Christopher Culver, Subway Angel, 2023, Charcoal and pastel on paper, 20 x 23 1/4 in (50.8 x 59.1 cm) (Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York; Photography by Charles Benton)
Pigeons are rarely bestowed a place of prominence in artwork. Doves? Sure. But those mottled rats with wings often get a comparably short shrift. Somewhat understandably. It’s hard to celebrate the pigeon. I almost stomp on one every morning when I run as they stare up at me blankly like they forgot they have wings. Then, there are their less-than-stellar nest-building skills. Just plop a couple of twigs together, poot out an egg, and done! And don’t forget their suspiciously spiteful ability to shit all over you and everything you own if they so desire. I also once witnessed a pigeon eat an almond whole (*gunk* and gone), which shook me to my very core. Even so, why should these pidgy personality gripes stifle our ability to memorialize the pigeon visually? Pigeons really do have their own special dignity—or at least, they seem to in an artwork with which I am completely enamored: Christopher Culver’s Closer, a drawing currently on view in Culver’s solo exhibition Manhattan at Chapter NY.
Closer brings the viewer face-to-face with a pigeon, so close, in fact, that it mimics snatching that round birdie right off the ground and pressing its face into your own like a treasured pet. More than just this intimacy, Culver’s Closer is ultimately a pigeon glamour shot, rendered elegantly in various grey-toned charcoal and pastels. Culver gives attention to the pigeon’s textured features, its layers of feathers and its smooth dark beak. Within this field of grey, the bird’s white-ringed pink eye pops. Granted, there is something inherently hilarious about bestowing this much care on a portrait of a pigeon. It feels one step above a tender portrait of a rat (which, to be clear, I like the thought of). Perhaps it’s because in urban environments like New York, pigeons are too commonplace, too ubiquitous, too trashy. You know, a little bit like New Yorkers ourselves.
Christopher Culver, Closer, 2023, Charcoal and pastel on paper 10 x 7 in (25.4 x 17.8 cm) (Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York; Photography by Charles Benton)
I am not the only one who sees a connection between pigeons and humans in the city. In Culver’s Manhattan, pigeons are the only living residents. Their human counterparts remain absent from the empty apartments, desolate movie theaters, and garbage-strewn sidewalks. Instead, the pigeons act as stand-ins for the population of New Yorkers, an alternative avian world that intersects and quite possibly reflects our own. In Culver’s drawings, pigeons sweetly warm themselves next to tenement apartment windows, peering in like little voyeurs. They suffer quietly with broken wings, sitting amongst discarded coffee cups and other refuse in the gutter. They squat defiantly near a sewer grate next to a used syringe. Who hasn’t decided to endure proximity to junk (in its many forms) just to get a breath of fresh air?
Perhaps it’s my projection, but Culver seems to imbue these pigeons with their own anthropomorphic emotionality. Take, for instance, the anxiety-ridden Subway Angel, a poor lost soul that wandered—or flew—too far into the depths of a subway station and is now cowering in a blind panic at the bottom of the urine-soaked, yellow-ridged, unidentifiable black ooze-coated stairs. This is a state of utter terror that I recognize after accidentally picking the wrong side of a nearly abandoned subway station during a late-night ride or, the opposite hell, descending into a stiflingly crowded station during rush hour. Someone, please help him!
Christopher Culver, Paul and Chris, 2023, Charcoal and pastel on paper, 19 5/8 x 23 1/2 in (49.8 x 59.7 cm) (Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York; Photography by Charles Benton)
Pigeons are not the only figures that populate the desolate city in Culver’s drawings. Stuffed animals such as the round-eyed puppy doll in Dog or the little bunnies in Paul and Chris are the inhabitants of apartment interiors. Rather than indicating the presence of children in vivid and cheery rooms, these dolls lie lazily on rumpled, muted duvet covers, framed by a window view of the angular crisscross of wrought iron fire escapes, brick tenement facades, and too-close windows of other apartment buildings. Like the pigeons, as well as reminiscent of children’s storybooks, these dolls take on human qualities. The floppy rabbits in Paul and Chris, for example, appear to be romantically spooning. Notably, this is the only moment of connection within the entire exhibition and it’s between inanimate objects.
