact we may even consider it perverse not to try to draw on our

experience whenever possible. Coming upon a gallery full of unaccus-

tomed things called art, for example, we can always spot affinities to

things called art from the past and to other things not called art from

the world outside; these parallels in turn suggest how to begin to com-

prehend the objects before us. Yet by interpreting that which we do

not know in terms of that which we do, we thwart any chance we get

to see a work on its own terms. “Everyone is so enamored with things

they already recognize,” as Chamberlain put it, however, “the key

activity in the occupation of art is to find out what you don’t know.”6

That then is the problem with looking to simile, analogy, meta-

phor, personification, and all manner of comparison when thinking

through a piece by Chamberlain: these verbal formulas so widespread

in discussions of the art make it more, not less, difficult to find out

what you do not know. When we point out that a Chamberlain object

and something else are alike in some respects, we routinely infer mis-

leading or false corollaries, such as that the two are also alike in other

respects, that on the whole they are more alike than unlike, and that

their likeness is a great deal more informative than their unlikeness.

And by exaggerating the resemblance of an as yet inexplicable artwork

to something taken to be much more thoroughly understood, we imply

that we already know most of what we could ever learn from the piece

in question. Of course that is seldom the case. Despite innumerable

likenesses, Chamberlain’s art remains largely unknown and otherwise

unlike all that we know.

Miswriting

To start learning about a Chamberlain work we tend to look elsewhere

straightaway. A comparison with more recognizable images, things,

phenomena, and concepts allows us to make some sense of the piece

while mulling it over in the gallery or on the page. Nevertheless, in

the course of constructing such a connection we might find ourselves

enfeebling our own reports of similarity in several ways. Sometimes

we do so by qualifying one or the other side of the correlation put

forward, as in observations that Chamberlain’s Ramfeezled Shiggers

(1991) “conjures . . . Rodin’s Balzac” except “a fatted version,” and that

F*****g Asterisks (1988, fig. 29) “may even remind some viewers of

Rodin’s Burghers of Calais” (1888, fig. 28) except “minus the bathos.”7

We are asked to regard the kinship of Chamberlain’s objects and

a pair of imaginary Rodins, one with more fat and the other with

less purported bathos than the sculptures that do happen to exist.

A hopelessly uncommon or plainly fictitious entity shows up in other

correspondences offered by writers reluctant to venture an overly

exact resemblance to anything real. Instead of the ordinary plants one

sees all around, we read that Chamberlain’s pieces are like “mutant

plant life [that] springs from toxic debris,” and on top of that, arrested

explosions, a rich man’s shanty, and mastodon-sized chewing gum.8

A reviewer may also coyly introduce and then cast doubt on one asso-

ciation only to articulate another, a display of skepticism that lends

the latter proposal a spurious plausibility. We encounter wariness of

phalluses but not of big game in one analysis of Stringer (1976) and

Zane & Corney (1976) for example: “The phallic quality of these works

[is] not as forceful as the recognition of car and beast,” more specifi-

cally, “an unmistakable resemblance to hunters’ mounted trophies”

with “tusklike planar thrusts to left and right” on top, lower sections

approximating “a cross between the trunk of a baby elephant and the

snout of an oversized boar,” and “outer sweeps of metal, smallish like

Indian elephant ears.”9 And in still other instances a correlation will

coast on its own poetry and poignancy in lieu of clarity, as when Velvet

White (1962, plate 32) is said to be “like a battered but determined

bride.”10 Rather than following through with an artless discussion

of Chamberlain’s pieces, one’s words can distract attention from the

work by crying out for additional analysis themselves.

Just to be clear, though, none of this is due to poor writing.

Chamberlain’s objects appear to relate to many things in straight-

forward ways suited to expression in language. One of the strangest

aspects of his art is how, in spite of the expected ease of putting those

parallels into words, a piece will strain one’s prose such that a sup-

posedly revelatory connection ends up unraveling before the eyes.11

Perhaps the most widespread cliché you read about Chamberlain’s

work is its similarity to that of de  Kooning. Judd, one of the most

frequent and astute writers on Chamberlain’s art, provided an early

example in a review of Chamberlain’s January 1960 exhibition at

Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, a show that included Zaar (1959,

figs. 30, 32; plate 5).12 “Chamberlain’s sculpture has an opulence and

a formation suggestive of de Kooning’s paintings of 1955–56, such as

Gotham News [1955],” Judd observed (fig. 31).13 This claim proves to

be somewhat complicated as written. For starters, Chamberlain had

made at least nineteen sculptures from crushed scraps of sheet metal

through early 1960 and de Kooning made at least eleven paintings in

1955 and 1956.14 Before considering any general commonality between

the two bodies of work from these years, can it really be that both

are in themselves as uniform as Judd’s assertion implies, which is to

say, that a single sentence suffices to liken nineteen Chamberlains to

eleven de  Koonings? It seems doubtful. That being said, Judd help-

fully specified one of de  Kooning’s paintings, and we might assume

he was thinking of only one or a few of Chamberlain’s objects in the

exhibition he was reviewing, such as, say, Zaar. And so we arrive at

a statement likening Zaar to Gotham News that has some promise of

permitting us to evaluate its validity, a possibility uncharacteristic of

most writing on Chamberlain’s work.

One does run into some trying intricacies, however. In compar-

ing Zaar and Gotham News, Judd apparently could not just say that

one “is like” the other, and even the weak but active verb “suggests”—

this “suggests” that—was no good. He resorted to the still weaker and

passive con struction, this “is suggestive of” that. What’s more, it is

not that a Chamberlain sculpture is itself suggestive of a de Kooning

painting. Instead, two qualities of the sculpture, its opulence and its

formation, are suggestive of those same qualities in the painting.

And at this point we may wonder exactly which visual and material

properties of Chamberlain’s sculpture, and of de Kooning’s painting

as well, Judd had in mind when he used “opulence” and “formation.”

“Opulence” could describe the colors of the sheet metal in Zaar, rich

in diversity and rich in saturation, or, on second thought, maybe it

has more to do with the abundance of discrete components now fit-

ted together that Judd also described as “redundant,” “voluminous,”

“grandiloquent,” and “verbos[e].”15 Either way, the everyday meaning

of “opulence” exceeds these narrow limits. The rusty beat-up scraps

contradict the sense of wealth and luxury in the word, and other con-

notations of excessive richness, extravagance, and vulgarity remain

fig 30

“John Chamberlain,” installation view, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 1960. Works shown are: Johnny Bird, Swannanoa, Redwing (background), Wildroot, and Zaar (all 1959)

fig 28 Auguste RodinThe Burghers of Calais, 1884–95 (cast 1953)Bronze70⅞ × 90½ × 86⅝ inches (180 × 230 × 220 cm)National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Matsukata Collection

fig 29 John ChamberlainF*****g Asterisks, 1988Painted and chromium-plated steel102½ × 69¾ × 47 inches (260.4 × 177.2 × 119.4 cm)Collection of Martin Z. Margulies

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46 —–47

we take in a piece of art by feeling, looking, and listening for a bit of

familiarity amid the overall oddity. And this extension of prior knowl-

edge to explain new phenomena seems to work pretty well most of the

time. In fact we may even consider it perverse not to try to draw on our

experience whenever possible. Coming upon a gallery full of unaccus-

tomed things called art, for example, we can always spot affinities to

things called art from the past and to other things not called art from

the world outside; these parallels in turn suggest how to begin to com-

prehend the objects before us. Yet by interpreting that which we do

not know in terms of that which we do, we thwart any chance we get

to see a work on its own terms. “Everyone is so enamored with things

they already recognize,” as Chamberlain put it, however, “the key

activity in the occupation of art is to find out what you don’t know.”6

That then is the problem with looking to simile, analogy, meta-

phor, personification, and all manner of comparison when thinking

through a piece by Chamberlain: these verbal formulas so widespread

in discussions of the art make it more, not less, difficult to find out

what you do not know. When we point out that a Chamberlain object

and something else are alike in some respects, we routinely infer mis-

leading or false corollaries, such as that the two are also alike in other

respects, that on the whole they are more alike than unlike, and that

their likeness is a great deal more informative than their unlikeness.

And by exaggerating the resemblance of an as yet inexplicable artwork

to something taken to be much more thoroughly understood, we imply

that we already know most of what we could ever learn from the piece

in question. Of course that is seldom the case. Despite innumerable

likenesses, Chamberlain’s art remains largely unknown and otherwise

unlike all that we know.

Miswriting

To start learning about a Chamberlain work we tend to look elsewhere

straightaway. A comparison with more recognizable images, things,

phenomena, and concepts allows us to make some sense of the piece

while mulling it over in the gallery or on the page. Nevertheless, in

the course of constructing such a connection we might find ourselves

enfeebling our own reports of similarity in several ways. Sometimes

we do so by qualifying one or the other side of the correlation put

forward, as in observations that Chamberlain’s Ramfeezled Shiggers

(1991) “conjures . . . Rodin’s Balzac” except “a fatted version,” and that

F*****g Asterisks (1988, fig. 29) “may even remind some viewers of

Rodin’s Burghers of Calais” (1888, fig. 28) except “minus the bathos.”7

We are asked to regard the kinship of Chamberlain’s objects and

a pair of imaginary Rodins, one with more fat and the other with

less purported bathos than the sculptures that do happen to exist.

A hopelessly uncommon or plainly fictitious entity shows up in other

correspondences offered by writers reluctant to venture an overly

exact resemblance to anything real. Instead of the ordinary plants one

sees all around, we read that Chamberlain’s pieces are like “mutant

plant life [that] springs from toxic debris,” and on top of that, arrested

explosions, a rich man’s shanty, and mastodon-sized chewing gum.8

A reviewer may also coyly introduce and then cast doubt on one asso-

ciation only to articulate another, a display of skepticism that lends

the latter proposal a spurious plausibility. We encounter wariness of

phalluses but not of big game in one analysis of Stringer (1976) and

Zane & Corney (1976) for example: “The phallic quality of these works

[is] not as forceful as the recognition of car and beast,” more specifi-

cally, “an unmistakable resemblance to hunters’ mounted trophies”

with “tusklike planar thrusts to left and right” on top, lower sections

approximating “a cross between the trunk of a baby elephant and the

snout of an oversized boar,” and “outer sweeps of metal, smallish like

Indian elephant ears.”9 And in still other instances a correlation will

coast on its own poetry and poignancy in lieu of clarity, as when Velvet

White (1962, plate 32) is said to be “like a battered but determined

bride.”10 Rather than following through with an artless discussion

of Chamberlain’s pieces, one’s words can distract attention from the

work by crying out for additional analysis themselves.

Just to be clear, though, none of this is due to poor writing.

Chamberlain’s objects appear to relate to many things in straight-

forward ways suited to expression in language. One of the strangest

aspects of his art is how, in spite of the expected ease of putting those

parallels into words, a piece will strain one’s prose such that a sup-

posedly revelatory connection ends up unraveling before the eyes.11

Perhaps the most widespread cliché you read about Chamberlain’s

work is its similarity to that of de  Kooning. Judd, one of the most

frequent and astute writers on Chamberlain’s art, provided an early

example in a review of Chamberlain’s January 1960 exhibition at

Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, a show that included Zaar (1959,

figs. 30, 32; plate 5).12 “Chamberlain’s sculpture has an opulence and

a formation suggestive of de Kooning’s paintings of 1955–56, such as

Gotham News [1955],” Judd observed (fig. 31).13 This claim proves to

be somewhat complicated as written. For starters, Chamberlain had

made at least nineteen sculptures from crushed scraps of sheet metal

through early 1960 and de Kooning made at least eleven paintings in

1955 and 1956.14 Before considering any general commonality between

the two bodies of work from these years, can it really be that both

are in themselves as uniform as Judd’s assertion implies, which is to

say, that a single sentence suffices to liken nineteen Chamberlains to

eleven de  Koonings? It seems doubtful. That being said, Judd help-

fully specified one of de  Kooning’s paintings, and we might assume

he was thinking of only one or a few of Chamberlain’s objects in the

exhibition he was reviewing, such as, say, Zaar. And so we arrive at

a statement likening Zaar to Gotham News that has some promise of

permitting us to evaluate its validity, a possibility uncharacteristic of

most writing on Chamberlain’s work.

