Jonathan Langseth ARH351 Rosenfeld

Chuck Close: Four Perspectives

In what follows I offer four approaches to the art of Chuck Close, an artist with distinct transitions in the development of his work. The approaches will be 1) historical, 2) formal, 3) theoretical, and 4) Critical. I limit discussion to his non-photographic works of portraiture. Through a discussion of only one theme, and in the case of Close this is the most prominent theme, we gain an ordered perspective of the progression of his artistic development. Although a complete and consistent account of any artist is an impossibility, it is my hope that the collective discussion that follows gives a well rounded and thorough account of the art of Chuck Close.

1) An Historical Account

Modern technology has made it now possible for any person with access to the internet to acquire a near infinite amount of information instantly. To acquire a basic biographical account of Chuck Close, biography being that which links an individual to history, one need only google his name; and so I did to collect basic information regarding Closes life.1 Born July 5, 1940, in Monroe, Washington. After receiving his B.A. from the University of Seattle, Close went on to graduate school at Yale, followed by a year long stint in Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship.
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The remainder of the paragraph is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close

Upon returning to the United States, Close Became an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. By the age of thirty, Close was already exhibiting his work in prominent galleries. Closes early paintings have been called photorealism or super-realism because they depict very large, up close portraits that look, from almost any distance, like a photograph. IT is here that we reach first point at which biography and history meet. Closes technique is only possible after the invention of photography. The existence of photography, as Benjamin notes in Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, offers new perspectives, forms of manipulation, and forms of consciousness. The perspective of Closes subjects is in fact photographical, only available through the optics of a camera lens. By the time Close was thirty years old, the history of art had witnessed the avant-garde, surrealism, abstract expressionism, and many other movements and styles that stretched the of boundaries of what constituted accurate representation, until the privileged status of representation itself was put under trial in non-objective painting. In response, Close chose to offer portrayals so real that discernment that the painting is not a photograph is difficult. This response to the question of representation evident in the art world at the time can be seen as a synthesis of the historically dialectical motion of art. Art dances with its definition, with any attempt to pin it down. Closes photorealist paintings bring the dialectical relation of representation and non-representation into synthesis by responding to the historical move away from representation with works that represent visual reality with an unparallel precision. After a spinal artery collapse in 1988, Close became quadriplegic. He continued painting, holding the brush in his mouth. The resulting paintings were very different from his earlier photorealist work. Close continued painting large, close-up portraits of people, but began using

small, colored, shapes positioned on a grid, to create his images. As a means towards making evident the change in Closes works, and as the main focus of the present and following sections, I would like to select five paints or Close. They are:

1. Study for Self-Portrait. 1968. Gelatin-silver print, ink, pencil, and pressure-sensitive tape on board, 18 5/8 x 13 3/8

2. Large Mark Pastel. 1978. Pastel and watercolor on washed paper mounted on paper, 55 3/4 x 43 1/4"

3. Georgia. 1984. Handmade paper, 56 x 45"

4. Dorothea. 1995. Oil on canvas. 102 x 84"

5. Emma/Woodcut. 2002. Ukiyo-e woodcut, 43 x 35

This selection of paintings is representative of the forty-plus years of Closes career as an artist. One can get a sense of both the continuity and distinctions that evolved from the 1960s to present day.

2) A Formal Account

Let us begin with Closes Study for Self-Portrait. Created with mostly ink and pencil, this piece could easily be mistaken for a photograph of the artist. From the wild motion of his hair to the reflection of light on his glasses, to the cigarette smoke trailing upward from his mouththe precision and skill required to create this work of art are evident of Closes genius. To have such precision, Close used grids to section off both the photograph from which he worked and the work itself.2 To make his large-scale portraits, Close first selects a photograph and overlays it with a grid. He then transposes the image square by square to another surface-be it canvas, paper, or printing plate. When filling in his grids, he builds the final likeness through marks that can include dots of pigment, inked fingerprints, etched lines, or vibrant brushstrokes.3 This work is
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To view the grid see: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE %3A1156&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1 3 http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/6aa/6aa176.htm

exemplar of photorealism. One has difficulty in distinguishing whether the work is a blown up photograph or made by pen and pencil. From a distance, Large Mark Pastel similarly resembles a photograph, albeit one out of focus. Yet as one closes the distance between him or herself and the work, it becomes evident that the work is constructed out of small circular sections of pastel and watercolor. This work, unlike Study for Self-Portrait, is in color. Close uses the same grid process to create this work as his other portraits. Georgia is one of Closes works made with black and gray fingerprints on a white background. With this work we see Closes move away from precise representation to an experimental method of creating images out of non-conventional means, namely his fingerprints. But he is still able to capture what can be called alternatively the essence or expression of a human. Whatever formal properties are necessary for such a feat, Close has captured them. Dorothea was made after Close became quadriplegic. This work is representative of the kinds of portraitures Close began painting with his mouth after losing the use of his arms and hands. Dorothea is highly interesting in its degree of photorealism and its simultaneous slipping away from realism into the abstract. This work would indeed be classified as abstract, but, and this in terms of its formal properties, the work suggests the lack of border and defined line, and instead a blurring of boundary, an ambiguity of vision. Emma/Woodcut is a collaborative piece undertaken with Yasuyuki (Yasu) Shibata. Here is a description of the process:

