Tomahawk Nolan

John Chamberlain, 1965 · Gallery 408 · Floor 4

Car parts. Cut up, bent, crushed, welded. And the longer you look, the less it looks like a wreck. It starts getting elegant on you. Annoyingly elegant. Before John Chamberlain could make a living from this, he worked as a hairdresser. Jerry's Beauty Shop. He was welding metal in a barn and doing hair to pay the bills. He said his first sculptures were hairstyles. Then, sometime in the late fifties, he's renting the painter Larry Rivers's house out in Southampton. There's a rusting 1929 Ford in the yard. So Chamberlain takes the fenders. Lays them down and drives over them with his own car. A few times. Then welds them together with steel rods. That one's called Shortstop. His first sculpture using car parts. That was the landlord's Ford, by the way. And the car parts gave him something else to work with. Color. So when he picks up a piece, he's choosing a shape and a color at the same time. This is Tomahawk Nolan, 1965. Look at what he chose. That big yellow piece on top, pitched like a roof. The blue crumple underneath. The red fold at the bottom. Those folds look almost soft. Like clothes dropped on a chair. Chamberlain said everybody makes sculpture every day. The way you throw a towel over the rack. Or the way you wad up the toilet paper.

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