One does run into some trying intricacies, however. In compar-

ing Zaar and Gotham News, Judd apparently could not just say that

one “is like” the other, and even the weak but active verb “suggests”—

this “suggests” that—was no good. He resorted to the still weaker and

passive con struction, this “is suggestive of” that. What’s more, it is

not that a Chamberlain sculpture is itself suggestive of a de Kooning

painting. Instead, two qualities of the sculpture, its opulence and its

formation, are suggestive of those same qualities in the painting.

And at this point we may wonder exactly which visual and material

properties of Chamberlain’s sculpture, and of de Kooning’s painting

as well, Judd had in mind when he used “opulence” and “formation.”

“Opulence” could describe the colors of the sheet metal in Zaar, rich

in diversity and rich in saturation, or, on second thought, maybe it

has more to do with the abundance of discrete components now fit-

ted together that Judd also described as “redundant,” “voluminous,”

“grandiloquent,” and “verbos[e].”15 Either way, the everyday meaning

of “opulence” exceeds these narrow limits. The rusty beat-up scraps

contradict the sense of wealth and luxury in the word, and other con-

notations of excessive richness, extravagance, and vulgarity remain

fig 30

“John Chamberlain,” installation view, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 1960. Works shown are: Johnny Bird, Swannanoa, Redwing (background), Wildroot, and Zaar (all 1959)

fig 28 Auguste RodinThe Burghers of Calais, 1884–95 (cast 1953)Bronze70⅞ × 90½ × 86⅝ inches (180 × 230 × 220 cm)National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Matsukata Collection

fig 29 John ChamberlainF*****g Asterisks, 1988Painted and chromium-plated steel102½ × 69¾ × 47 inches (260.4 × 177.2 × 119.4 cm)Collection of Martin Z. Margulies

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difficult to assess at all (are the hues or the quantity of parts in Zaar

excessively rich? Is either extravagant? Vulgar? It is hard to say).

Formation by contrast seems literal and physical, the arrangement

of metal scraps into a structure that Judd called “fan-shaped,” “self-

enclosing,” “epibolic” (where the center is enveloped by a more rapidly

expanding exterior, as with the growth of an embryo), and “winged.”16

Now Gotham News. The meaning of formation changes all of a sud-

den since, presumably, we are to examine the arrangement of marks

into a strictly pictorial structure as opposed to studying how the

stretched canvas structure physically supports the applied paint. Even

allowing for this shift from the physical to the pictorial, the so-called

formation of the work looks very different from that of Zaar. Gotham

News is by and large frontal. Everything sits on the surface of the

painting rather than withdrawing to various depths within pictorial

space. Marks and forms appear beside one another more than before

or behind; and brushstrokes, scrapes, and transferred newspaper print

keep all the white at the surface plane so that it reads as several posi-

tive forms and not as hollowed-out negative volumes.17 Because the

white is not space, shapes that might pass for fans and wings (espe-

cially in a small reproduced image) do not resolve so easily into figures

on a recessed ground. And the painting does not look all that epibolic

or self-enclosing or, for that matter, centrifugal or centripetal since

the surface is uniformly packed from center to edge and from edge

to center. This frontality of Gotham News contrasts with the robust

spatiality of Zaar. A red metal element extends in three dimensions

by poking down and right and out toward the viewer from among the

creamy-whitish sheets; a brilliant red band spans the other side of the

work, encouraging one to walk around the object while viewing it; the

largest scraps are bowed or fully bent back upon themselves such that

the viewer sees both their outside and inside surfaces at once; and a

rusty pipe juts forth and girdles a considerable amount of open space

within the work’s airy interior.

Granting all of this, one could nonetheless argue that Gotham

News and Zaar share a sort of skeleton or trunk or core. In the paint-

ing, jagged and swooping brushstrokes that begin just right of cen-

ter and continue to the four sides of the canvas help to hold in place

other marks and forms along the edges and in the corners, prevent-

ing their pictorial collapse back into the middle. In Zaar, a bent and

hammered red assembly near the center of the piece braces tubular

scraps on both sides that in turn help to hold in place the larger sheets

of metal to the far left and right, preventing their physical collapse

back down to the floor. Perhaps the formation of one work is indeed

suggestive of the formation of the other, as Judd wrote. As for opu-

lence, the colors and marks in Gotham News look about as diverse and

numerous as the colors and parts in Zaar, and so, I suppose, about as

opulent. Maybe a Chamberlain sculpture actually is somewhat like a

de Kooning painting.

Yet after hundreds of words that conclusion feels rather under-

whelming. Tentatively verifying or provisionally accepting that Zaar

has an opulence and a formation suggestive of the opulence and the

formation of Gotham News does not thereby make them, or other art-

works like them, alike in any other or wider sense. It can often seem

as such, though. The very act of relating artworks by Chamberlain to

those by de Kooning tacitly assumes and then confirms their essen-

tial commensurability by squeezing them both into the comparison

at hand. In short, comparison is tautological. Along with its weaker

derivatives, the verbal formula this is like that itself juxtaposes and so

likens through proximity the two entities whose similarity it seems to

impartially report. And yet in spite of this formal fallacy that ensures

some degree of apparent affinity no matter what, Chamberlain’s pieces

somehow retain their unlikeness to all that writers compare them with.

Four years after his initial review Judd dithered. Clearly his confi-

dence in the direct correlation had diminished, but, instead of cutting

the sentence altogether from a 1964 essay, he hedged and reworded

it: “Chamberlain was interested in de  Kooning’s voluminous paint-

ings of 1955 and 1956, such as Gotham News.”18 The original assertion

of limited yet verifiable similarity between sculpture and painting

dwindled to no more than a detail about the artist’s interests.19 In five

subsequent writings about Chamberlain’s art Judd did not mention

de  Kooning again.20 He no longer needed to. Living with Mr. Press

(1961/69), Hollywood John (1962, plate 29), Buckshutam (1963, fig. 33),

and other pieces in his personal collection (fig. 6), sometimes catch-

ing sight of them in passing and other times inspecting them with

care, Judd may have come to realize that each is quite unlike Gotham

News and other paintings by de Kooning.21 The resemblance that at

first provides some amount of clarity always ends up outweighed by

the stark disparity between Chamberlain’s crumpled sheet metal and

de Kooning’s oil paint atop stretched canvas; likening the two can go

only so far before you hinder your comprehension of both. Of course the

real problem lies in not ever discovering this. An especially compelling

correspondence lures us into disregarding all kinds of accompanying

incongruity, such as that between metal and canvas, between a volume

and a surface, between crushing and brushing. Obvious differences

start to appear trivial or, worse, disappear altogether. And then we may

just as well be looking at anything else. A work becomes like a word—

symbolic, allusive, and unseen.

Misreading

Asked about the first important impression from his classes at

Black Mountain College in North Carolina during 1955 and 1956,

Chamberlain replied that “it was an essay by Ernest Fenollosa . . .

discussing the [Chinese] ideogram as a unit of poetry, in the sense that

it said [semantically] exactly what it said [pictorially].”22 “The ideo-

gram was a drawing of something, and it wasn’t anything else.”23 In

“The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” edited and

posthumously published by Ezra Pound in 1919, Fenollosa offered this

example: the sentence Man sees horse or A man sees a horse, 人見馬,

printed on the page as a hand-drawn rendering (fig. 34). “First stands

the man 人 on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space 見:

a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye 目, a modified

picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs, but unforgettable

once you have seen it. Third stands the horse 馬 on his four legs.”24

Or another example: The sun rises in the east, 日昇東. “The sun 日, the

shining, on one side, on the other the sign of the east 東, which is the

sun 日 entangled in the branches of a tree 木. And in the middle sign,

the verb ‘rise’ 昇, we have further homology; the sun 日 is above the

horizon 一, but beyond that the single upright line is like the grow-

ing trunk-line of the tree sign 木.”25 “Chinese notation is something

fig 32

John ChamberlainZaar, 1959 (detail)Painted steel 51¼ × 68⅜ × 19⅝ inches (130.2 × 173.7 × 49.8 cm) Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

fig 33 John ChamberlainBuckshutam, 1963Painted and chromium-plated steel47½ × 45 × 45 inches (120.5 × 114.5 × 114.5 cm)Private collection

48 —–49

fig 31 (top)Willem de KooningGotham News, 1955Oil, enamel, charcoal, and newspaper transfer on canvas69 × 79 inches (175.3 × 200.7 cm)Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr.

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difficult to assess at all (are the hues or the quantity of parts in Zaar

excessively rich? Is either extravagant? Vulgar? It is hard to say).

Formation by contrast seems literal and physical, the arrangement

of metal scraps into a structure that Judd called “fan-shaped,” “self-

enclosing,” “epibolic” (where the center is enveloped by a more rapidly

expanding exterior, as with the growth of an embryo), and “winged.”16

Now Gotham News. The meaning of formation changes all of a sud-

den since, presumably, we are to examine the arrangement of marks

into a strictly pictorial structure as opposed to studying how the

stretched canvas structure physically supports the applied paint. Even

allowing for this shift from the physical to the pictorial, the so-called

formation of the work looks very different from that of Zaar. Gotham

News is by and large frontal. Everything sits on the surface of the

painting rather than withdrawing to various depths within pictorial

space. Marks and forms appear beside one another more than before

or behind; and brushstrokes, scrapes, and transferred newspaper print

keep all the white at the surface plane so that it reads as several posi-

tive forms and not as hollowed-out negative volumes.17 Because the

white is not space, shapes that might pass for fans and wings (espe-

cially in a small reproduced image) do not resolve so easily into figures

on a recessed ground. And the painting does not look all that epibolic

or self-enclosing or, for that matter, centrifugal or centripetal since

the surface is uniformly packed from center to edge and from edge

to center. This frontality of Gotham News contrasts with the robust

spatiality of Zaar. A red metal element extends in three dimensions

by poking down and right and out toward the viewer from among the

creamy-whitish sheets; a brilliant red band spans the other side of the

work, encouraging one to walk around the object while viewing it; the

largest scraps are bowed or fully bent back upon themselves such that

the viewer sees both their outside and inside surfaces at once; and a

rusty pipe juts forth and girdles a considerable amount of open space

within the work’s airy interior.

Granting all of this, one could nonetheless argue that Gotham

News and Zaar share a sort of skeleton or trunk or core. In the paint-

ing, jagged and swooping brushstrokes that begin just right of cen-

ter and continue to the four sides of the canvas help to hold in place

other marks and forms along the edges and in the corners, prevent-

ing their pictorial collapse back into the middle. In Zaar, a bent and

hammered red assembly near the center of the piece braces tubular

scraps on both sides that in turn help to hold in place the larger sheets

of metal to the far left and right, preventing their physical collapse

back down to the floor. Perhaps the formation of one work is indeed

suggestive of the formation of the other, as Judd wrote. As for opu-

lence, the colors and marks in Gotham News look about as diverse and

numerous as the colors and parts in Zaar, and so, I suppose, about as

opulent. Maybe a Chamberlain sculpture actually is somewhat like a

de Kooning painting.

