Christopher Felver’s “Whole Shebang”
Sausalito Center for the Arts
March 2024
Teeing up the Masters
by John Held Jr.
Chris Felver grew up in Akron, Ohio, not far from famed
Firestone Country Club. After honing his athletic prowess
he ventured to Florida, becoming a member of the
University of Miami golf team.
His latest film “Spirit of Golf” includes Tiger Woods, Arnold
Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller and Robert Trent
Jones Jr, as well as Bill Murray, Dennis Hopper, Jim
Jarmusch, master documentarian Ken Burns and his
narrator Peter Coyote is his homage to the game. When
Felver immerses himself in a project, his cast literally
steps up to the plate for public presentation.
Photographically, Felver works in series. Widely disparate
in subject, they are united by their deep dive into the core
of the specialty, extracting the human heartbeat shielded
by public perception. Be it personages involved in
ceramics, ethnicity, literary, visual or musical arts, Felver’s
portraiture swings for the fences, determined to obtain
access to the greatest in the field under examination. How
he does so is as much the art as the finished product.
His films are also rich in diversity of interest. Beside his
deep dive into sports with “Spirit of Golf” (2023). he has
helped accelerate the acceptance of ceramic arts with his
“California Clay in the Rockies(1983) and celebrated the
Beats in “The Coney Island of Lawrence Ferlinghetti”
(1996) and “West Coast: Beat & Beyond” (1984).
Musicians are represented in far ranging films as “John
Cage Talks about Cows”(1991) and “Cecil Taylor: All the
Notes”(2005). Felver’s immersion in “Donald Judd’s Marfa
Texas”(1998) and “Inside/Outside: Anthony Cragg” (2023)
display his comfort with all manner of cultural expression
be it poetical, musical or visual.
This exhibition presents us with a panorama of cultural
personalities at the turn of the Millennium. Musicians: Patti
Smith, Lou Reed, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack
Elliott; Native American writers: Dennis Banks, James
Luna, Linda Hogan; Literati: Norman Mailer, Joan Didion,
Kurt Vonnegut, Fran Lebowitz; Poets: Robert Creeley,
Charles Bukowski, Hunter S Thompson; Actors: Clint
Eastwood, Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Taylor;
Painters: Richard Diebenkorn, Jay DeFeo, Jasper Johns,
Robert Rauschenberg. His photographs capture the spirit
of the age in the click of a shutter as seen in his books,
films, and especially in this unofficial retrospective.
Ordered World is another body of work in the Sausalito
exhibition that deviates from documentation. Felver dives
into montage, arranging his photographic output into
puzzle pieces that beg us to ponder structure and
meaning in the maze of our daily lives.
Critic/poet David Shapiro wrote in 2010, “I think a lot of his
greatest work—is to use a basic alphabet, not in a soup,
but in a mosaic. I think these photographs are distinct, but
they can also come together. It’s a series, but it’s not a
series. Moments of time? You cannot quite tell. One of
the curious things about these photographs is ‘not to
know’.
How ironic that Felver’s documentary photography reveals
the subject, while his creative work cloaks it. This push-
pull marks an artist in transit, running from shadows
constantly pursuing him.