The Printmaking Process Yasu made color separations for each color that Chuck Close had created in his original painting. He ultimately carved 27 blocks out of a combination of basswood and

maple plywood that would eventually carry 113 colors and be printed 132 times for each sheet of paper. The process of carving the blocks took approximately 20 weeks. Prior to printing, the Shiramine paper was calendered and hand sized with Nikawa which is similar to rabbit skin glue. In a weekly cycle, 30 pieces of paper that were to be printed that week were dampened on Sunday, kept in plastic during the week to maintain their moisture, and finally placed on the drying rack at the end of the week. Each day, Yasu was able to hand print two to three runs on each batch of 30 prints. The inks were prepared by Yasu from ground dry pigments, mixed with water and kept refrigerated. The area of the woodblock that was to be printed was dampened each time with a brush before the ink was applied. Yasu next applied the pigments from a bowl to the block with a brush. A second brush called a hake was then used to spread the ink to its proper consistency onto the block. The blocks were registered with small notches cut into the corner of each block. Yasu then using a baren printed each inked area of each block. He repeated this process 132 times for each print.4 In each of the paintings Close made use of grids. This sectioning off of various sections of a work in order to better organize ones act of creating is not unique to Close and may even be considered essential to that act of making art, but Closes style is and has been consistently unique in his use of grids as a visually apparent aspect of his work.

3) A Theoretical Account

It has already been noted that Closes work affords a unique dialectical synthesis of representation and non-representation. But in relation to this it should be further noted that the evolution of Closes work has its own dialectical progression. From his Study for Self-Portrait of 1968 to Emma/Woodcut in 2002, there is both a level of consistency and change. The most evident struggle Close had to comes to terms with was his physical impairmentthe struggle between new and challenging limitations and the desire to express pushed Close in new directions with his art. But throughout his career we can see another, more experientially based,
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http://www.paceprints.com/printshop/FeaturedPrints/Close-1851.asp For a visual of the process see: http://www.chuckclose.coe.uh.edu/process/emma_b_1.htm

progression in which Close pulls his work into ever new dimensions of perception. In his portraitures, Close found a methodology with which to test the boundaries of limitations. All construction requires limitations of some sort, at the very least some pulling thread which brings the work of art together into a whole. Even the most avant-garde and abstract of works are unified in some fashion; and this unification is evidence of some form of limitation imposed on the construction and presentation of a work of art. As noted Close used grids to break his works into smaller units to be worked on in turn. At first this was intended to allow Close to paint large portraitures photographic in appearance. But as Close continued his artistic endeavors, he began playing off the grids to create representations somehow simultaneously representative and obscured. We see not only a face and the expression of what it is like to be human in the work, but something more, possibly unable to be expressed in words, the is communicated to the attentive spectator. In his later work, such as Emma, we still see the face ad intuit the expressive quality of the work, but we equally see an organized arrangement of colored squares and globular shapes. The shapes not only construct the appearance of a face but at the same time seem to be breaking it apart into fragments. This contradiction, the concurrent construction and deconstruction of the representation or subject matter, is left for the spectator to synthesize how ever he or she is able. Closes work also articulates the determinacy of distance. His earlier works appear photographic at nearly all distances. His later works give the appearance of accurate, photo-like representation at a distance, but up close break down into the patterned use of shapes Close chooses as means of creation.

4) A Critical Account

The portraits of Close are close-up, larger than life portrayals of humanity. Their size and closeness express to the attentive spectator an intimate glimpse of the human conditionthe strife, joy, toll of life, etc. Their presence acts as a reminder of or awaking to ones relation to ones self and to others. In Closes work we can see the lines of the face, the fear in the eyes, and the smile on the lips of his subjects expressed more loudly and boldly than typically noticed throughout the course of everyday life. The face has been the source of the most intimate understanding of humanityit is, so to speak, the inlet into ones souland Close depicts this intimacy and understanding convincingly. Closes work from the Seventies onward continually pushes the limit of this loud and bold expression of human understanding. The use of varying shapes constructed with no definable border attests to the philosophical belief that an individual is not what he or she is without the support of and interplay with the world, the environment, other people, objects, etc. Emma is an example in which the background and foreground are indiscernible, thus suggesting either the reciprocity or concurrency of self and other, the world as extension of self and the self as existing in, of , and with the world. Closes art recognizes the myth of the autonomous, detached individual who faces a world distinct from his or herself. The study of his work results in the blurring of subject and object. In so doing Closes work aides in disrupting the ideals of humanity at root in the current commodification of society, of individual as consumer and competitor in a world of each against all. Close recognizes the lack of fine lines that divide self from other, a recognition in support of the ideal of cooperation as opposed to competition. Although Closes works have a high market value and are thus apart of the

commodification of society, to experience one of his works is to experience the connectedness and interrelatedness of all things, that everything is bound together in making each part what it is. Like Closes paintings, the world to is a whole out of its part, like the various sections of Closes grids. And like the grids Close uses in his later works, we can not easily recognize where one conscious individual starts and another stops beyond mere empirical superficialities. Close says his use of grids is "a creative process that could be interrupted repeatedly without damaging the final product, in which the segmented structure was never intended to be disguised."5 The work, as was previously noted, both constructs and deconstructs the subject (both the subject of the painting and the subjecting witnessing the painting). In general, all of Closes works are evidence to his extreme talent, patience, and understanding.

http://www.chuckclose.coe.uh.edu/life/index.html

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