FELVER~Christopher. The Importance of Being by Christopher Felve
€56,00
Author: Plimpton, Andrei Codrescu, Robert Creeley, Luc Sante, Jack Hirschman~George
Publisher: Arena Editions, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Year: 2002
Artist: FELVER~Christopher
ISBN: 1-892041-48-0
The Importance of Being by Christopher Felver.
(447pp.) Hardcover
EYE ON THE BEATS
The Words and Work of Christopher Felver
By Todd Bauer
Christopher Felver is an artist of many trades. Filmmaker, photographer and fine artist, just to name a few. His books of photography include “THE POET EXPOSED, ANGELS, ANARCHISTS & GODS, SEVEN DAYS IN NICARAGUA LIBRE/with Lawrence Ferlinghetti/ and FERLINGHETTI: PORTRAIT. His documentary THE CONEY ISLAND OF LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI and his book FERLINGHETTI: PORTRAIT form a perfect package. Some of his other films include DONALD JUDD’S MARFA, TEXAS, JOHN CAGE TALKS ABOUT COWS and WEST COAST BEATS AND BEYOND. He has also exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Turin’s Fotografia Biennale Internazionale.
“I come out of the Robert Frank tradition but I have my own twist to it. Any camera, any place, any time! I don’t have a team, I work by myself.
I grew up in Ohio and started by playing music and then after the army I went to film school at The London College of photography. We shot film four days a week and then screened it on the fifth. I did a piece there called THE LAST TIME I SAW NEAL. It was a twenty-five minute piece, you know, ’48 Ford, about the relationship between Kerouac and Neal. I first got exposed to the beats when I went out to California in 1966. Hung out in City Lights bookstore and on Grant Street. It was a mecca. Then after the army I went directly to Alice’s Restaurant in Stockdail, Massachusetts for the New York spin.
I do all kinds of things in addition to photography. I’ve always been involved with documentary films, and now I’ve got some art projects going on. I’m working on a piece right now with Ferlinghetti called I AM NOT A CLOWN. I made up myself as a clown and it is sixteen images of the life and death of a clown. And then I put them in a grid and now Ferlinghetti is working on each one individually. It is a kick. We’ve been friends for over twenty years now. I went down to (Charles) Bukowski’s house with his biographer Neeli Cherkovski and he was having a wine party and he sat across from me for about two and a half hours – three feet away from me – and I never made a portrait of him! I was just having a good time. And then we went out to eat and then went back to his place and got the portrait of him and Linda right in the closing moments of the day. So we went to the 7-11 the next day and that’s where I got the picture. He was just such a nice guy. He called himself the original park bench kid. We stayed up all night talking and at the time I wasn’t drinking but that didn’t bother him in the least.
I’ve never had anybody sign a release. I don’t work that way. I feel it’s my responsibility to make them look good, if they don’t look good I’ve failed and I won’t publish. So most of these people have become friends over the years. I like people. It’s a necessity if you’re a photographer.
Right now I’m working on a book edited by David Fahey for Arena Editions scheduled to come out next year of over 400 portraits of writers, artists, poets, etc. Basically the creative personalities of the second half of the 20th century that I’ve been lucky enough to spend a moment with.
I’m also working on a video compilation of all my poetry stuff called BEAT COAST MUSE. It’s everybody that’s ever come to the West Coast – all the visionary writers I have filmed. It’ll probably be out next year and run about an hour and a half.”
The Importance Of BeingWall Street Journal, Review, November 30, 2001 – “Some of the best specimens of the human animal show up in “The Importance Of Being” by Christopher Felver. And by this I do not mean the “beautiful people” but the accomplished ones – writers, artists, musicians, activists. No pretense here, just straight-ahead, black-and-white portraits of a staggering 436 “creative revolutionaries,” as Mr. Felver calls them, photographed by him over the past two decades.
“My subjects are the people I always wanted to meet,” he writes. Just one degree of separation, and it’s as if we’re meeting them too, everyone from Kathy Acker (“postmodern novelist, biker”) to Franco Zefferelli (“film director”), including Seamus heaney, Jasper Johns, B.B. King, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Lou Reed, Susan Sontag — even a jolly Ansel Adams.
Arena Editions, Review – In this massive undertaking of portraiture, documentary artist and photographer Christopher Felver celebrates the present moment of the anarchistic face of the new genius. Over the previous two decades, Felver has traveled the United States and Europe, portraying the greatest creative forces of our times – writers, poets, filmmakers, actors, visual artists, protesters, and those engaged in the struggle for expression during the late twentieth century. Artists and poets know they are involved with the “sister arts,” and Felver makes them into a cyber family of friends who are bound by a common will to create. This is no ordinary portrait collection – it represents a typology of creativity and a road map to the New Left that has fed the hearts and souls of countless observers. This spectacular international family of faces is an anthology, after all, of the most adventurous discoverers in language and the visual arts of our time. It is always a revelation to see what the face reveals and conceals. As Isamu Noguchi commented on Felver’s portraiture, “The thoughtfulness seems to show. The face responds to thoughts.” Or as Frank O’Hara proclaimed, “One should be as clear as one’s natural reticence permits.” This is a book full of reticence, revelation, and permission. This eclectic collection documents the energy and tenacity of the human spirit – the creative face of a generation. Felver has undertaken a vision to meet and document the greatest creative minds.
