In a career extending over six decades, roving through big cities and quiet towns of the United States, artist John Chamberlain (1927–2011) generated a radical visual world in which motion, pressure, and color crystalize within manufactured objects. He is widely recognized for sculptures made from crushed automobile parts, a material the artist continually revisited throughout his career, though additional bodies of work, ranging in scale from monumental to miniature, are composed of foam, foil, resin, paper, steel, and dismantled appliances, amongst others. Developed in collaboration with Dia Art Foundation, THE TIGHTER THEY’RE WOUND, THE HARDER THEY UNRAVEL is the first institutional survey devoted to John Chamberlain in over a decade. The exhibition, which spreads across the museum’s three floors is divided into five groupings: The End and The Beginning; The Sixties and The Seventies; Foam and Galvanized Steel; Photographs; and The Line Up, Miniatures, and Models. Together, these categories tell a story of a relentlessly independent artist whose key motivation in artmaking was “to find out what you don’t know.” Pursuits of the unfamiliar governed Chamberlain’s life since childhood. Fascinated by aviation, Chamberlain learned to fly a plane at 11 and joined the United States Navy while underage during World War II. After a stint as a hairdresser, Chamberlain briefly enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he became acquainted with techniques of Abstract Expressionism, and later, Black Mountain College, where he began a lifelong engagement with words and poetry. These eclectic origins produced an artist who resisted categorization in an age of artistic movements, both eliding and incorporating contemporary philosophies of Pop Art, Action painting, and Minimalism. For Chamberlain, art was a means of engineering irregularities into equilibrium. With a characteristic irreverence and deadpan humor, he described his signature sculptural technique as “articulate wadding.”
These varied experiments in squeezing, folding, and compressing populate the galleries of the Aspen Art Museum. Devoted to towering late works placed in dialogue with some of Chamberlain’s rarely exhibited earliest sculptures, the museum’s second floor gallery merges a practice’s beginning and end. Across the ground floor, works primarily on loan from Dia Art Foundation mingle along East Hyman Avenue in a surreal street scene. Chamberlain’s foam works, considered a radical departure when first exhibited in 1965, congregate in an adjacent gallery. In the museum’s Lower Level, visitors are encouraged to immerse themselves in projections of Chamberlain’s psychedelic Wide-Lux photographs. Chamberlain’s camera was a near-constant companion, passively shooting panoramas from hip level. The result is a collection of disorienting quotidian scenes, as well as luminous shots of the artist’s life on the road, all of which mirror the alluring warp of his sculptures. This leads to a gallery devoted to Chamberlain’s miniatures, providing a bird’s-eye view of the artist’s material manipulations. On the occasion of the exhibition, Urs Fischer has produced a new artist book: The Tighter They’re Wound, The Harder They Unravel: John Chamberlain Against The World . The publication is a companion to the show, and visitors are encouraged to take a copy. In his introduction to the book, Fischer writes that “Artworks make us see the world in a new light. We associate.” As such, the book sees Chamberlain placed in dialogue with artistic predecessors, peers, and those who might be “descendants.”
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