Yet after hundreds of words that conclusion feels rather under-

whelming. Tentatively verifying or provisionally accepting that Zaar

has an opulence and a formation suggestive of the opulence and the

formation of Gotham News does not thereby make them, or other art-

works like them, alike in any other or wider sense. It can often seem

as such, though. The very act of relating artworks by Chamberlain to

those by de Kooning tacitly assumes and then confirms their essen-

tial commensurability by squeezing them both into the comparison

at hand. In short, comparison is tautological. Along with its weaker

derivatives, the verbal formula this is like that itself juxtaposes and so

likens through proximity the two entities whose similarity it seems to

impartially report. And yet in spite of this formal fallacy that ensures

some degree of apparent affinity no matter what, Chamberlain’s pieces

somehow retain their unlikeness to all that writers compare them with.

Four years after his initial review Judd dithered. Clearly his confi-

dence in the direct correlation had diminished, but, instead of cutting

the sentence altogether from a 1964 essay, he hedged and reworded

it: “Chamberlain was interested in de  Kooning’s voluminous paint-

ings of 1955 and 1956, such as Gotham News.”18 The original assertion

of limited yet verifiable similarity between sculpture and painting

dwindled to no more than a detail about the artist’s interests.19 In five

subsequent writings about Chamberlain’s art Judd did not mention

de  Kooning again.20 He no longer needed to. Living with Mr. Press

(1961/69), Hollywood John (1962, plate 29), Buckshutam (1963, fig. 33),

and other pieces in his personal collection (fig. 6), sometimes catch-

ing sight of them in passing and other times inspecting them with

care, Judd may have come to realize that each is quite unlike Gotham

News and other paintings by de Kooning.21 The resemblance that at

first provides some amount of clarity always ends up outweighed by

the stark disparity between Chamberlain’s crumpled sheet metal and

de Kooning’s oil paint atop stretched canvas; likening the two can go

only so far before you hinder your comprehension of both. Of course the

real problem lies in not ever discovering this. An especially compelling

correspondence lures us into disregarding all kinds of accompanying

incongruity, such as that between metal and canvas, between a volume

and a surface, between crushing and brushing. Obvious differences

start to appear trivial or, worse, disappear altogether. And then we may

just as well be looking at anything else. A work becomes like a word—

symbolic, allusive, and unseen.

Misreading

Asked about the first important impression from his classes at

Black Mountain College in North Carolina during 1955 and 1956,

Chamberlain replied that “it was an essay by Ernest Fenollosa . . .

discussing the [Chinese] ideogram as a unit of poetry, in the sense that

it said [semantically] exactly what it said [pictorially].”22 “The ideo-

gram was a drawing of something, and it wasn’t anything else.”23 In

“The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” edited and

posthumously published by Ezra Pound in 1919, Fenollosa offered this

example: the sentence Man sees horse or A man sees a horse, 人見馬,

printed on the page as a hand-drawn rendering (fig. 34). “First stands

the man 人 on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space 見:

a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye 目, a modified

picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs, but unforgettable

once you have seen it. Third stands the horse 馬 on his four legs.”24

Or another example: The sun rises in the east, 日昇東. “The sun 日, the

shining, on one side, on the other the sign of the east 東, which is the

sun 日 entangled in the branches of a tree 木. And in the middle sign,

the verb ‘rise’ 昇, we have further homology; the sun 日 is above the

horizon 一, but beyond that the single upright line is like the grow-

ing trunk-line of the tree sign 木.”25 “Chinese notation is something

fig 32

John ChamberlainZaar, 1959 (detail)Painted steel 51¼ × 68⅜ × 19⅝ inches (130.2 × 173.7 × 49.8 cm) Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

fig 33 John ChamberlainBuckshutam, 1963Painted and chromium-plated steel47½ × 45 × 45 inches (120.5 × 114.5 × 114.5 cm)Private collection

48 —–49

fig 31 (top)Willem de KooningGotham News, 1955Oil, enamel, charcoal, and newspaper transfer on canvas69 × 79 inches (175.3 × 200.7 cm)Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr.

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much more than arbitrary symbols,” Fenollosa contended.26 Rather,

we have “a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals

to the eye,” a written language that is “based upon a vivid shorthand

picture of the operations of nature.”27 “The group 人見馬 [and 日昇東

as well] holds something of the quality of a continuous moving pic-

ture.”28 Pictures, declared Fenollosa, not arbitrary symbols as with

English words.

Chamberlain challenged this distinction between Chinese and

English but not by identifying the fully symbolic and nonpictorial

content in Chinese characters (as many sinologists did in disputing

Fenollosa’s account of how one reads written Chinese).29 Instead

Chamberlain treated English words too as semipictorial appeals to the

eye. “I began keeping lists of words that caught my eye, words that

looked good, with a lot of p’s or o’s.”30 “I didn’t particularly understand

the words other than whether I liked the look of them, as they were

printed,” he emphasized.31 “Words with a lot of vowels in it or some-

thing, you know. They always look like eyes.”32 “[Or] I’d find a word

I liked because of the way the letters formed around it,” for instance, if

“the letters in sequence look good.”33 The good look of p’s and o’s posi-

tioned opposite one another within printed words; vowels resembling

eyes, indeed, like the e and e in eye; the sequence of ups and downs in

the letters of the title Malaprop (1969, plate 48)—by paying attention

to how words appear on the page we can come to understand something

more visual and more physical than their usual symbolic meanings.

The same holds true for many of Chamberlain’s other titles that

set words side by side (fig. 27). Not only do the word pairings not

reveal anything about the piece (“the titling has nothing to do with the

object”), they do not mean anything much at all.34 Or so Chamberlain

claimed. Hillbilly Galoot (1960), Rooster Starfoot (1976), and Lipstick

Canteen (2000) look good as printed text even though we tend to miss

this in trying to catch hold of some quirky yet intelligible meaning that

may or may not begin to explain the sculptures so named (see plates 11,

61, and 94). “I like certain words together regardless of meaning,”

Chamberlain insisted, “two words or three words that mean absolutely

nothing, but they look good.”35 “My attitude about poetry was not tell-

ing somebody something as much as what the word looked like, or

what two words looked like together, especially if they looked good

and didn’t mean anything. . . . If you look at a lot of my titles you’ll see

that they really don’t mean much.”36 Truth be told, Chamberlain’s

titles create meaning all too readily because we force them to do so.

Consider the following passage cited in several recent essays on

Chamberlain’s art: “I would look at these words and I would put them

together and come up with an image that was unlike anything you

could achieve if you didn’t do it this way. I remember one line I wrote

in which I put together two words: blonde day. I’d never thought of a

day being blonde. I still haven’t, but I liked the way that the connection

functioned.”37 Given Chamberlain’s stated interest in how words look

and his stated indifference to what they mean, it is at least conceiv-

able that when he spoke of an “image” in the lines above, he meant

the visual image of blonde day as printed text on the page instead of

whatever mental image the words create; likewise, the “connection” he

referred to may be a visual connection between the shapes of blonde

and day and their good-looking sequence of letters instead of the

expected interpretative connection. All of which is to say, rather than

putting together blonde and day in order to transform their meanings,

or to solicit visualization in the mind’s eye of the thing that the pair-

ing might describe, or to unleash imagination wherever it should lead,

Chamberlain simply may have wanted to see how these two words

50 —–51

look when sitting next to one another. But seeing the words differ-

ently remains a notion so unusual that most writers cannot take it

literally.38 Our familiarity with reading and instantaneously interpret-

ing text, even odd text, foils the far odder experience of studying the

shapes of words and the fit of their letters. To choose titles regardless

of their meaning, to understand them as meaning not much or not

anything, constitutes a remarkably visual approach to language that

treats words themselves as immediate sensory phenomena and not

only as signs pointing elsewhere.

On occasion Chamberlain strayed from the routine usage of

another everyday abstraction: money. Just as he examined the visual

form of words along with their symbolic meanings, he also focused on

the physical weight of bills and coins along with their symbolic values.

“‘A pound of fifties,’” Chamberlain ventured during a conversation.

“You know how much that is? It’s a definite amount but nobody knows

how much money weighs. Back in the Seventies, when they had triple

beam scales, . . . we would make bets on how much your money weighed.

I remember that a nickel weighs five grams brand new. So you’d make

a bet about whether it’s 4.85 or 4.87 [grams],” taking into account the

metal worn off of the coin from its having been in circulation for a

while. “Bills are always the same brand new,” he continued. “They weigh

a gram. How much is a pound of fifties? It comes to twenty-two, seven

hundred [$22,700].”39 And so what? Well, by acknowledging the physi-

cal reality of conventional abstractions and any other information

usually “discarded as useless,” we may discover something that we did

not know.40

In several instances Chamberlain has proposed paying attention

to how you crumple a newspaper, crush cigarette packs, throw a towel

over the rack, break a pencil, and shake hands.41 These seemingly

banal activities alter assorted types of matter in ways worth a second

glance and a moment of contemplation. Taking note of “how you wad

your toilet paper” is another favorite example cited in various inter-

views.42 Next time have a look at that handful of compressed tissue

before putting it to use. Words, money, and toilet paper are decidedly

physical although their customary functions blind us to their look,

weight, and feel. And at times one can say the same for Chamberlain’s

art. An image of Nanoweap (1969, plate 52) turns up in a college algebra

textbook above the sentence, “The mathematical model N = 0.4x2 – 36x

+ 1000 approximates the number of accidents per 50 million miles (N)

for a driver who is x years old” (fig. 35); and if you happen to read a

particular science journal article on water molecules chemically bound

within minerals, you will stumble across another image of Nanoweap

above the following text, “When we compressed the hydrous minerals

between the diamond anvils, we obtained startling results: frequent

bursts of sound over a wide range of pressures and temperatures.”43

To some authors and editors Nanoweap must look so commonplace,

so straightforward, that its image can be put to use in illustrating the

words accident and compress and pressure and perhaps even the molec-

ular structure of a hydrous mineral as well—whitish crystal mostly

with interstitial bits of blue water. To find out from Chamberlain’s

pieces what you do not already know, you cannot let their ostensible

familiarity satisfy your curiosity.

Another Kind of Language

Giant phalluses, mutant plants, hunting trophies, enraged Titans,

and battered brides (see fig. 36)—while Chamberlain dwells on the

physicality of abstractions, writers do much with the abstraction of

his objects. Ideally we could spend a while learning about the works,

getting a handle on the new words, new distinctions, and new ways of

thinking that they both make possible and render necessary. Short of

that, we have comparison. Comparison is quicker and easier, falling

back on stock vocabulary and logical structures in order to summarize

the specifics of a piece and ready it for assimilation with that which

we think we know. But maybe there is more going on here. Surveying

what has been written to date about Chamberlain’s art shows how his

creations evade comparison and so are compared to everything. And

the failings of these countless correlations and similes and metaphors

fig 34 Page from the Little Review, showing Ernest Fenellosa and Ezra Pound, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” September 1919

fig 35 Page from Robert Blitzer, Introductory Algebra for College Students, 1998, illustrating Chamberlain’s Nanoweap (1969)

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much more than arbitrary symbols,” Fenollosa contended.26 Rather,

we have “a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals

to the eye,” a written language that is “based upon a vivid shorthand

picture of the operations of nature.”27 “The group 人見馬 [and 日昇東

as well] holds something of the quality of a continuous moving pic-

ture.”28 Pictures, declared Fenollosa, not arbitrary symbols as with

English words.