“There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough—there has to be vision and the two together can make a good photograph. It is difficult to describe this thin line where matter ends and mind begins.”
—Robert Frank, 1962
Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank’s student, understood this and occasionally, in his photographs, more often in his poems, achieves his teacher’s directive, especially in his photographs of his sometimes lover and always friend William S. Burroughs. Christopher Felver, a student of Ginsberg, Frank and others, in his newest book, The Importance of Being, reveals that he understands what Robert Frank teaches. Felver shows, in 421 soul filled images, that the student has become a Master.
In every aspect The Importance of Being is high art. Black and white and Blue from cover to cover the large book, an epic, is beautifully produced. It includes introductions by George Plimpton, Andrei Codrescu, Robert Creeley, Luc Sante, Jack Hirschman, an epigraph by Isamu Nogushi and the most illuminating interview with Felver to date. The 421 photographs are of leading cultural figures including Kathy Acker, Ansel Adams, Edward Albee, Mose Allison, Stephen Ambrose, David Amram, Laurie Anderson, Maya Angelou, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Joan Baez, Dennis Banks, Russell Banks, Amiri Baraka, Peter Beard, Ann Beattie, Harry Belafonte, Saul Bellow, Daniel Berrigan, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Breslin, Douglas Brinkley, Charles Bukowski, Ken Burns, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, Noam Chomsky, Guy Clark, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Judy Collins, Francis Ford Coppola, Gregory Corso, Angela Davis, Willem de Kooning, Bo Diddley, Joan Didion, Jim Dine, Diane di Prima, E.L. Doctorow, Rita Dove, Robert Duncan, Marianne Faithfull, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Frank, Carlos Fuentes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Michael Graves, Dick Gregory, Robert Haas, Seamus Heaney, Richard Hell, Werner Herzog, David Hockney, Abbie Hoffman, Bob Holman, Dennis Hopper, Herbert Huncke, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Isherwood, Jim Jarmusch, Jasper Johns, Erica Jong, Donald Judd, William Kennedy, Ken Kesey, B.B. King, Maxine Hong Kingston, Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, William Kunstler, Timothy Leary, Fran Lebowitz, Doris Lessing, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, Roy Lichtenstein, Taj Mahal, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, Frank McCourt, George McGovern, Russell Means, W.S. Merwin, Arthur Miller, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Robert Motherwell, Graham Nash, Willie Nelson, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Joyce Carol Oates, Odetta, Claes Oldenburg, Sharon Olds, Tillie Olsen, Michael Ondaatje, Grace Paley, Robert Pinsky, Roman Polanski, John Prine, Robert Rauschenberg, John Rechy, Ishmael Reed, Lou Reed, Adrienne Rich, Larry Rivers, Henry Rollins, Ned Rorem, Barney Rossett, Salman Rushdie, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Bobby Seale, Pete Seeger, Patti Smith, Gary Snyder, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Steven Spielberg, Gloria Steinem, Frank Stella, Oliver Stone, Tom Stoppard, Mark Strand, Sun Ra, Gay Telese, Cecil Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Studs Terkel, Hunter S. Thompson, Quincey Troupe, John Trudell, John Updike, Townes Van Zandt, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Andrei Vosnesenky, Derek Walcott, Anne Waldman, Lina Wertmuller, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Robin Williams, Franco Zefferelli.
And that’s to mention only 150 of the 421 phtographs which can’t really be identified as portraits because each shot glimpses the heart and soul of the individual on the page. A warm glow flows from image to viewer. Felver has the genius artist ability to not only know all the details of light and lens he also has the old soul wisdom of one who recognizes and opens the soft heart. I have traveled with Chris in Europe and the USA. He recently stopped to visit here in Kentucky where he took photos of Brother Patrick Hart and me at Thomas Merton’s grave at The Abbey of Gethsemani. A Ulyssean wanderer Chris is uncanny in every way. Work and play aren’t in his vocabulary. He lives and breathes creative energy. He lives his dream. He is so subtle in his approach to his art as to nearly be invisible. It’s as if the spring sun a spring breeze arrives. His subject relaxes and opens. A positive, harmless, even healing energy is present when Chris is creating.
Suddenly it’s over. He’s done. No time has been lost. And although each and every image he creates is intimate no one feels that their privacy has been invaded. The humanity, the vision of the moment is captured in the work of art, the photograph. No need to describe the “thin line.” It is gone. Matter and mind have merged, they are one.
Christopher Felver is indeed a Master. His photographs and documentary films have recently been featured in solo exhibitions at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris and Torino Fotographia Biennale Internzionale in Italy. He was a participant in the 53rd Venice International Film Festival. In 2000, a retrospective of his films was held at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and Donald Judd’s Marfa Texas was screened at The Smithsonian. In 2002 Thunder’s Mouth Press will release two new books by Christopher Felver: the first will be shots of Allen Ginsberg, the second will be photos of The New Rebels
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