Early-Sixties junk sculptors lived and slept inside their own salvaged-material work

Evidence

MoMA, the Times critic charged, was catering to an unspecified “coterie.” Indeed, three days before Seitz’s show was disassembled, the New York Herald Tribune profiled Aldo Tambellini under the headline SCULPTOR HUNTS JUNK FOR FIERCE FORMS. Visiting Tambellini’s storefront studio, the reporter Don Ross found a small, emotional man living amid “big overwhelming plaster sculptures that bristle with the points of long nails, jagged pipes, tin cans, trowels, rusted automobile wheels and even parts of toilets and washing machines all he has found on the streets or in vacant lots or bought at junkyards.” The artist “literally sleeps with his work,” Ross joked, pointing out that Tambellini’s bed frame was an ornamental iron fence salvaged from a demolished synagogue. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 223

Categorization

• SEED: The junk sculptor sleeping on a salvaged synagogue iron fence is a vivid image of artists living inside their materials — angle: material scarcity literally fused with living space.
• SHARE: The bed frame made from a demolished synagogue’s ornamental fence is ultra-specific and delightful.