CHAMBERLAIN’S TOUGH / TENDER HEAVY METAL

In these days of neo-fundamentalism and born-again conservativism, it is bemusing to imagine the fate of modern art. If the fundamentalists attain logical extreme, all art may be lumped with erotica and rock music lyrics as generically evil. If the conservatives carry the day, their respect for convention will revive the traditions of the ancient Greeks, the Renaissance and the 19th-Century academies: Students will once again draw from plaster casts and long to win the Prix de Rome so they can see the Apollo Belvedere in person.

In either unlikely event, modern art will wind up looking odd, like a brief tantrum in the majestic flow of time. It looks odd to a lot of people anyway. Take the work of John Chamberlain. Since the 1950s he has made sculpture out of crumpled metal. His 30-year career is under retrospective review at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary galleries, to Oct. 5.

A massive affair, the show includes some 100 works and represents what is probably MOCA’s most artistically praiseworthy exercise to date. It focuses attention on a key American artist who has not heretofore received his due, and comes complete with a catalogue raisonne by art scholar Julie Sylvester, who organized the spread along with MOCA’s Jacqueline Crist. It will attract every citizen with pretentions to a serious interest in art but is not one of those aesthetic circuses that have gained MOCA its reputation for being excessively anxious to please.

Chamberlain, 59, projects an aesthetic that feeds an idea that one day a psychological history of art will characterize male American artists of this period as arrested adolescents excessively preoccupied with their machismo and in perpetual rebellion against rational adulthood. Chamberlain’s art punches forth an image of an unemployed steelworker drinking down his days in a redneck bar. He gurgles cans of Rheingold and crumples the containers out of free-floating hostility ( not your wimpy little aluminum-foil jobs of the present, but good sturdy cans worthy of mighty muscles).

Accumulating alcohol focuses the worker’s attention. He gets interested in the folds of the mashed cans, enjoying their shapes, colors and reflections for their own sake. As he begins to arrange them in a pile that he finds interesting, a tired guy plops down on the stool next to him.

“This is my art,” says the worker. “Pretty good, huh?”

“Looks like a buncha wadded-up beer cans to me.”

“This is art. I gave this a lotta thought, sardine-breath. If you don’t admit it’s great stuff, I’m gonna put your ears in your armpits.”

“OK, it’s art. Harry, gimme a beer.”

It is perfectly clear from the earliest works on view that Chamberlain is grounded in the poetics of Abstract Expressionism. Small paintings and rusty metal-rod sculpture admire Willem de Kooning and David Smith and their largely self-contained expressive vectors. Chamberlain makes no secret of his attachment to AE, and his place in art’s pantheon is probably as the finest sculptor of the genre.

There is, however, a crucial difference between Chamberlain and the Abstract Expressionists. He is closer in age to artists like Rauschenberg and Johns and “junk” sculptors like Richard Stankiewicz and Jean Tinguely. They chose to work with imagery that refers to ordinary life and makes an oblique social commentary.

Like them, Chamberlain chose to work in a material with built-in sociological overtones: crushed parts of auto bodies, in abstract arrangements. They immediately called forth powerful associations with the American male’s love affair with the car, its links to his sexual prowess and fears of impotence. The twisted metal inescapably suggests violent failure. Chamberlain has always denied such overtones. To attempt to discount the principal association evoked by his materials is either pure intransigence, pubescent courting of misunderstanding or an imperiously shallow insistence that we see things the artist’s way.

What’s there is there.

Even the changing fashions in car bodies and their glossy painted surfaces affect the look of the sculpture. Some of the sillier styles of the ‘60s actually take over the character of the work, giving it a fatuous, feather-headed science-fiction aura like the film “Barbarella.”

Maybe that’s why Chamberlain started casting about for other materials. For a while he lived right here in Topanga Canyon. His California stay uncorked a string of works in stuff like wadded brown paper bags stiffened with urethane or rolls of foam rubber trussed up in big, puckery lumps. Sheets of iridescent clear plastic suggest the influence of Larry Bell and the California Finish Fetish and also seem to anticipate later types of design-molded plastic furniture.

At best, these works tingle with virtually literal sensations. Foam suggests masses of soft flesh in Ingres’ “Au Bain Turque,” plastic wafts forth the idea of odors so strongly you feel like you’re at the perfume counter at Bullocks Wilshire.

They do their thing but they also seem ephemeral, flippant, wallowingly self-indulgent and most of all quite seriously desperate. Chamberlain tries to make a disembodied art out of temporal materials. This may have been the point when he proved to himself that it can’t really be done. The sensations of these works disengage from the objects and leave them lying there like rotting carcasses.

When we re-encounter the artist, he is back in the body shop. But wall reliefs like “Hard Alee” from 1975 now have a classical gravity and we begin to think of him in terms of art historical epochs, like Hellenistic Greek and Baroque.

Where did that come from?

Everybody knows the hardest things to get the blue-collar redneck adolescent to admit are that (a) he is sensitive and (b), he is smart. Chamberlain certainly is both, and when we retrace our steps we find that his involvement with bottom-line sculptural concerns was there all the time. A 1961 work called “Fantail” is surely the chef-d’oeuvre of this period (significantly it belongs to fellow artist Jasper Johns), almost exactly re-creating the gesture and lift of the Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre.

Armed with this somewhat hard-bought realization, we have an easier time doing what the artist wants: seeing it his way, in spite of his cranky efforts to prevent us from doing what he wants us to do.

This is pure sculpture that finally transcends its own adolescent populism. The painted metal is sculpturally no more metal than the marble of the Victory’s shift is marble. It is fabric. When we realize that Chamberlain’s sculptural preoccupation is a Baroque involvement with magnificent drapery clinging to volume and fluttering away from it, it’s much easier to appreciate what he’s up to.

Even at that, however, one is constrained to recognize hard truths about this art. Its evolution tends to be garbled because it is so often swathed in shapes that either mumble incoherently or yell coarsely and cannot make up their mind if they’re pictorial or volumetric, so that walking around them forces a series of staggering jerks. Their bulk is too often besotted and slovenly.

In the end, it is a wonder that an art can have this many things wrong with it and still be as good as it is. But there you are.

Chamberlain’s most recent pieces, like “Straits of Night,” run to huge, eroded uprights painted to evoke the subway graffiti so much an inspiration for current Neo-Expressionism. That is Chamberlain the adolescent at work. What is far more important is the way these pieces capture the sobering stillness of ancient Egyptian icons or the tragic gesture of Rodin’s “The Fates.”

Technically Chamberlain has earned a place in the lexicon of modernism for crucial contributions to the revival of colored sculpture, gutsy investigations of impossible materials and planting of ideas about Process and “artists furniture.”

He will be OK in the imagined future. The fundamentalists will ignore him as a harmless, incoherent crank. The conservatives will see him as a classicist manque .

Old survivors of the Beat Generation will know that what finally counts with this work is its cockeyed heroism.