TOMAHAWK NOLAN
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN, 1965
So.... its Car parts. Cut up. Bent. Crushed. Welded. And somehow, the longer you look, the less it feels like wreckage. It starts to get elegant on you. Annoyingly elegant. Chamberlain said, look at your bed in the morning. Look at towels thrown in the bathroom. All crumpled up. Not so different from his work. Which is a wild thing to say about mangled car metal. But he's right. He's not thinking: crash. He's thinking: fold. Weight. Color. Pressure. This thing pushing against that thing. Hard metal acting soft. Chamberlain is taking Abstract Expressionism off the wall. Pollock, de Kooning, Kline — the gesture was the whole thing. The body in motion. The mark as evidence. Chamberlain says: okay. What if the gesture is a crushed fender? What if the brushstroke weighs forty pounds? Same energy. Different weapon. And the car is not innocent material. This is postwar America's favorite object. Highways. Suburbs. Status. Freedom. Escape. He takes it after the promise is over. Used up. Wrecked. Tossed aside. Then folds it into art. So let your eye move through it. That red against the blue. That black crease. That torn edge. That peeled paint, like the color got dragged through the argument. It gives you the wreck first. Then the rhythm shows up.