From Auacity to Pompier

...What we are given instead is a slick, secondhand, assembly-line version of the kind of art he was producing at first-hand, with ever so much more feeling and power, five years ago...

...Where their work was open and airy and elegant, his was closed, tight and forthright...

...And there was ample reason then to admire what he had already produced, and to look forward to what he could be expected to produce in the future...

...Thus, many sculptors find themselves in the unhappy position of a rhetorician who knows that it is his own improvised persiflage, rather than the intrinsic merit of the idea it ostensibly serves, which really counts...

...Where Chamberlain seems to have gotten completely side-tracked by one of the least important aspects of his own work, Stankiewicz has been able to accommodate the humorous aspect of his style while strengthening its purely sculptural momentum...

...At first glance, therefore, one responded to a certain tension in his work between its sophisticated esthetic intention and the unesthetic associations of the material he used to implement it...

...One of these sculptors is John Chamberlain, whose exhibition this month at the Castelli Gallery shows us a very strong, gifted, initially audacious artist utterly bemused by his own rhetoric and hence out of touch with his own artistic resources...

...This means that—at least in theory—all manner of objects and materials, no matter how outlandish, can be incorporated into the construction without violating its sculptural integrity...

...At the time, New York could boast of a flourishing Constructivist tradition of its own...

...Stankiewicz's exhibition, which closed at the Stable Gallery just as Chamberlain's was opening at Castelli's, reaffirmed his position as an artist who is both extraordinarily intelligent and cleareyed about his own work...

...As long ago as 1912, Umberto Boccioni suggested in his "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture" that it was no longer necessary to employ "one material for the entire sculptural ensemble that even 20 different materials can compete in a single work," and among the materials he recommended were "glass, wood, cardboard, iron, cement, horsehair, leather, cloth, mirrors, electric lights, etc...

...Four or five years ago Chamberlain was on everybody's list as one of the most interesting of the younger Constructivist sculptors on the New York scene...

...The problem has proved to be particularly acute for sculptors working in the Constructivist tradition...

...If, as is usually the case, the device itself has only a cosmetic, decorative function in the work and contributes little or nothing to its basic structural conception, then the likelihood of its turning overnight into something déjà vu is complete...

...I hope to discuss Smith in detail in these pages when a large survey of his new work comes to New York some months hence, but for the moment I cannot refrain from invoking his copious achievement as a measure to be borne in mind when confronting the more vociferously promoted Wunderkinder on the current scene...

...One's sense of Chamberlain's failure is all the greater, perhaps, because both Smith and Stankiewicz have lately exhibited new work that sustains and, in Smith's case, even advances their earlier reputations...

...In the intervening half-century, but particularly in the past decade, these and still more surprising materials—items of apparel, stuffed animals, and manufactured products straight from the hardware shop and the grocery store—have become familiar accoutrements in showings of vanguard sculpture and collage...

...The audacity of the original has here been eclipsed by a style unbearably superficial and pompier...

...Though deeply indebted to European precedents, particularly those of Picasso and Gonzalez, the New York group had —in the work of David Smith, among the older artists, and Richard Stankiewicz among the younger— clearly established an esthetic ambience of its own...

...The exhibition at the Stable Gallery gives us fewer of those visual doubles-entendres which had earlier been a staple of his production, and shows a greater emphasis on a purer, more exalted and disinterested imagery...

...It showed us an artist who, as Clement Greenberg remarked in an interesting essay for the exhibition catalogue, "remains as adventurous as ever, and if anything has become even more prolific...

...The tendency now is to assume that virtually anything can be incorporated into a sculptural construction, since there is no theoretical basis for denying its artistic viability nor any barrier of taste to prevent its sale...

...A device that provokes hilarity, dismay or outright shock on a first encounter is very likely, the second time around, to look a bit tame and expected...

...But what is remarkable about most of this new sculpture is how essentially conservative it remains in structural conception...

