The last two weeks of September have been optimistically designated “World Car-Free Fortnight”. Today’s work of art is a sculpture called Waltzing with Mr Eye, by the American artist John Chamberlain, who has worked almost exclusively with scrapped car parts for the best part of half a century. This exuberantly colourful object can currently be seen at Waddington Galleries in Cork Street, along with several other works made by Chamberlain during the past few years.
Chamberlain is not the only American artist to have recycled bits and pieces of dead motor car, but he is the leading exponent of the so-called fender-bending school of modern sculpture. When I interviewed him recently, he recalled vivid memories of his earliest experiments: “It was back in 1957 and I was living in the painter Larry Rivers’ house in Southampton, New York State. He had a 1929 Ford in the back. It was dark green and its two fenders were laying there next to it, so I took them out and fooled about with them. I scrunched them up and put them together and made my first piece with automobile metal. It occurred to me later that the car was an antique. But Larry never said anything to me to suggest I had overstepped the bounds, so I guess he didn’t mind. I was 30 years old at the time. Then I started going around auto body shops and they had all these coloured metals piled up. It looked to me like art supplies, just sitting there waiting for me. That was how I got started. You’re an artist, you use what’s there. For Michelangelo it was Carrara marble. For me it was auto parts.”
Jack Kerouac published On the Road in 1957. A year earlier, Jackson Pollock had been killed in a...
