I THINK CHRISTOPHER FELVER is involved in the tug of war between a certain kind of minimalism and post minimalism. In this fugue, Chris creates something that is very wide in terms of its scope. You suddenly see something that looks like a gigantic presence of shadows; you see things that are pulling (falling) apart like a Joseph Cornell; you see clean rows of objects like an Andy Warhol; and very classic beauty. It’s very elegant and much of it a spiraling situation.

Fernand Léger was the only person who loved technology so much that he enjoyed the first World War. Let’s hope that’s not true, but I think that what’s interesting [in the Ordered World photographs] is that these twin trees are expertly handled but then suddenly [Felver] can get that kind of beauty in a little piece of a branch, a little non sentimental sign, almost a “velleity” or little wish. And then something that looks like a dark sketch for the apocalypse. So all of these are very interesting structurally but they shouldn’t be thought of as simply structures. They are architectural thoughts. And someone might not want to call them sculptures but structures also as a lyrical poetry long poem.

What is interesting for me is how stable some parts of these images are. He tends to have one quarter this, one Zen willingness, drastic diagonals. Not so stable. A window is an archway and a window. Something else may look art deco, but I think that what’s important is something that Charles Rosen said, which is, “that the classical style of music is not about harmony but it’s about dissonance.”And actually that is part of what makes Chris’s work so beautiful. I have in my hands some nude photographs and they do have this Russian structure, this situation. But they are also montages, cinematic. It just stands to reason that he has this camera eye of a Vertov who could shoot things backwards. One of the things about juxtaposing three different images is that it does have what a photographer once told me, “the beauty of adjacent slides, the beauty of adjacent energies, all those are things that make this as close to cinema as to any other art. And I think it’s very brave that he can use nature as much as other forces. And I guess to conclude, a lot of French philosophy the last twenty to thirty years, which “leaked into or downwardly drifted” into art criticism, was [expressed as] ideas of the undecidable.

So you can’t really say you can identify each in this collage. But you can’t really say why the beauty is so strong in adjacent frames. This is like a string trio. I remember when a lot of people, Jan Groover, Eve Sonneman, and others were experimenting with this, and I hope that they will continue researching this. But in a way Chris is already continuing to research that, these photographs propose themselves later, I think, as painting. Painting again with images and images that explode. As in Eric Fischl’s, “Subverted Sexualities.” So, I think it’s quite moving in the way these collages put one thing next to another thing next to another thing. To combat Hitler, Hannah Höch made photomontages that were called “Strange Beauty.” They were very shocking for the time. So I would say for our time these are shocking. Also, I don’t want to call them inevitable, but they are.

What is interesting to me about our conversations about art is that now Chris is in the terrain of fundamental simplicities that are not so simple. In other words, like montage, the opportunities are endless to use these fundamental images in his grid systems. All of this comes together as part of the science that almost holds them together.

Kenneth Snelson for years thought he had the image of an electron, people laughed at him because they said you can’t have an image of an electron. It’s a wave, it’s a particle, and they pooh-poohed him for a long time. About two to three years ago, the Scientific American ran an issue that was only about Kent Nelson, how someone who had discovered that this master of knots and grids and pressures, pretty much like Chris, was able to go from that to thinking up, well it wasn’t electrons, but it was one of the basic physiological patterns. So thinking about this as a short story is interesting. Godard said a good movie should relate to a short story, not to a novel. In questions of scale, these works can be blown up to six feet, it’s also true that it becomes a sort of mental task and pleasure if one’s closer to them or hovers over them like a doll’s house. I think a short story is good because it has a theme of abruptness. Where does it end? Suddenly. In Chekhov you don’t know where that short story is going to end. And I think in these sequences by Chris Felver you have the same sense that it may be an alphabet, as he’s put it. Or an infinity. It may be like counting the permutations. But you do get lost in this very elegant darkness, which Jasper Johns once said to me was “clear darkness.”