Chamberlain challenged this distinction between Chinese and

English but not by identifying the fully symbolic and nonpictorial

content in Chinese characters (as many sinologists did in disputing

Fenollosa’s account of how one reads written Chinese).29 Instead

Chamberlain treated English words too as semipictorial appeals to the

eye. “I began keeping lists of words that caught my eye, words that

looked good, with a lot of p’s or o’s.”30 “I didn’t particularly understand

the words other than whether I liked the look of them, as they were

printed,” he emphasized.31 “Words with a lot of vowels in it or some-

thing, you know. They always look like eyes.”32 “[Or] I’d find a word

I liked because of the way the letters formed around it,” for instance, if

“the letters in sequence look good.”33 The good look of p’s and o’s posi-

tioned opposite one another within printed words; vowels resembling

eyes, indeed, like the e and e in eye; the sequence of ups and downs in

the letters of the title Malaprop (1969, plate 48)—by paying attention

to how words appear on the page we can come to understand something

more visual and more physical than their usual symbolic meanings.

The same holds true for many of Chamberlain’s other titles that

set words side by side (fig. 27). Not only do the word pairings not

reveal anything about the piece (“the titling has nothing to do with the

object”), they do not mean anything much at all.34 Or so Chamberlain

claimed. Hillbilly Galoot (1960), Rooster Starfoot (1976), and Lipstick

Canteen (2000) look good as printed text even though we tend to miss

this in trying to catch hold of some quirky yet intelligible meaning that

may or may not begin to explain the sculptures so named (see plates 11,

61, and 94). “I like certain words together regardless of meaning,”

Chamberlain insisted, “two words or three words that mean absolutely

nothing, but they look good.”35 “My attitude about poetry was not tell-

ing somebody something as much as what the word looked like, or

what two words looked like together, especially if they looked good

and didn’t mean anything. . . . If you look at a lot of my titles you’ll see

that they really don’t mean much.”36 Truth be told, Chamberlain’s

titles create meaning all too readily because we force them to do so.

Consider the following passage cited in several recent essays on

Chamberlain’s art: “I would look at these words and I would put them

together and come up with an image that was unlike anything you

could achieve if you didn’t do it this way. I remember one line I wrote

in which I put together two words: blonde day. I’d never thought of a

day being blonde. I still haven’t, but I liked the way that the connection

functioned.”37 Given Chamberlain’s stated interest in how words look

and his stated indifference to what they mean, it is at least conceiv-

able that when he spoke of an “image” in the lines above, he meant

the visual image of blonde day as printed text on the page instead of

whatever mental image the words create; likewise, the “connection” he

referred to may be a visual connection between the shapes of blonde

and day and their good-looking sequence of letters instead of the

expected interpretative connection. All of which is to say, rather than

putting together blonde and day in order to transform their meanings,

or to solicit visualization in the mind’s eye of the thing that the pair-

ing might describe, or to unleash imagination wherever it should lead,

Chamberlain simply may have wanted to see how these two words

50 —–51

look when sitting next to one another. But seeing the words differ-

ently remains a notion so unusual that most writers cannot take it

literally.38 Our familiarity with reading and instantaneously interpret-

ing text, even odd text, foils the far odder experience of studying the

shapes of words and the fit of their letters. To choose titles regardless

of their meaning, to understand them as meaning not much or not

anything, constitutes a remarkably visual approach to language that

treats words themselves as immediate sensory phenomena and not

only as signs pointing elsewhere.

On occasion Chamberlain strayed from the routine usage of

another everyday abstraction: money. Just as he examined the visual

form of words along with their symbolic meanings, he also focused on

the physical weight of bills and coins along with their symbolic values.

“‘A pound of fifties,’” Chamberlain ventured during a conversation.

“You know how much that is? It’s a definite amount but nobody knows

how much money weighs. Back in the Seventies, when they had triple

beam scales, . . . we would make bets on how much your money weighed.

I remember that a nickel weighs five grams brand new. So you’d make

a bet about whether it’s 4.85 or 4.87 [grams],” taking into account the

metal worn off of the coin from its having been in circulation for a

while. “Bills are always the same brand new,” he continued. “They weigh

a gram. How much is a pound of fifties? It comes to twenty-two, seven

hundred [$22,700].”39 And so what? Well, by acknowledging the physi-

cal reality of conventional abstractions and any other information

usually “discarded as useless,” we may discover something that we did

not know.40

In several instances Chamberlain has proposed paying attention

to how you crumple a newspaper, crush cigarette packs, throw a towel

over the rack, break a pencil, and shake hands.41 These seemingly

banal activities alter assorted types of matter in ways worth a second

glance and a moment of contemplation. Taking note of “how you wad

your toilet paper” is another favorite example cited in various inter-

views.42 Next time have a look at that handful of compressed tissue

before putting it to use. Words, money, and toilet paper are decidedly

physical although their customary functions blind us to their look,

weight, and feel. And at times one can say the same for Chamberlain’s

art. An image of Nanoweap (1969, plate 52) turns up in a college algebra

textbook above the sentence, “The mathematical model N = 0.4x2 – 36x

+ 1000 approximates the number of accidents per 50 million miles (N)

for a driver who is x years old” (fig. 35); and if you happen to read a

particular science journal article on water molecules chemically bound

within minerals, you will stumble across another image of Nanoweap

above the following text, “When we compressed the hydrous minerals

between the diamond anvils, we obtained startling results: frequent

bursts of sound over a wide range of pressures and temperatures.”43

To some authors and editors Nanoweap must look so commonplace,

so straightforward, that its image can be put to use in illustrating the

words accident and compress and pressure and perhaps even the molec-

ular structure of a hydrous mineral as well—whitish crystal mostly

with interstitial bits of blue water. To find out from Chamberlain’s

pieces what you do not already know, you cannot let their ostensible

familiarity satisfy your curiosity.

Another Kind of Language

Giant phalluses, mutant plants, hunting trophies, enraged Titans,

and battered brides (see fig. 36)—while Chamberlain dwells on the

physicality of abstractions, writers do much with the abstraction of

his objects. Ideally we could spend a while learning about the works,

getting a handle on the new words, new distinctions, and new ways of

thinking that they both make possible and render necessary. Short of

that, we have comparison. Comparison is quicker and easier, falling

back on stock vocabulary and logical structures in order to summarize

the specifics of a piece and ready it for assimilation with that which

we think we know. But maybe there is more going on here. Surveying

what has been written to date about Chamberlain’s art shows how his

creations evade comparison and so are compared to everything. And

the failings of these countless correlations and similes and metaphors

fig 34 Page from the Little Review, showing Ernest Fenellosa and Ezra Pound, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” September 1919

fig 35 Page from Robert Blitzer, Introductory Algebra for College Students, 1998, illustrating Chamberlain’s Nanoweap (1969)

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I thank colleagues and readers for their comments on drafts of this essay. Also, for help with research, my thanks to Roger Anthony, Geri Aramanda, Lisa Barkley, Jeff Bergman, Ken Fernandez, Judith Hastings, Helen Hsu, Mary Kadish, Jon Mason, Ricki Moskowitz, Stanley Murashige, Sandra Olsen, Amy Schichtel, Charlie Stuckey, and Shou-Chih Yen. The Charlotte Faculty Fellowship from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Vivian L. Smith Foundation Fellowship from the Menil Collection contributed financial support.

The epigraph is from Ezra Pound, quoting Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a, in one of his editorial footnotes for Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Pound (New York: Arrow Editions, 1936), p. 26. (Pound’s note in the version of Fenollosa’s essay published in 1919 is only to “Compare Aristotle’s Poetics,” but the 1936 version includes this specific line.) Fenollosa’s definition of metaphor as “the use of material images to suggest immaterial relations” seems to have reminded Pound of the following passage from the Poetics: “The great-est thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” See additional discussion of Fenollosa’s work below. The translation of Aristotle is from S. H. Butcher, ed., The Poetics of Aristotle, 2nd rev. ed. (1895; London: MacMillan, 1898), pp. 86–87.

1. For references to car wrecks and dancers, see Barbara Butler, “Movie Stars and Other Members of the Cast,” Art International 4, no. 2–3 ([Feb./Mar.] 1960), p. 52; and Michael Auping, “John Chamberlain,” in Structure to Resemblance: Work by Eight American Sculptors (Buffalo, N. Y.: Fine Arts Academy, 1987), p. 23. For artichokes and mummies, see Michael Auping, “John Chamberlain: Reliefs 1960–1982,” in John Chamberlain: Reliefs 1960–1982 (Sarasota, Fla.: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 1982), p. 12. And for phalluses, drapery, foot-ball players, Christmas ornaments, jungle gyms, sucked eggs, and Titans, see Elizabeth Hayt-Atkins, “John Chamberlain,” Art News 88, no. 5 (May 1989), p. 158; Jochen Poetter, “‘No Leaning on the Oars’: On John Chamberlain’s High-Energy Ideograms,” in John Chamberlain (Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1991), p. 30; William C. Agee, David J. Getsy, and Adrian Kohn, comments in “Panel Discussion,” in It’s All in the Fit: The Work of John Chamberlain (Marfa, Tex.: Chinati Foundation, 2009), pp. 244–47; Michael Fried, “New York Letter,” Art International 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1964), p. 82; Julie Yufe, “Artscene: In Brief,” Columbia Daily Spectator, May 29, 1996, p. 3; Donald Judd, “Chamberlain: Another View,” Art International 7, no. 10 (Jan. 16, 1964), p. 39; and Donald Kuspit, “Troubled Titan: John Chamberlain’s Existential Vernacular,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 8 (Apr. 1990), p. 51.

2. For likenesses to the baroque, rococo, and neoclas-sicism, see Robert Taylor, “Events in Art: Baroque Autos,” Boston Herald, Nov. 24, 1963, section 3, p. 6; David Anfam, “Chamberlain’s Gambit: ‘Cautious Maniac,’” in John Chamberlain (London: Waddington Galleries, 2002), p. 7; and Robert C. Morgan, “The Look,” Village Voice, Aug. 26, 1986, p. 83. For Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, see Barbara Rose, “How to Look at John Chamberlain’s Sculpture,” Art International 12, no. 10 (Jan. 16, 1964), p. 36; Poetter, “‘No Leaning on the Oars,’” p. 29; and Gary Indiana, “John Chamberlain’s Irregular Set,” Art in America 71, no. 10 (Nov. 1983), p. 209. And for Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, and Process art, see Barbara Rose, “On Chamberlain’s Interview,” Artforum 10, no. 6 (Feb. 1972), p. 44; Hilton Kramer, “A Rare Sculptor Who Succeeds with Color,” New York Observer, Mar. 13, 1989, p. 12; Michael Auping, “John Chamberlain,” in Art of Our Time: The Saatchi Collection, 4 vols. (London: Lund Humphries, 1984), vol. 2, p. 12; and Auping, “John Chamberlain” (1987), p. 19.

3. For Bernini, Rubens, Rodin, and van Gogh, see Irving Sandler, “Gesture and Non-Gesture in Recent Sculpture,” in Maurice Tuchman, ed., American Sculpture of the Sixties, (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967), p. 42; Poetter, “‘No Leaning on the Oars,’” p. 32; Bonnie Clearwater, oral history interview with John Chamberlain, Sarasota, Fla., Jan. 29, 1991, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, p. 83; and Nancy Princenthal, “John Chamberlain at Pace,” Art in America 77, no. 6 (June 1989), p. 165. For Picasso and Braque, see Michael McManus, “The Poetics of Process,” Artweek 17, no. 31 (Sept. 27, 1986), p. 1. For Gorky, Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning, see Auping, “John Chamberlain” (1987), p. 21; Carol Strickland, “Unshackled, Unconventional Sculptor,” New York Times, June 13, 1993, sec. 13 [“Long Island Weekly”], p. 21; Walter Hopps, foreword to New American Sculpture (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1964), unpaginated (second page); and Bernice Rose, “Willem de  Kooning and John Chamberlain: Displaced Realities,” in De  Kooning/Chamberlain: Influence and Transformation (New York: PaceWildenstein, 2001), pp. 5–13. And for Smith, Johns, Rauschenberg, di Suvero, and Judd, see William C. Agee, “The Year of John Chamberlain,” New Criterion 6, no. 3 (Nov. 1987), p. 51; Auping, “John Chamberlain” (1984), vol. 2, p. 14; Dave Hickey, “John Chamberlain: Constant Gardener,” in John Chamberlain (Cologne: Galerie Karsten Greve, 2008), p. 267; Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 181; and Elizabeth C. Baker, “The Secret Life of John Chamberlain,” Art News 68, no. 2 (Apr. 1969), p. 51.

