Blog Post 3 - John Chamberlain's Self Portraiture

Chamberlain photos displayed at MANA Contemporary, retrieved from aynfoundation.com

On Tuesday, April 24, I saw John Chamberlain's Photographs displayed in the second floor gallery of MANA contemporary. John Chamberlain spent most of his career as a sculptor and became well known along with abstract expressionists during the 1950s. His works were made of car parts and brightly colored with car paint, although the finished products had no resemblance to cars(The Art Story). He was said to have pioneered the use of automotive metal in sculpture (Kennedy). From 1989 to 2002, he experimented with photography and created the series of photos including those on display at MANA Contemporary. These works are all untitled and do not have any descriptions on display in the gallery, but this leaves them up to the interpretation of the viewer. Additionally, I think it creates a simplicity and straightforwardness that says these works are what they are and nothing more. I found these pieces to be at once abstract and deeply personal. Chamberlain's method and approach create a self portrait using his motions and the world around him.

Chamberlain portrays himself in his photos mainly through his movements and experiences, although in some of them he includes his own face. In some cases, his face is the main focus, such as in the photo above where he uses the motion of the camera to turn his head into a long squiggle. In others, such as the photo below, his face appears off to the side or in a corner and is not as much of a focal point.

In yet other photos, his face appears multiple times due to the photo being panoramic. This adds an element of surrealism to the pictures and is also a way of capturing his movement from one place to another within one still image. He also captures images of a wide array of experiences. For example, some pictures show restaurant interiors and foods, while others show streets, rooms, art galleries, monuments, and other locations, some too distorted to discern. Additionally, the majority of the photos were taken by a moving camera, usually moved by Chamberlain himself. The distortion of the photos shows how much he moved when he took them, and even indicate what directions he may have moved in.

The most prominent repeated themes I noticed in this series were movement, distortion, and day to day life. Almost every photograph captured movement. Chamberlain often took photos by holding the camera close to his body and moving around as he took them (Wiley). In doing so, he captured his own movement through the way the surroundings are affected by the camera’s movement. This is visible in the distortion of the photos’ subjects. Although a few photos do not, most show extremely distorted, often blurred objects and places. This is why they appear so abstract even though they are also easily understandable as self portraits. Since he does not show his face in every picture, he uses many of them to portray himself through his experiences. Even though he chooses to show relatively simple and everyday subjects, such as room interiors, outdoor scenery, and meals, he does so in a way that makes them interesting to look at and unique to his own style. In the cases where he portrays travel and landmarks, they are not usually the focus of the picture, making them seem like mundane everyday scenery as well.

Chamberlain addresses himself and his experiences playfully and experimentally in his photos. This in itself is a characteristic of his identity as an artist. He was known to experiment with many other media besides sculpture, as well as with different materials within sculpture(Kennedy).

If he is critiquing the concepts of self-identity, Chamberlain seems to be countering how seriously many people take themselves by creating more playful images. He is also countering how contrived and overly constructed one’s self image may be by creating these images without much premeditation. He lets his movements direct what the picture will look like, making his self portrayal genuine on a very basic level. His technique has been compared to automatic drawing (The Art Story), which works well as a method of expression without too much thought. Chamberlain’s work evokes a sense of constructed self, however, in the sense that people construct themselves through their experiences. I also think it exemplifies the male gaze, but in a different way than portraits of women by men tend to. In this case he is literally portraying what he sees. He is also an active participant in his work, emphasizing John Berger’s point that “men act and women appear”(47) as a way to simplify the concepts of the male gaze. This, however is the only similarity because there is not any objectification of women to be found in Chamberlain’s work. Of course, it is hard for any art works not to be considered self portraits because “[s]pectatorship cultivated through cinema, art, theatre, and fashion has conventionalized a visual representation of identity (Finkelstein 129).


I think that the purpose of this series was to experiment with self portrayal and photography when Chamberlain did not primarily work in this way. It was another step in the experimentation he naturally did throughout his career. He may be telling the audience to experiment with expression and self-portrayal as he did, or simply showing the picture of himself created by these works.



Sources

“John Chamberlain Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works.” The Art Story, www.m.theartstory.org/artist-chamberlain-john.htm.

Kennedy, Randy. “John Chamberlain, Artist of Auto Metal, Dies at 84.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Dec. 2011, mobile.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/arts/design/john-chamberlain-artist-of-auto-metal-dies-at-84.html.

“Ayn Foundation Projects at MANA Contemporary.” Aynfoundation.com, Ayn Foundation, www.aynfoundation.com/mana.php.

Wiley, Tad. “‘MORE ME’: John Chamberlain's Panoramic Self Portraits.” Aynfoundation.com, Ayn Foundation, Aug. 2016, www.aynfoundation.com/photos/mana/chamberlain/more-me.pdf.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Art & Language, 1978.

Finkelstein, Joanne. The Art of Self Invention: Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture. I.B. Tauris, 2007.