I think [art work is] an adventure. Probably anyone who really knows Chris’s work will see what needs to be called the “human unity.” It’s amazing to someone, how can you do a film about this, a short story with grids, something else with the very images of stacking? How can you move from one to another? Picasso was famous for doing classical in the morning, neoclassic in the afternoon and cubist lights at night. We see a lot of differences. So all of these works are about transitions and are transitional in the life of this philosopher-cameraman. And the one enduring material—he knows and remembers the details of objects that come from ‘X’ place, a Prague, a London. He knows that. But we are left bewildered, because it’s the alphabet before it’s put into words and paragraphs and books, and that alphabet is a very strange force.

I think that, in a way that the permutations in Felver can go on forever, that the montages themselves are forever. One, two, three, it’s a very basic counting that Meyer Schapiro found in Van Gogh. Sky, wheat field, death, the crows. He calls that the “simple avoual” and says that the situation is an attempt to get toward the beloved object. Very often here we are thrust upon a surface, and in other places we are given deep enough shadow, so darkness is really the theme. I once spoke about the tradition of American darkness. We talk about the tradition of American light. I don’t really believe that Chris goes out looking for impressionist effects of light. I don’t see it in his work, anyway. I think what he does do is to use elements like the alphabet again, which are really scripts and scripts for a script.

Once upon a time when I was afraid of airplanes, I told Claes Oldenburg that I was afraid of airplanes. We had different attitudes towards this. Oldenburg said to me that once upon a time he said to a steward, “Let me off.” They’ve often said to me, “We can’t let you out sir, we’ve taxied already.” And Claes told me that after he left a plane that had already taxied he started to do his soft numbers and words. And I said, “So, basic anxiety, infantile anxiety, led you back to the child’s world of the alphabet.”

One of the things about Chris Felver’s work is that he’s partly maintained a child’s view of the world as constantly shifting, and that is exactly the context of which I want to remind you. That is, “There is a language here. And when you look at all of his work together you realize that they are functioning like the ancient alphabets becoming, by themselves, agents of montage, agents of the short story, agents of a grid system. The grid system was thought to be scientific rebellion in the nineteenth century; it isn’t. “The grid system,” as Meyer Schapiro once said tome, “is an old story.” The grid system goes back to strewn mosaics in Rome and Pompeii. So, if you’re looking at this fresh child-like vigor, you might think it’s only that, but what’s staggering in Chris’s work is that he has so much assured, confident, elegant, virtuosity. He is professional, but we don’t like that word. “Even sophisticated is a sad word,” said Lionel Trilling. There is joy in Chris’s work, a little mania of joy. His joyful art doesn’t stop. And I think one of the reasons he’s gone towards joyful art is rarely stopping for artists of whining and pathos.

I think a lot of his greatest work—in the Donald Judd vocabulary—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.” Of course, with an artist like Chris, you can ask him the question, “What is this?” What does this mean? How are you doing this?” and he will give you an answer, but the answer is not a limit to his photography. The limit can only be seen in a special way, which we may call a divertimento. In many movements, Mozart considered how he could put together the complexities of the world in different textures: one fast, one slow, one fast, one slow. So, I think that what’s marvelous about Chris is that he’s able to take this thickness, this density, something that John Hejduk used to call compaction. He loved compaction. Ezra Pound said it was condensation. And he said, even in a foreign language, “dichtung=condensare.” The poetry that we love the most has, I think, been a very fresh revolution against mere functionalism, the art of money and the domination of money in our day. Here is work that was not merely “commissioned”; though he can do commissioned work, these are largely self-commissioned. There is a self that commissions these images and wants to record. You can say, “But are you being specific enough about this particular work?” I think it would take many pages of a book to answer that, and I hope he will have his book, Ordered World, one day. Chris Felver has done many books of the naked face. Here are the naked grids or the clothed stacking. These are the systems that are efflorescent in his later work.

DAVID SHAPIRO . NEW YORK CITY . 2010