John Chamberlain

By Mackenzie Erin Beltz, October 17, 2014

John Chamberlain was an American sculptor. He was born in Rochester, Indiana in 1927 and died in Shelter Island, New York on December 21st, 2011. As a young adult, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago. When he was young, he started working with clay sculpting, but transitioned to working in metal. He is best known for his works featuring sculptures made from old automobile parts. Later in his career, he also made abstract color paintings and created several films. His works have been displayed in many galleries, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Chamberlain’s claim to fame was his automotive sculptures. He crafted crumpled, rusty old car parts into complex, colorful abstract structures. Many tried to read deeper into his designs, critiquing his reassembled cars as a dark commentary on the American dream. But that wasn’t Chamberlain’s intent, and these overly metaphorical readings were the very thing that prompted him to abandon his automotive sculptures and begin sculpting out of other materials, including paper bags and foam rubber.

One of the distinctive things about Chamberlain’s work is his intuitive use of color. Most of the parts he scavenged from junk yards already came colored, it was just his job to rearrange them in an aesthetically pleasing way. It has been said about his work that he uses color in a way that creates a sense of roundness in the sharp forms of the automobile scraps.

John Chamberlain is also one of the six artists featured in the Moon Museum, a small ceramic wafer three-quarters of an inch by half an inch in size that was supposedly put on the moon by Apollo 12. Forrest Myers, one of the other six artists, was the creator of the Moon Museum. After his idea to put a museum in space was vetoed by NASA, he got in contact with an engineer who helped him use techniques normally used to create telephone circuits to engrave the miniscule Moon Museum, then snuck it onto the leg of the Apollo 12. Chamberlain’s image, a design resembling circuitry, is on the lower right. The Moon Museum also features such artists as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol (Warhol’s in the penis in the upper left hand corner. In the NY Times reporting of the Moon Museum, a thumb covered Warhol’s design). There are somewhere between 15 and 19 copies of Moon Museum, one of which is presumably on the Moon. However, this cannot be officially confirmed without sending another craft to check.
John Chamberlain was a talented artist who had the amazing ability to transform something as rough as rusty old car parts into beautiful and complicated sculptures. He spoke about his work humbly. He once said, ““Everyone always wanted to know what it meant, you know: What does it mean, jellybean? Even if I knew, I could only know what I thought it meant.”¹

¹ Kennedy, Randy. “John Chamberlain, Who Wrested Rough Magic From Scrap Metal, Dies at 84.” The New York Times. December 21, 2011. Accessed October 17, 2014.