4. See, respectively, a video recording of a Jan. 1983 interview with Chamberlain by Michael Auping featured on Spectrum: Visual Art, WUSF-TV, 1983, Conservation Department archives, item VI83-02,

The Menil Collection, Houston, at 2:42; a video record-ing of an Artists Documentation Program inter-view with Chamberlain by Carol Mancusi-Ungaro and Helen Winkler, Mar. 27, 2000, Conservation Department archives, item TMCD-2008.007 #15, The Menil Collection, Houston, at 40:57 and 39:11; and Chamberlain, “A Statement,” 1982, in a bro-chure from John Chamberlain Sculpture: An Extended Exhibition, Dia Art Foundation, New York, Mar. 19, 1982–July 30, 1983 and Sept. 22, 1983–Feb. 23, 1985, in “John Chamberlain” vertical file, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

5. “John Chamberlain in Conversation with Klaus Ker tess,” Chinati Foundation Newsletter (Marfa, Tex.) 11 (Oct. 2006), p. 15.

6. Chamberlain, cited in “The Continuum Between, and Transformations of, Art and Design,” in Barbara Bloemink, Design ≠ Art: Functional Objects from Donald Judd to Rachel White read (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2004), p. 81; and Julie Sylvester, “Auto/Bio: Conversations with John Chamberlain,” in Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture, 1954–1985 (New York: Hudson Hill Press in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, 1986), p. 11. See also Donna De Salvo, “An Interview with John Chamberlain,” in De Salvo, Wide Point: The Photography of John Chamberlain, exh. brochure (Southampton, N.Y.: Parrish Art Museum, 1993), p. 12; and Hans Ulrich Obrist, John Chamberlain (Cologne: Walther König, 2006), p. 39.

7. “Goings On About Town,” New Yorker, Apr. 1, 1991, p. 12; and “Goings On About Town,” New Yorker, Mar. 13, 1989, p. 12.

8. See, respectively, Kirby Gookin, “John Chamberlain,” Artforum 29, no. 10 (Summer 1991), p. 108; Michael Kimmelman, “John Chamberlain,” New York Times, Mar. 3, 1989, p. C36; Gerrit Henry, “John Chamberlain,” Art News 92, no. 1 (Jan. 1993), p. 128; and Bennett Schiff, “In the Art Galleries,” New York Post, June 12, 1960, “Week-End Magazine,” p. 12.

9. Barbara Baracks, “John Chamberlain,” Artforum 14, no. 10 (Summer 1976), p. 70.

10. Klaus Kertess, “Color in the Round and Then Some: John Chamberlain’s Work, 1954–1985,” in Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture, p. 34. Note that Chamberlain did make a painted and chromium-plated steel piece titled The Bride in 1988.

11. “His sculptures invite and desire endless adjectives, but none of them can stick. His configurations are in a referential state, but their constant re-form-ing slips out of the adjectival grip; ultimately they transcend the language of analysis and description.” Kertess, “Color in the Round and Then Some,” p. 38.

52 —–53

unexpectedly tell us much about the work. When our earnest efforts to

establish parallels between Chamberlain’s objects and those of Rodin,

Smith, Kline, or de Kooning falter, the associations end up accentu-

ating the dissimilarities that go unmentioned and can be as effective

as deliberately differentiating the pieces from the outset. When our

correspondences invoke outlandish entities, the propositions convey

more than anything else our ongoing inability to make sense of the

art under examination: Swannanoa/Swannanoa II (1959/74) remains

as obscure to us as the “prehistoric mutant creature” that it “can be

read as,” and Starletta (1999) as bizarre as the “gaudy motorbike that

might be speeding along a highway in Oz” that it “looks like.”44 As our

comparisons fail one after another they make it clear that the oddity

of Chamberlain’s work endures.

Another connection that attests to our only rudimentary compre-

hension of a piece is the tiresome but perhaps inevitable correlation to

the human body—nothing else seems so familiar and accordingly an

unknown object seems to resemble nothing else quite so much. Asked

about his own words likening the art to the body, Chamberlain replied,

“If you’re putting these kinds of parts together that have a commu-

nication format, and we’re dealing with another kind of language

and another kind of meaning for that matter, [the work] has to have

things that have some relevance to what someone else understands

also, some common ground.”45 Anthropomorphic terms and concepts

amount to a compromise in the name of communication, the common

ground that we are forever hunting for or inventing as we stand before

a strange work of art. Yet we can also learn about a piece by starting

with its uncommonness, its unlikeness to the body and to everything

else. The works have their own communication format, language, and

meanings independent of what we are used to; it may be time to reflect

on those rather than throwing more comparisons at the art. And so

while Chamberlain often relies on sex as a metaphor when discussing

the construction of his objects (“the sexual decision comes in the fit-

ting of the parts,” “the assembly is a fit, and the fit is sexual”), it serves

as a useful analogy to get at another quality of the pieces as well:

“Talking about the art itself is very difficult. It’s like sex. Nobody really

talks about it, they talk around it, on the edge of it.”46 Contrary to the

work’s seemingly easygoing evocations of this and that, the difficulty

of selecting satisfactory words and comparisons should not be lost in

our verbal explanations. It now looks less like Chamberlain makes art

that resembles all manner of things we have seen and done, and more

that he makes unusual pieces that we are still only very slowly getting

to know on their own terms.

Unlike most of those who have written about his work, Cham-

berlain often makes a point of noting the inadequacies of language as

he uses it to talk about his art. “You have a fit, and you have a form,

and you have a color. And so all of these three parts are—,” he broke

off during a recent interview, unable to come up with the right verb,

“I’m running out of words.” He finished the thought by retreating to

abstract language, as he frequently does: “They’re having a good time

together, if you put them together well.”47 At first glance those vague

phrases, having a good time together and put together well, tell us next to

nothing. But like our facile comparisons to pieces by other artists and

like our impossible comparisons to prehistoric mutants and motor-

bikes in Oz, Chamberlain’s own explanations reveal that language can-

not keep pace with his objects. Around his works one finds words and

around those words, now, even more words. The continuing failure of

all this language suggests that Chamberlain’s art might be unlike what

you see when you turn away from these words and look around.

fig 36 John ChamberlainThe Bride, 1988Painted and chromium-plated steel85 × 47¼ × 44⅞ inches (216 × 120 × 114 cm)Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

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I thank colleagues and readers for their comments on drafts of this essay. Also, for help with research, my thanks to Roger Anthony, Geri Aramanda, Lisa Barkley, Jeff Bergman, Ken Fernandez, Judith Hastings, Helen Hsu, Mary Kadish, Jon Mason, Ricki Moskowitz, Stanley Murashige, Sandra Olsen, Amy Schichtel, Charlie Stuckey, and Shou-Chih Yen. The Charlotte Faculty Fellowship from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Vivian L. Smith Foundation Fellowship from the Menil Collection contributed financial support.

The epigraph is from Ezra Pound, quoting Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a, in one of his editorial footnotes for Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Pound (New York: Arrow Editions, 1936), p. 26. (Pound’s note in the version of Fenollosa’s essay published in 1919 is only to “Compare Aristotle’s Poetics,” but the 1936 version includes this specific line.) Fenollosa’s definition of metaphor as “the use of material images to suggest immaterial relations” seems to have reminded Pound of the following passage from the Poetics: “The great-est thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” See additional discussion of Fenollosa’s work below. The translation of Aristotle is from S. H. Butcher, ed., The Poetics of Aristotle, 2nd rev. ed. (1895; London: MacMillan, 1898), pp. 86–87.

1. For references to car wrecks and dancers, see Barbara Butler, “Movie Stars and Other Members of the Cast,” Art International 4, no. 2–3 ([Feb./Mar.] 1960), p. 52; and Michael Auping, “John Chamberlain,” in Structure to Resemblance: Work by Eight American Sculptors (Buffalo, N. Y.: Fine Arts Academy, 1987), p. 23. For artichokes and mummies, see Michael Auping, “John Chamberlain: Reliefs 1960–1982,” in John Chamberlain: Reliefs 1960–1982 (Sarasota, Fla.: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 1982), p. 12. And for phalluses, drapery, foot-ball players, Christmas ornaments, jungle gyms, sucked eggs, and Titans, see Elizabeth Hayt-Atkins, “John Chamberlain,” Art News 88, no. 5 (May 1989), p. 158; Jochen Poetter, “‘No Leaning on the Oars’: On John Chamberlain’s High-Energy Ideograms,” in John Chamberlain (Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1991), p. 30; William C. Agee, David J. Getsy, and Adrian Kohn, comments in “Panel Discussion,” in It’s All in the Fit: The Work of John Chamberlain (Marfa, Tex.: Chinati Foundation, 2009), pp. 244–47; Michael Fried, “New York Letter,” Art International 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1964), p. 82; Julie Yufe, “Artscene: In Brief,” Columbia Daily Spectator, May 29, 1996, p. 3; Donald Judd, “Chamberlain: Another View,” Art International 7, no. 10 (Jan. 16, 1964), p. 39; and Donald Kuspit, “Troubled Titan: John Chamberlain’s Existential Vernacular,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 8 (Apr. 1990), p. 51.

2. For likenesses to the baroque, rococo, and neoclas-sicism, see Robert Taylor, “Events in Art: Baroque Autos,” Boston Herald, Nov. 24, 1963, section 3, p. 6; David Anfam, “Chamberlain’s Gambit: ‘Cautious Maniac,’” in John Chamberlain (London: Waddington Galleries, 2002), p. 7; and Robert C. Morgan, “The Look,” Village Voice, Aug. 26, 1986, p. 83. For Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, see Barbara Rose, “How to Look at John Chamberlain’s Sculpture,” Art International 12, no. 10 (Jan. 16, 1964), p. 36; Poetter, “‘No Leaning on the Oars,’” p. 29; and Gary Indiana, “John Chamberlain’s Irregular Set,” Art in America 71, no. 10 (Nov. 1983), p. 209. And for Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, and Process art, see Barbara Rose, “On Chamberlain’s Interview,” Artforum 10, no. 6 (Feb. 1972), p. 44; Hilton Kramer, “A Rare Sculptor Who Succeeds with Color,” New York Observer, Mar. 13, 1989, p. 12; Michael Auping, “John Chamberlain,” in Art of Our Time: The Saatchi Collection, 4 vols. (London: Lund Humphries, 1984), vol. 2, p. 12; and Auping, “John Chamberlain” (1987), p. 19.

