11.13.23 — I’ll Take Manhattan
Christopher Culver does not exactly have a love affair with New York. His works on paper are too unflinching for that—and too short of explicit human connections.
They are a record of his attachments all the same. That includes his attachment to drawing. Charcoal and dark pastel lend his surfaces both sharp-eyed realism and soft-focus texture. Their very intimacy invites one into his life and allows one to mistake it for one’s own, at Chapter NY through December 9.
Culver calls his show “Manhattan,” and there is no mistaking the city. It has the sidewalks with their awkward drop-off at the curb. One can see how dead birds would have come to an untimely end on the street. It has the views out a window that never quite opens onto rooftops and open sky, with hints of both enclosure and ways out. It has a soft light in that uncertain space between day and night. That, the drawings say, is the space where he lives, too.
It recalls the stereotypical apartment that artists can barely afford, with way too little sunlight or starlight at all hours of the day and night. The stuffed animal on a bed must be his, too, in a New York where adults need whatever affection they can get. Not that he ever appears, but then neither does anyone else. Life and art alike have the ability to evoke things unseen while testifying to the visible. Life or art could dissolve at any moment, just as the drawings dissolve into stippling. They are just another way of getting things right and taking care.
He shares the show’s title with the “Analog City” where I myself grew up and a familiar movie. Like me more often than I care to say, Woody Allen makes a point of nostalgia, but with his often bitter, rapid-fire jokes. Culver’s dead birds, struggling house plants and other unexpected juxtapositions defy nostalgia, and his humor takes things slow. One can move from work to work uncertain what will come next, each with a layering that hides what might otherwise cohere into text or other images entirely. That, too, builds a sense of connection. Back outside, Tribeca’s clumsy paving and poorly maintained streets seem off-putting by comparison.
It may seem strange to go from Culver to photography. He cares too much for work by hand—and hardly at all for photography’s documentary impulse. It may seem stranger still to cross the continent and to go back in time more than fifty years. Yet all I could think of was the layered black and white of Jay DeFeo more than fifty years ago, recently at Paula Cooper through October 18. A stubborn Bay Area artist, she had finally finished The Rose in 1966, if that is the word for a massive construction whose whole point is never to be finished. Then she moved to Santa Monica for five years and picked up a camera for her own portrait of socialization and seclusion.
She, too, was drawn to still life but cannot leave it alone. The layering can arise from cutting and pasting photos, photocollage, or a staged assemblage akin to Surrealism. It can fall into abstraction, morph into faces and bodies, or become something else entirely, like the old-fashioned telephone that one might mistake for a black liquid pouring down. Maybe I should have thought of Salvador Dali and his telephone topped by a lobster claw. Could the process recall her sculpture after all with its labor of love and hate? Not really, but it makes a fascinating addition to a career so often known for a single work.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.