Alienation is not exactly novel in depictions of NYC. It’s hard to look at Culver’s drawings, particularly his accurate rendering of the strange cavernous light of neighborhoods dominated by turn-of-the-last-century tenement architecture, and not think of Edward Hopper’s depictions of Greenwich Village and other parts of Lower Manhattan from the rooftops (Or his paintings of lonesome theaters, for that matter). However, there is a sense of idyllic romanticism in Hopper’s work that I don’t see here. Whereas Hopper shows the unique angularity of light in New York, Culver’s smoggy chalk and pastel practice revels in the gloom and dinge of this dirty old town.
Installation view of Christopher Culver’s Manhattan at Chapter NY (Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York; Photography by Charles Benton)
This isn’t to say that Culver’s work doesn’t have any romance—it does. It’s just a different type than is often found in some of the more famous representations of New York City. Of course, it’s hard to overlook that Culver’s show—no matter how generically named—shares its title with Woody Allen’s classic Manhattan, a film that, other than creeping everyone out with age differences, did more than any tourist board could to advertise Manhattan as a place of man-made beauty. Hell, Woody even made the Queensboro Bridge gorgeous. Still, Allen’s Manhattan doesn’t shy away from the more grotesque aspects of the urban landscape. Even the NYC love letter opening scene includes a shot of a towering mountain of black trash bags, a familiar sight for any New York City dweller.
Allen’s trash is a comical disruption, taken out between stunners of flickering skyscraper lights in Midtown. In Culver’s Manhattan, though, the trash takes centerstage. Granted, much less so than his previous 2021 exhibition at Chapter NY, which was significantly filthier: shut-in piss bottles in stuffy apartments, leaking urinals, a Betty Tompkins-like close-up of a blow job entitled Moldy Gays, and an ominous depiction of Canadian geese with the title Geese with Rat Poison. Manhattan replaces filth with dilapidation—flowers wilt, cameras are singed, crumpled mattresses lie on the floor, hovering in the city skyline. Yet, there is a fondness to these images—to the rubbish and the gutter and the grubbiness. Not in a kind of nostalgic reveling in some imagined Rent fantasy, a scourge of bad old days NYC romanticism, but more toward the realistically shitty yet sentimental broke-down beauty of the city as captured in the Pogues’ song “Fairytale of New York,” which I consider the perfect New York Christmas song and actually, maybe the perfect New York song entirely. (Obviously, I’m making this connection entirely out of my own recent thoughts dominated by Shane MacGowan’s death last week).
Christopher Culver, Laura, 2023, Charcoal and pastel on paper, 17 x 23 in (43.2 x 58.4 cm) ((Courtesy of the artist and Chapter NY, New York; Photography by Charles Benton)
Beyond a proud appreciation for the unseemly side of the city, there remains a possibility of transcendence and even resurrection (just water those flowers—maybe they’ll come back) in the exhibition too, thanks to the inclusion of the work, Laura. In Manhattan, like in Twin Peaks, Laura is the one. Laura portrays the rapturous final scene of David Lynch’s now-revered but previously near-universally loathed Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) post-murder, finds herself in the Black Lodge blessed and absolved of her sins by a hovering angel (Lorna MacMillan) set to an ecstatic score by Angelo Badalamenti. Though the drawing is titled Laura, Culver doesn’t portray Laura’s tearful cackling ascendent euphoria. Instead, he singles out the angel, blurring her features into a pure white winged silhouette, ghostly and ethereal, set against that iconic Lynchian red curtain. Rather than just reflecting the scene itself, Culver places it on a movie screen in, what looks to be, an empty theater with the exception of the perspective of the viewer. (WHO didn’t buy tickets to Fire Walk with Me?!). In some respects, this creates a natural distance from the transcendence captured in the film yet, anyone who has ever piously sobbed their way through that ending knows it rubs off on the viewer too.
Perhaps we can also find transcendence elsewhere in the exhibition. It’s not lost on me that Laura‘s angel is not the only winged creature in Manhattan, nor is it the only evocation of angels as seen in the title of the freaked-out pigeon drawing, Subway Angel. This raises the question: Are pigeons really angels among us?