3. For Bernini, Rubens, Rodin, and van Gogh, see Irving Sandler, “Gesture and Non-Gesture in Recent Sculpture,” in Maurice Tuchman, ed., American Sculpture of the Sixties, (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967), p. 42; Poetter, “‘No Leaning on the Oars,’” p. 32; Bonnie Clearwater, oral history interview with John Chamberlain, Sarasota, Fla., Jan. 29, 1991, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, p. 83; and Nancy Princenthal, “John Chamberlain at Pace,” Art in America 77, no. 6 (June 1989), p. 165. For Picasso and Braque, see Michael McManus, “The Poetics of Process,” Artweek 17, no. 31 (Sept. 27, 1986), p. 1. For Gorky, Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning, see Auping, “John Chamberlain” (1987), p. 21; Carol Strickland, “Unshackled, Unconventional Sculptor,” New York Times, June 13, 1993, sec. 13 [“Long Island Weekly”], p. 21; Walter Hopps, foreword to New American Sculpture (Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1964), unpaginated (second page); and Bernice Rose, “Willem de  Kooning and John Chamberlain: Displaced Realities,” in De  Kooning/Chamberlain: Influence and Transformation (New York: PaceWildenstein, 2001), pp. 5–13. And for Smith, Johns, Rauschenberg, di Suvero, and Judd, see William C. Agee, “The Year of John Chamberlain,” New Criterion 6, no. 3 (Nov. 1987), p. 51; Auping, “John Chamberlain” (1984), vol. 2, p. 14; Dave Hickey, “John Chamberlain: Constant Gardener,” in John Chamberlain (Cologne: Galerie Karsten Greve, 2008), p. 267; Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 181; and Elizabeth C. Baker, “The Secret Life of John Chamberlain,” Art News 68, no. 2 (Apr. 1969), p. 51.

4. See, respectively, a video recording of a Jan. 1983 interview with Chamberlain by Michael Auping featured on Spectrum: Visual Art, WUSF-TV, 1983, Conservation Department archives, item VI83-02,

The Menil Collection, Houston, at 2:42; a video record-ing of an Artists Documentation Program inter-view with Chamberlain by Carol Mancusi-Ungaro and Helen Winkler, Mar. 27, 2000, Conservation Department archives, item TMCD-2008.007 #15, The Menil Collection, Houston, at 40:57 and 39:11; and Chamberlain, “A Statement,” 1982, in a bro-chure from John Chamberlain Sculpture: An Extended Exhibition, Dia Art Foundation, New York, Mar. 19, 1982–July 30, 1983 and Sept. 22, 1983–Feb. 23, 1985, in “John Chamberlain” vertical file, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

5. “John Chamberlain in Conversation with Klaus Ker tess,” Chinati Foundation Newsletter (Marfa, Tex.) 11 (Oct. 2006), p. 15.

6. Chamberlain, cited in “The Continuum Between, and Transformations of, Art and Design,” in Barbara Bloemink, Design ≠ Art: Functional Objects from Donald Judd to Rachel White read (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2004), p. 81; and Julie Sylvester, “Auto/Bio: Conversations with John Chamberlain,” in Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture, 1954–1985 (New York: Hudson Hill Press in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, 1986), p. 11. See also Donna De Salvo, “An Interview with John Chamberlain,” in De Salvo, Wide Point: The Photography of John Chamberlain, exh. brochure (Southampton, N.Y.: Parrish Art Museum, 1993), p. 12; and Hans Ulrich Obrist, John Chamberlain (Cologne: Walther König, 2006), p. 39.

7. “Goings On About Town,” New Yorker, Apr. 1, 1991, p. 12; and “Goings On About Town,” New Yorker, Mar. 13, 1989, p. 12.

8. See, respectively, Kirby Gookin, “John Chamberlain,” Artforum 29, no. 10 (Summer 1991), p. 108; Michael Kimmelman, “John Chamberlain,” New York Times, Mar. 3, 1989, p. C36; Gerrit Henry, “John Chamberlain,” Art News 92, no. 1 (Jan. 1993), p. 128; and Bennett Schiff, “In the Art Galleries,” New York Post, June 12, 1960, “Week-End Magazine,” p. 12.

9. Barbara Baracks, “John Chamberlain,” Artforum 14, no. 10 (Summer 1976), p. 70.

10. Klaus Kertess, “Color in the Round and Then Some: John Chamberlain’s Work, 1954–1985,” in Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture, p. 34. Note that Chamberlain did make a painted and chromium-plated steel piece titled The Bride in 1988.

11. “His sculptures invite and desire endless adjectives, but none of them can stick. His configurations are in a referential state, but their constant re-form-ing slips out of the adjectival grip; ultimately they transcend the language of analysis and description.” Kertess, “Color in the Round and Then Some,” p. 38.

52 —–53

unexpectedly tell us much about the work. When our earnest efforts to

establish parallels between Chamberlain’s objects and those of Rodin,

Smith, Kline, or de Kooning falter, the associations end up accentu-

ating the dissimilarities that go unmentioned and can be as effective

as deliberately differentiating the pieces from the outset. When our

correspondences invoke outlandish entities, the propositions convey

more than anything else our ongoing inability to make sense of the

art under examination: Swannanoa/Swannanoa II (1959/74) remains

as obscure to us as the “prehistoric mutant creature” that it “can be

read as,” and Starletta (1999) as bizarre as the “gaudy motorbike that

might be speeding along a highway in Oz” that it “looks like.”44 As our

comparisons fail one after another they make it clear that the oddity

of Chamberlain’s work endures.

Another connection that attests to our only rudimentary compre-

hension of a piece is the tiresome but perhaps inevitable correlation to

the human body—nothing else seems so familiar and accordingly an

unknown object seems to resemble nothing else quite so much. Asked

about his own words likening the art to the body, Chamberlain replied,

“If you’re putting these kinds of parts together that have a commu-

nication format, and we’re dealing with another kind of language

and another kind of meaning for that matter, [the work] has to have

things that have some relevance to what someone else understands

also, some common ground.”45 Anthropomorphic terms and concepts

amount to a compromise in the name of communication, the common

ground that we are forever hunting for or inventing as we stand before

a strange work of art. Yet we can also learn about a piece by starting

with its uncommonness, its unlikeness to the body and to everything

else. The works have their own communication format, language, and

meanings independent of what we are used to; it may be time to reflect

on those rather than throwing more comparisons at the art. And so

while Chamberlain often relies on sex as a metaphor when discussing

the construction of his objects (“the sexual decision comes in the fit-

ting of the parts,” “the assembly is a fit, and the fit is sexual”), it serves

as a useful analogy to get at another quality of the pieces as well:

“Talking about the art itself is very difficult. It’s like sex. Nobody really

talks about it, they talk around it, on the edge of it.”46 Contrary to the

work’s seemingly easygoing evocations of this and that, the difficulty

of selecting satisfactory words and comparisons should not be lost in

our verbal explanations. It now looks less like Chamberlain makes art

that resembles all manner of things we have seen and done, and more

that he makes unusual pieces that we are still only very slowly getting

to know on their own terms.

Unlike most of those who have written about his work, Cham-

berlain often makes a point of noting the inadequacies of language as

he uses it to talk about his art. “You have a fit, and you have a form,

and you have a color. And so all of these three parts are—,” he broke

off during a recent interview, unable to come up with the right verb,

“I’m running out of words.” He finished the thought by retreating to

abstract language, as he frequently does: “They’re having a good time

together, if you put them together well.”47 At first glance those vague

phrases, having a good time together and put together well, tell us next to

nothing. But like our facile comparisons to pieces by other artists and

like our impossible comparisons to prehistoric mutants and motor-

bikes in Oz, Chamberlain’s own explanations reveal that language can-

not keep pace with his objects. Around his works one finds words and

around those words, now, even more words. The continuing failure of

all this language suggests that Chamberlain’s art might be unlike what

you see when you turn away from these words and look around.

fig 36 John ChamberlainThe Bride, 1988Painted and chromium-plated steel85 × 47¼ × 44⅞ inches (216 × 120 × 114 cm)Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

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12. Hawthorne and Swannanoa (both 1959) are the only pieces Sylvester indicates in her catalogue raisonné as having been included in Chamberlain’s exhibi-tion at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, Jan. 5–30, 1960. However, a list of exhibited works from the archives of the gallery includes eight additional pieces: Wellsroot, Waller, Zaar, Johnny Bird, Arcadia, Redwing, Wildroot, and S (all 1959). Sylvester dates Redwing to 1960, but an inventory card from the gallery archives states “1959.” See “Exhibition: January 5 to January 30” [list of exhibited works], box 8 “1960-A,” and the inventory card for Redwing, work no. 4535, Martha Jackson Archives, University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery, The State University of New York; and Sylvester, “Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture,” in Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture, pp. 48–53, 58 (jccr 26, 28, 29, 31, 33–37, 56). Judd wrote about Chamberlain’s work at least nine times: D[onald] J[udd], “John Chamberlain,” Arts Magazine 34, no. 5 (Feb. 1960), p. 57; D[onald] J[udd], “John Chamberlain,” Arts Magazine 36, no. 6 (Mar. 1962), p. 48; Judd, “Chamberlain: Another View,” pp. 38–39; [Donald Judd], “John Chamberlain,” in “Young Artists at the Fair and at Lincoln Center,” Art in America 52, no. 4 (Aug. 1964), p. 117 (reprinted in Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975 [Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975], pp. 130–31); D[onald] J[udd], “John Chamberlain,” Arts Magazine 38, no. 10 (Sept. 1964), p. 71; Donald Judd, “Local History,” Arts Yearbook 7 [“New York: The Art World”] (1964), pp. 31–32; Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 [“Contemporary Sculpture”] (1965), p. 82; Donald Judd, “John Chamberlain,” in 7 Sculptors (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania [1966]), pp. 8–9; and Donald Judd, “John Chamberlain,” John Chamberlain: New Sculpture (New York: Pace Gallery, 1989), pp. i–xi.

13. J[udd], “John Chamberlain” (1960), p. 57.

14. The nineteen Chamberlain works include the ten pieces exhibited in the January 1960 Martha Jackson Gallery show as well as nine others: Shortstop (1958), Nutcracker (1960), two untitled works from 1958, two untitled works from 1958–59, H.A.W.K. (1959), Manitou (1959), and Summer Sequence (1959). Sylvester, “Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture,” pp. 46–53 (jccr 15, 21, 24, 25, 27, 30, 32, 38, 39). Judd probably did not intend to draw similarities between de Kooning’s paintings and at least twenty-one of Chamberlain’s early objects, without the colored sheet metal from automobile bodies and elsewhere, such as Calliope (1954) and Cord (1957). See Sylvester, “Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture,” pp. 44–47 (jccr 1–14, 16–20, 22, 23). The eleven de Kooning paintings are Woman as Landscape, Composition, Street Corner Incident, Interchange, and Gotham News (all 1955); Easter

Monday (1955–56); and Backyard on Tenth Street, First of January, Saturday Night, The Time of the Fire, and July (all 1956). See “Willem de Kooning Works, 1954–1955” and “Willem de Kooning Works, 1956–1957” binders, Archives of the Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York.

15. “[Chamberlain’s sculpture] is redundant. . . . The folded sheet metal from automobile bodies is volu-minous, apparently somewhat unmanageable, and constitutes an essential form that is less than its bulk requires. It is grandiloquent, proliferating exhaust pipes, rods, and billows of metal. . . . The verbosity implies the inexhaustible supply of mate-rial.” J[udd], “John Chamberlain,” (1960), p. 57. Judd wrote in this review that Chamberlain’s color is the “unique aspect” of his work, and so, one assumes, he must have thought it unlike the color in de Kooning’s Gotham News.

16. Ibid.

17. De  Kooning covered paintings in progress with newspaper in an effort to slow their drying. Peeling the paper off left reversed images of the assorted pages, which are especially visible in the whitish areas.

