Chuck Close
By Stephen Longmire
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Close’s approach to portraiture is predicated on the idea that all the options in this ancient genre have been played out. His early images, reproducing the most commonplace photographs in paint on a gigantic scale, are less interesting than his clever, virtuosic method. Close explains his use of Polaroids pragmatically: who would sit still for the several months it takes him to finish a painting, working as he does from edge to edge so as not to privilege any area of the composition? More compelling, Close describes himself as learning disabled and says he doesn’t recognize faces until he sees them photographed. And he’s not alone in finding a photograph easier to assimilate than life: today photographs are taken as proof that any number of things exist and happen. Siding with the postmodernists, Close suggests that no meaningful distinction remains between photography and life, making the processed reality of photography the raw material of his art.
Close traces his consistent popularity to his figurative focus: “Everyone is very good at reading faces.” Yet the faces are often the least interesting aspect of his paintings, as he himself admits. They are merely the constant in a formal experiment designed to establish whether representational paintings can be made with the same “alloverness,” the same attention to every detail, as abstract ones. Yet “the paintings are really about how the camera sees,” he says. The MCA show includes some of the large Polaroids he’s worked from and some composite portraits made up of several photographs, arranged in grids. But these are interesting only as steps in his journey. Until recently, the heads themselves often seemed means to an end.
Like Close, Witkiewicz made frequent self-portraits, among his most daring works: he seems to be staring into the camera with desperate urgency. Will it show him who he is? The “mirror with a memory” was perfectly suited to a man who described himself as a schizophrenic and believed he had several alter egos. The camera was an audience for these rival selves oddly like the stage–Witkiewicz’s better-known artistic venue. He seems to demand a response from the camera as an actor does from his audience. But even more than an audience at a play, the camera is shrouded in darkness, mute.
