I walked off Second Avenue, out of the 104-degree heat, into the long, rectangular space of Amanita. It could have been a waiting area for a Jurassic Park–themed roller coaster: reconstructed, complete dinosaur skeletons flanked one of John Chamberlain’s “Gondolas”—the name of the series he created of oblong, low-to-the-ground sculptures made from colorful pieces of smashed car bodies. The sculpture reminded me of a bird of paradise (the flower) and of an expensive, enlarged kitchen appliance.

Chamberlain named each sculpture in the series after a poet whose work he admired (he was also somewhat of a poet himself). The gondolas were exhibited for the first time as a group at the Dia Art Foundation around 1991.1 Some of Chamberlain’s other “Gondolas” were named as follows: Gondola Hart Crane (1982), Gondola Charles Olson (1982), Gondola Herman Melville (1981), Gondola W. H. Auden (1981), Gondola Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1981), Gondola T. S. Eliot (1981), Gondola Ezra Pound (1982), Gondola Walt Whitman (1981–82), and Gondola William Carlos Williams (1982).

In an interview with Julie Sylvester—the curator who compiled the catalogue raisonné of Chamberlain’s oeuvre (the complete record of the works he created over his lifetime)—Chamberlain recounted reading Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, poets after whom he later named two of his “Gondolas,” at Black Mountain College. He also wrote his own poems there, and it was at the college that he developed a technique of writing down words he encountered in poems by Pound and Williams and in other texts: “I would read, and when I’d see a word I liked, I’d isolate it; I’d write it down. So I had this collection of words I liked to look at. It didn’t matter what they meant; I liked the way they looked. So I would look at the words, and I would put the words together, and I would come up with an image that was unlike anything you would perceive if you didn’t do it this way.”2

Chamberlain insisted that this technique—isolating specific words because he liked the look of them, then scrambling them—later influenced how he made his sculptures. He did not, though, consider himself a poet just because he wrote poems. To be a poet, he insisted, or to be considered a real artist in any medium, one must have created a body of work in that medium. In the interview with Sylvester, Chamberlain referred to Robert Creeley—a colleague at Black Mountain who influenced his development of the word-scrambling technique—as a real poet because he had written enough poems to constitute a body of work. Whether those poems were thematically related to each other or completely unrelated (and therefore, in their own way, also linked) didn’t matter; together they formed a body of work, and that made Creeley a poet. Chamberlain, though he sometimes wrote poems, never created a body of work from them. Here is one of the poems he wrote at Black Mountain:

It wasn’t until 1957 that Chamberlain readopted the technique of collecting and rearranging words from different contexts into original poems—now applying it to artworks that existed in three dimensions rather than two. That year, he removed the fenders from an antique car belonging to fellow artist Larry Rivers, bent them, and called the resulting sculpture Shortstop.4 After Shortstop, recombining stray, cast-off car parts—fenders and other pieces of the exterior bodies of cars—became his regular way of making sculpture. He had already been welding metal before this, but now he was also bending those stray pieces of car bodies—much as he had collected words at Black Mountain and chosen ones to recombine from the list he had written. Chamberlain selected the parts from a pile, or “library,” and occasionally sorted them into groups based on color and size. He usually arranged them with no clear idea of how he wanted the final assemblage to look, then welded the separate parts together and secured them in place.

Gondola Marianne Moore is made from steel automobile parts—Chamberlain’s signature material since the late 1950s, though the “Gondola” series dates to the 1980s.5 The skeletons belong to Maiasaura. According to the exhibition press release, the reconstructed bones indicate “limbs that register both weight-bearing function and latent movement.”6 So the dinosaurs, much like cars, traveled across the ground this way, taking up land as they went. But what is latent movement? When I first looked up Maiasaura online, the results described a dinosaur that swam—kind of like a whale, though it breathed above rather than below the water. A dinosaur like a whale, like a car: clearly it is not so easy to make sense of why the curator would put dinosaurs in with this sculpture.

Because the sculpture does not have a base, it reminds me more of a boat that is either already ashore or floating on a pristinely smooth body of water. There could also be a person sitting or standing (most likely sitting) inside the boat that is Chamberlain’s sculpture, rowing it across a river to the underworld. Well, it doesn’t have to be the underworld, but the boat is definitely floating toward the far bank, across from where it was previously docked (we will assume the dinosaurs are standing on opposite sides of a river—on dry land, in other words).