ABSTRACT
The works that John Chamberlain first showed were welded from iron planes and rods in the David Smith manner. What interested Chamberlain most was the relationship of the forms he found and shaped and their battered colors. The glut of cliche-ridden, precious fabrications was responsible in part for the growing interest in assemblage. It also most likely prompted Chamberlain and di Suvero to turn to simpler structures whose formal qualities were clear, like Smith’s. Furthermore, it accounted in part for the avoidance of Sur-realist-related imagery by Robert Rauschenberg, Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, and di Suvero, although not by Stankiewicz and Follett. The use of detritus enabled young junk sculptors to take a different tack from that of other established avant-garde sculptors of the fifties, such metal welders who spurned found materials as Herbert Ferber, David Hare, Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, and Theodore Roszak. Smith played an influential role in the evolution of junk sculpture.