18. Judd, “Chamberlain: Another View,” p. 38.

19. Also notice the change from opulence and formation to voluminousness. Judd’s next sentences locate Chamberlain’s interest in the pace of de Kooning’s mark-making, a new topic of discussion: “Having painted a little himself, he was impressed by the speed with which a painting could be started. He neither liked the methodical labor of sculpture nor its effect.” Ibid.

20. See [Judd], “John Chamberlain” (Aug. 1964), p. 117; J[udd], “John Chamberlain” (Sept. 1964), p. 71; Judd, “Local History,” pp. 31–32; Judd, “Specific Objects,” p. 82; and Judd, “John Chamberlain” [1966], pp. 8–9. Judd’s final 1989 essay on Chamberlain’s art reprinted all that he had previously published on the work except his initial 1960 review, which pro-posed parallels to de Kooning’s paintings. Other sections of this 1989 text refer to de Kooning but only in order to contrast his paintings with those of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. See Judd, “John Chamberlain” (1989), pp. i–xi; and J[udd], “John Chamberlain” (1960), p. 57.

21. See Sylvester, “Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture,” pp. 63, 68, 74 (jccr 83, 117, 151). Craig Rember, Collections Manager, Judd Foundation, said that to his knowledge Judd never owned any works by de Kooning. Letter to the author, Apr. 27, 2011.

22. Sylvester, “Auto/Bio,” p. 11. See also Clearwater, oral history interview, pp. 22–23; and Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” Little Review 6, no. 5 (Sept. 1919), pp. 62–64; 6, no. 6 (Oct. 1919),

pp. 57–64; 6, no. 7 (Nov. 1919), pp. 55–60; and 6, no. 8 (Dec. 1919), pp. 68–72. For additional commentary on the importance of Fenollosa’s essay to Chamberlain, see Auping, “John Chamberlain” (1984), vol. 2, p. 16; Dieter Schwarz, “To Create the Flow,” in Schwarz, ed., John Chamberlain, Papier Paradisio: Drawings, Collages, Reliefs, Paintings (Winterthur, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 2005), pp. 11–12; and Dieter Schwarz, “Staples, Cuts, Sprays, Imprints, and Calligraphy: Chamberlain on Paper,” It’s All in the Fit, p. 58.

23. “John Chamberlain,” in The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in Conversation with 27 of His Subjects (New York: A.R.T. Press, 1997), p. 526. By my reading, Chamberlain misconstrues Fenollosa’s arguments to a certain extent. The claim is not so much that an exact match exists between a character’s pictorial content (as an image) and its symbolic content (as a word), but rather the more fundamental point that Chinese characters have pictorial content and that this pictorial content tends toward actions more than stationary things. “The earlier forms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conven-tional modifications. . . . Examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes.” Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Character” (Oct. 1919), p. 58.

24. Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Charac ter” (Oct. 1919), p. 58. Chinese characters added.

25. Ibid., p. 72. Chinese characters added.

26. Ibid., p. 57.

27. Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Charac ter” (Sept. 1919), p. 64; and Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Character” (Oct. 1919), p. 57. See also Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Character” (Nov. 1919), p. 57.

28. Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Charac-ter” (Oct. 1919), p. 58. Chinese characters added.

29. Most scholars agree that Fenollosa failed to describe casual everyday reading of Chinese, say, as one reads a newspaper. That being said, some argue in favor of considering characters pictorially when conduct-ing hermeneutic analysis of poetry and other texts. Doing so undoubtedly adds layers of meaning to the writing, which was something Fenollosa celebrated. “Thus a word, instead of growing gradually poorer and poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more rich from age to age, almost consciously luminous. Its uses in national philosophy and history, in biography and in poetry, throw about it a nimbus of meanings. These center about the graphic sym-bol. . . . Ideographs are like blood-stained battle flags to an old campaigner.” Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Character” (Nov. 1919), p. 59.

For wider discussion of Fenollosa’s essay, see Joseph Riddel, “Decentering the Image: The ‘Project’ of ‘American’ Poetics?” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 332–40; Haun Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 1–40; and Nam-See Kim, “Grammatologie der Schrift des Fremden. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Untersuchung westli-cher Rezeption chinesischer Schrift” (doctoral dis-sertation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2009), pp. 215–29.

30. Paul Gardner, “Do Titles Really Matter?” Art News 91, no. 2 (Feb. 1992), p. 95.

31. Michael Auping, “An Interview with John Chamberlain,” Art Papers 7, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1983), p. 2.

32. Clearwater, oral history interview, p. 24.

33. Gardner, “Do Titles Really Matter?,” p. 95; and Obrist, John Chamberlain, p. 111.

34. Obrist, John Chamberlain, p. 111. The full passage reads: “And the titling has nothing to do with the object, any more than, for example: Hans is your name, you’ve had it all your life, you’re quite used to it, everybody would know you . . . Fine! But there is no connection, unless ‘I’m named after my grandfa-ther and my great-grandfather, who was also named Hans.’ It’s a long name in the family. But there’s nothing specific about the word ‘Hans’ with the person other than everybody’s gotten used to it” (pp. 111–12).

35. Gardner, “Do Titles Really Matter?,” p. 95; and Obrist, John Chamberlain, p. 111. See also Sylvester, “Auto/Bio,” p. 11.

36. Obrist, John Chamberlain, p. 69. See also Auping, “An Interview,” p. 2. The strange-looking title Coo Wha Zee (1962) may play on the last name of artist Christo Coetzee, with whom Chamberlain exhib-ited in New Media–New Forms I at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, June 6–24, 1960. Stressed Desserts (1990–91) is a curious palindrome. The format-ting and spacing of SWIFT WI T (1979) empha-

size that the word swift contains the letters of the word wit. As for puns in Chamberlain’s titles, some examples include Chickmeat of 1979 (possibly a reversal of the slang meet chicks), Coup d’Soup of 1980 (“Coupe de Ville,” “cup of soup”), Haute Cinq of 1990 (the American slang high five translated lit-erally into French), Cone Yak of 1990 (“cognac”), and Feminine Mystaque of 1996 (“mystique,” “mistake”). See also Gardner, “Do Titles Really Matter?,” p. 95. Chamberlain devised what he called triple or three-way puns as well, which demonstrate some consideration for the meanings that result from his combinations of words: “I wanted to have titles that were ambiguous—is that the right word? It’s like a three-way pun; it could be three different things, like Toasted Hitlers [or] Electra Under Lace [Toasted Hitlers (from E. J.) of 1977, Electra Underlace of 1979]. These things don’t really mean anything, but in your imagination . . . Don’t you remember that there was Toasted Hitlers? It’s a form of bread that’s toasted. Hitler was toasted. But it could be a des[s]ert, or it could be somebody’s breakfast.” “And not only that, it could also just look good. It could mean noth-ing.” Obrist, John Chamberlain, p. 111, ellipsis in original. Commenting on the same two titles else-where, Chamberlain explained, “You recognize the words but you can’t quite figure out the meaning. The meaning could go this way and that way. And I really liked that. Like Toasted Hitlers. Not necessar-ily a Danish. And he did burn. Electra Underlace—the words are nice and they also have the right number of syllables. . . . The title could mean half a dozen things.” Francesca Esmay and Kohn, interview with Chamberlain, audio recording, Mar. 14, 2006, New York, side A. See also Artists Documentation Program interview, at 34:05, and “Rhyme and Reason: A Limited Lexicon,” pp. 230–35 in this volume.

37. Sylvester, “Auto/Bio,” p. 11.

38. “A ‘blonde day’ may mean something different to each of us, but it nevertheless has different pos-sibilities than a ‘brunette night’—not to mention a ‘salt and pepper afternoon.’ . . . The act of fitting creates new possibilities for seeing the words differ-ently and for seeing in their combination something that could not previously be visualized.” David J. Getsy, “Immoderate Couplings: Transformations and Genders in John Chamberlain’s Work,” in It’s All in the Fit, p. 203.

39. Esmay and Kohn, interview with Chamberlain, side B.

40. Sylvester, “Auto/Bio,” p. 12.

41. See ibid., p. 12; Auping, “John Chamberlain,” in 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes (Fort Worth, Tex.: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2007), p. 97; and Dan Tooker, teacher’s notes for Contemporary Artists at Work: Sculptors (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Films, 1978), p. 28. See also John Chamberlain: Modern Sculpture (Inner-Tube Video, 1999), at 46:05.

42. Auping, “John Chamberlain” (2007), p. 97. See also Edward Leffingwell, “The Irregular Set: An Interview with John Chamberlain,” in John Chamberlain: Sculp ture and Work on Paper (Youngstown, Ohio: Butler Institute of American Art, 1983), p. 18; and Sylvester, “Auto/Bio,” p. 12.

43. Robert Blitzer, instructor’s edition of Introductory Algebra for College Students, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1998), p. 695; and Raymond Jeanloz, “The Hidden Shore,” Sciences 33, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1993), p. 29.

44. Kuspit, “Troubled Titan,” p. 51; David Ebony, “John Chamberlain at PaceWildenstein,” Art in Amer ica 88, no. 9 (Sept. 2000), p. 148.

45. Spectrum: Visual Art interview, at 19:25. Auping’s question to Chamberlain was: “I’ve noticed when we have had conversations about your sculpture, you often use terms relating to the human body like ‘stance’ or ‘nervous system.’ How does that relate to the sculpture? How do you mean ‘stance,’ or what effect on the nervous system do you want to have?” (at 19:08).

46. Chamberlain, “A Statement”; Chamberlain in con-ver sation with Auping, Oct. 1, 1981, cited in Auping, “John Chamberlain” (1982), p. 12; and Esmay and Kohn, interview with Chamberlain, side A.

47. “John Chamberlain in Conversation with Klaus Kertess,” p. 17.

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12. Hawthorne and Swannanoa (both 1959) are the only pieces Sylvester indicates in her catalogue raisonné as having been included in Chamberlain’s exhibi-tion at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, Jan. 5–30, 1960. However, a list of exhibited works from the archives of the gallery includes eight additional pieces: Wellsroot, Waller, Zaar, Johnny Bird, Arcadia, Redwing, Wildroot, and S (all 1959). Sylvester dates Redwing to 1960, but an inventory card from the gallery archives states “1959.” See “Exhibition: January 5 to January 30” [list of exhibited works], box 8 “1960-A,” and the inventory card for Redwing, work no. 4535, Martha Jackson Archives, University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery, The State University of New York; and Sylvester, “Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture,” in Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture, pp. 48–53, 58 (jccr 26, 28, 29, 31, 33–37, 56). Judd wrote about Chamberlain’s work at least nine times: D[onald] J[udd], “John Chamberlain,” Arts Magazine 34, no. 5 (Feb. 1960), p. 57; D[onald] J[udd], “John Chamberlain,” Arts Magazine 36, no. 6 (Mar. 1962), p. 48; Judd, “Chamberlain: Another View,” pp. 38–39; [Donald Judd], “John Chamberlain,” in “Young Artists at the Fair and at Lincoln Center,” Art in America 52, no. 4 (Aug. 1964), p. 117 (reprinted in Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975 [Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975], pp. 130–31); D[onald] J[udd], “John Chamberlain,” Arts Magazine 38, no. 10 (Sept. 1964), p. 71; Donald Judd, “Local History,” Arts Yearbook 7 [“New York: The Art World”] (1964), pp. 31–32; Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 [“Contemporary Sculpture”] (1965), p. 82; Donald Judd, “John Chamberlain,” in 7 Sculptors (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania [1966]), pp. 8–9; and Donald Judd, “John Chamberlain,” John Chamberlain: New Sculpture (New York: Pace Gallery, 1989), pp. i–xi.