...As Chamberlain's reputation has prospered, he has apparently been able to abandon the use of actual automobile wrecks for his material and now employs thinner, more elegant metal sheets which are sprayed with the kind of color—at once garish, "expensive" and effete—that would make even the most shameless automaker in Detroit blush with embarrassment...

...His exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art this season, though scandalously ignored by the New York press, came as a reminder of his preëminent position not only in American sculpture but on the international art scene...

...Fortunately, his sense of humor was equal to the task, and he was fortunate, too, in having a sense of sculptural detail sufficiently rigorous and exact to sustain the humor while never allowing it to become the dominant interest of his work...

...Joinery, whether the means employed is nailing, gluing or welding, is the governing syntactical principle...

...He seemed, at one stroke, to have successfully reintroduced both color and monolithic form into a sculptural genre that had long forfeited them for other goals...

...Chamberlain has, however, chosen to dwell on the most superficial aspect of his own imagery—its visual association with automobile bodies, both wrecked and intact...

...This has led, in the current exhibition, to an almost farcical denouement...

...But an interest of this sort, so heavily indebted to extraesthetic associations that would themselves be dissipated as soon as the artist had converted his raw material into a consistent imagery of his own, was bound to be shortlived...

...What remained was the promise of a multi-chromatic Constructivism that could re-establish monolithic form on a new basis...

...Such unfettered choice in the realm of sculptural materials might have been expected to enlarge the esthetic possibilities of Constructivism to a significant degree...

...The purely sculptural problems that were posed in his earlier work have simply been lost sight of...

...A purely sculptural momentum that can accommodate and utilize whatever materials or ideas come to hand is what has distinguished David Smith's oeuvre for over 30 years now...

...Indeed, there seems to be a law at work here—a law long familiar to copywriters and demagogues—that the proliferation of rhetorical extravagance increases in direct proportion to the thinness and conventionality of the idea it is made to serve...

...Where his predecessors had based their construction for the most part on slender, linear masses, and tended to regard their work as a form of drawing-in-space, Chamberlain employed broad sheets of colored metal, which were bent, buckled and otherwise "modeled" into a constructed three-dimensional simulacrum of a painterly surface...

...And anyone who reads for very long in the windy, arcane prose that is commonly lavished upon each successive "innovation" in this field by its official sponsors is likely to come away with the impression that we are in fact living through a period of prolific and unparalleled invention...

...In his new work Stankiewicz's own interest in what might be called the comedy of his means has diminished...

...Chamberlain seemed a logical successor to these artists, at once establishing his mastery of the direct-metal medium and his independence in the way he proposed to use it...

...Whereas David Smith had, over a period of three decades, brought Constructivism to the point where it could assimilate practically the whole range of modern pictorial styles, from the most austere geometricism to the most symbolical Surrealism, and Stankiewicz had shown a particular virtuosity in incorporating ready-made industrial parts into a style at once brilliantly witty and rigorously formal, Chamberlain addressed his art exclusively to a sculptural imagery that effectively simulated the dynamics of Abstract Expressionist painting, especially de Kooning's...

...Unlike the more venerable modes of sculpture, in which the artist, if he is a carver, chips away from the monolith (stone or wood) or, if he is a modeler, builds up the monolith (out of clay or wax) bit by bit, Constructivist sculpture is put together out of discrete components...

...Taking a hint perhaps from Stankiewicz's use of boiler plates, Chamberlain used, as his principal material, the crushed metal bodies of abandoned automobiles...

...One's judgment of Chamberlain's technical mastery has proved to be correct, but his esthetic independence has turned out to be illusory...

...The objects and materials from which it is constructed, and the use of which is often the artist's sole claim to distinction, very often function as a kind of rhetoric altogether extrinsic to the basic sculptural grammar...

...Stankiewicz had from the beginning been quick to see that there was something inherently humorous in the practice of using found industrial parts—hot-water boilers, plumbing fixtures and the like—as serious sculptural components, and rather than shy away from their comical incongruities, he chose to emphasize and enlarge upon them...