13. J[udd], “John Chamberlain” (1960), p. 57.

14. The nineteen Chamberlain works include the ten pieces exhibited in the January 1960 Martha Jackson Gallery show as well as nine others: Shortstop (1958), Nutcracker (1960), two untitled works from 1958, two untitled works from 1958–59, H.A.W.K. (1959), Manitou (1959), and Summer Sequence (1959). Sylvester, “Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture,” pp. 46–53 (jccr 15, 21, 24, 25, 27, 30, 32, 38, 39). Judd probably did not intend to draw similarities between de Kooning’s paintings and at least twenty-one of Chamberlain’s early objects, without the colored sheet metal from automobile bodies and elsewhere, such as Calliope (1954) and Cord (1957). See Sylvester, “Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture,” pp. 44–47 (jccr 1–14, 16–20, 22, 23). The eleven de Kooning paintings are Woman as Landscape, Composition, Street Corner Incident, Interchange, and Gotham News (all 1955); Easter

Monday (1955–56); and Backyard on Tenth Street, First of January, Saturday Night, The Time of the Fire, and July (all 1956). See “Willem de Kooning Works, 1954–1955” and “Willem de Kooning Works, 1956–1957” binders, Archives of the Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York.

15. “[Chamberlain’s sculpture] is redundant. . . . The folded sheet metal from automobile bodies is volu-minous, apparently somewhat unmanageable, and constitutes an essential form that is less than its bulk requires. It is grandiloquent, proliferating exhaust pipes, rods, and billows of metal. . . . The verbosity implies the inexhaustible supply of mate-rial.” J[udd], “John Chamberlain,” (1960), p. 57. Judd wrote in this review that Chamberlain’s color is the “unique aspect” of his work, and so, one assumes, he must have thought it unlike the color in de Kooning’s Gotham News.

16. Ibid.

17. De  Kooning covered paintings in progress with newspaper in an effort to slow their drying. Peeling the paper off left reversed images of the assorted pages, which are especially visible in the whitish areas.

18. Judd, “Chamberlain: Another View,” p. 38.

19. Also notice the change from opulence and formation to voluminousness. Judd’s next sentences locate Chamberlain’s interest in the pace of de Kooning’s mark-making, a new topic of discussion: “Having painted a little himself, he was impressed by the speed with which a painting could be started. He neither liked the methodical labor of sculpture nor its effect.” Ibid.

20. See [Judd], “John Chamberlain” (Aug. 1964), p. 117; J[udd], “John Chamberlain” (Sept. 1964), p. 71; Judd, “Local History,” pp. 31–32; Judd, “Specific Objects,” p. 82; and Judd, “John Chamberlain” [1966], pp. 8–9. Judd’s final 1989 essay on Chamberlain’s art reprinted all that he had previously published on the work except his initial 1960 review, which pro-posed parallels to de Kooning’s paintings. Other sections of this 1989 text refer to de Kooning but only in order to contrast his paintings with those of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. See Judd, “John Chamberlain” (1989), pp. i–xi; and J[udd], “John Chamberlain” (1960), p. 57.

21. See Sylvester, “Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture,” pp. 63, 68, 74 (jccr 83, 117, 151). Craig Rember, Collections Manager, Judd Foundation, said that to his knowledge Judd never owned any works by de Kooning. Letter to the author, Apr. 27, 2011.

22. Sylvester, “Auto/Bio,” p. 11. See also Clearwater, oral history interview, pp. 22–23; and Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” Little Review 6, no. 5 (Sept. 1919), pp. 62–64; 6, no. 6 (Oct. 1919),

pp. 57–64; 6, no. 7 (Nov. 1919), pp. 55–60; and 6, no. 8 (Dec. 1919), pp. 68–72. For additional commentary on the importance of Fenollosa’s essay to Chamberlain, see Auping, “John Chamberlain” (1984), vol. 2, p. 16; Dieter Schwarz, “To Create the Flow,” in Schwarz, ed., John Chamberlain, Papier Paradisio: Drawings, Collages, Reliefs, Paintings (Winterthur, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 2005), pp. 11–12; and Dieter Schwarz, “Staples, Cuts, Sprays, Imprints, and Calligraphy: Chamberlain on Paper,” It’s All in the Fit, p. 58.

23. “John Chamberlain,” in The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in Conversation with 27 of His Subjects (New York: A.R.T. Press, 1997), p. 526. By my reading, Chamberlain misconstrues Fenollosa’s arguments to a certain extent. The claim is not so much that an exact match exists between a character’s pictorial content (as an image) and its symbolic content (as a word), but rather the more fundamental point that Chinese characters have pictorial content and that this pictorial content tends toward actions more than stationary things. “The earlier forms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conven-tional modifications. . . . Examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes.” Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Character” (Oct. 1919), p. 58.

24. Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Charac ter” (Oct. 1919), p. 58. Chinese characters added.

25. Ibid., p. 72. Chinese characters added.

26. Ibid., p. 57.

27. Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Charac ter” (Sept. 1919), p. 64; and Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Character” (Oct. 1919), p. 57. See also Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Character” (Nov. 1919), p. 57.

28. Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Charac-ter” (Oct. 1919), p. 58. Chinese characters added.

29. Most scholars agree that Fenollosa failed to describe casual everyday reading of Chinese, say, as one reads a newspaper. That being said, some argue in favor of considering characters pictorially when conduct-ing hermeneutic analysis of poetry and other texts. Doing so undoubtedly adds layers of meaning to the writing, which was something Fenollosa celebrated. “Thus a word, instead of growing gradually poorer and poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more rich from age to age, almost consciously luminous. Its uses in national philosophy and history, in biography and in poetry, throw about it a nimbus of meanings. These center about the graphic sym-bol. . . . Ideographs are like blood-stained battle flags to an old campaigner.” Fenollosa and Pound, “The Chinese Written Character” (Nov. 1919), p. 59.

For wider discussion of Fenollosa’s essay, see Joseph Riddel, “Decentering the Image: The ‘Project’ of ‘American’ Poetics?” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 332–40; Haun Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 1–40; and Nam-See Kim, “Grammatologie der Schrift des Fremden. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Untersuchung westli-cher Rezeption chinesischer Schrift” (doctoral dis-sertation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2009), pp. 215–29.

30. Paul Gardner, “Do Titles Really Matter?” Art News 91, no. 2 (Feb. 1992), p. 95.

31. Michael Auping, “An Interview with John Chamberlain,” Art Papers 7, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1983), p. 2.

32. Clearwater, oral history interview, p. 24.

33. Gardner, “Do Titles Really Matter?,” p. 95; and Obrist, John Chamberlain, p. 111.

34. Obrist, John Chamberlain, p. 111. The full passage reads: “And the titling has nothing to do with the object, any more than, for example: Hans is your name, you’ve had it all your life, you’re quite used to it, everybody would know you . . . Fine! But there is no connection, unless ‘I’m named after my grandfa-ther and my great-grandfather, who was also named Hans.’ It’s a long name in the family. But there’s nothing specific about the word ‘Hans’ with the person other than everybody’s gotten used to it” (pp. 111–12).

35. Gardner, “Do Titles Really Matter?,” p. 95; and Obrist, John Chamberlain, p. 111. See also Sylvester, “Auto/Bio,” p. 11.

36. Obrist, John Chamberlain, p. 69. See also Auping, “An Interview,” p. 2. The strange-looking title Coo Wha Zee (1962) may play on the last name of artist Christo Coetzee, with whom Chamberlain exhib-ited in New Media–New Forms I at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, June 6–24, 1960. Stressed Desserts (1990–91) is a curious palindrome. The format-ting and spacing of SWIFT WI T (1979) empha-

size that the word swift contains the letters of the word wit. As for puns in Chamberlain’s titles, some examples include Chickmeat of 1979 (possibly a reversal of the slang meet chicks), Coup d’Soup of 1980 (“Coupe de Ville,” “cup of soup”), Haute Cinq of 1990 (the American slang high five translated lit-erally into French), Cone Yak of 1990 (“cognac”), and Feminine Mystaque of 1996 (“mystique,” “mistake”). See also Gardner, “Do Titles Really Matter?,” p. 95. Chamberlain devised what he called triple or three-way puns as well, which demonstrate some consideration for the meanings that result from his combinations of words: “I wanted to have titles that were ambiguous—is that the right word? It’s like a three-way pun; it could be three different things, like Toasted Hitlers [or] Electra Under Lace [Toasted Hitlers (from E. J.) of 1977, Electra Underlace of 1979]. These things don’t really mean anything, but in your imagination . . . Don’t you remember that there was Toasted Hitlers? It’s a form of bread that’s toasted. Hitler was toasted. But it could be a des[s]ert, or it could be somebody’s breakfast.” “And not only that, it could also just look good. It could mean noth-ing.” Obrist, John Chamberlain, p. 111, ellipsis in original. Commenting on the same two titles else-where, Chamberlain explained, “You recognize the words but you can’t quite figure out the meaning. The meaning could go this way and that way. And I really liked that. Like Toasted Hitlers. Not necessar-ily a Danish. And he did burn. Electra Underlace—the words are nice and they also have the right number of syllables. . . . The title could mean half a dozen things.” Francesca Esmay and Kohn, interview with Chamberlain, audio recording, Mar. 14, 2006, New York, side A. See also Artists Documentation Program interview, at 34:05, and “Rhyme and Reason: A Limited Lexicon,” pp. 230–35 in this volume.

37. Sylvester, “Auto/Bio,” p. 11.

38. “A ‘blonde day’ may mean something different to each of us, but it nevertheless has different pos-sibilities than a ‘brunette night’—not to mention a ‘salt and pepper afternoon.’ . . . The act of fitting creates new possibilities for seeing the words differ-ently and for seeing in their combination something that could not previously be visualized.” David J. Getsy, “Immoderate Couplings: Transformations and Genders in John Chamberlain’s Work,” in It’s All in the Fit, p. 203.

39. Esmay and Kohn, interview with Chamberlain, side B.

40. Sylvester, “Auto/Bio,” p. 12.

41. See ibid., p. 12; Auping, “John Chamberlain,” in 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes (Fort Worth, Tex.: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2007), p. 97; and Dan Tooker, teacher’s notes for Contemporary Artists at Work: Sculptors (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Films, 1978), p. 28. See also John Chamberlain: Modern Sculpture (Inner-Tube Video, 1999), at 46:05.

42. Auping, “John Chamberlain” (2007), p. 97. See also Edward Leffingwell, “The Irregular Set: An Interview with John Chamberlain,” in John Chamberlain: Sculp ture and Work on Paper (Youngstown, Ohio: Butler Institute of American Art, 1983), p. 18; and Sylvester, “Auto/Bio,” p. 12.

43. Robert Blitzer, instructor’s edition of Introductory Algebra for College Students, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1998), p. 695; and Raymond Jeanloz, “The Hidden Shore,” Sciences 33, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1993), p. 29.

44. Kuspit, “Troubled Titan,” p. 51; David Ebony, “John Chamberlain at PaceWildenstein,” Art in Amer ica 88, no. 9 (Sept. 2000), p. 148.

45. Spectrum: Visual Art interview, at 19:25. Auping’s question to Chamberlain was: “I’ve noticed when we have had conversations about your sculpture, you often use terms relating to the human body like ‘stance’ or ‘nervous system.’ How does that relate to the sculpture? How do you mean ‘stance,’ or what effect on the nervous system do you want to have?” (at 19:08).

46. Chamberlain, “A Statement”; Chamberlain in con-ver sation with Auping, Oct. 1, 1981, cited in Auping, “John Chamberlain” (1982), p. 12; and Esmay and Kohn, interview with Chamberlain, side A.

47. “John Chamberlain in Conversation with Klaus Kertess,” p. 17.