Artist Chuck Close considers the human face, and then considers it again

'A Couple of Ways of Doing Something' shows Chuck Close experimenting yet again with the idea of the portrait

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS CRITIC
Thursday, August 27, 2009

Consider the human face.

Artist Chuck Close has done so for decades, finding ways to deconstruct an image of a face only to painstakingly put it back together. And his experimentations have distinctly changed the very definition of what a portrait can be in the 21st century.

While most American artists in the late 1960s considered painting dead — portraiture and representational painting perhaps even more than dead — Close eschewed the ideas percolating around him in New York and instead cut his own path, creating massive photo-realistic painted portraits that were typically based on photographs.

Now nearing 70 and with a long list of laurels, the celebrated Close still is experimenting with ways of portraying the human face. And "A Couple of Ways of Doing Something," an exhibit recently opened at the Austin Museum of Art, reveals the artist's thoughtful explorations of photogra-

phy in dramatically different formats, materials and scales.

Organized by Aperture, the New York-based nonprofit organization devoted to all things photographic, "A Couple of Ways" demonstrates the intriguing creative journey on which Close has embarked since 2001.

Training the lens on his circle of artistic friends — the same cadre that have served as subjects of Close's paintings for years including Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and Cindy Sherman — Close starts his foray with photography's earliest form — intimately sized daguerreotypes — then sidesteps to large-format digital pigment prints and finally dives into colossal digitally generated tapestries.

Why consider the human face at just one scale, Close posits, when you can consider the face — and then consider it again — in myriad forms and sizes? For Close, the topography of the human face is too complex for just one view.

For that matter, is a portrait limited to only an image? Not in this exhibit. An integral part of "A Couple of Ways" is the praise poetry by New York School poet Bob Holman (who originated the now-famous poetry slams at Nuyorican Poets Cafe) that accompany each of Close's digital pigment prints. Just as Close's forceful yet intimate portraits stand as intimate but probing studies of each face, so do Holman's laudatory prosodies. "It's always about the person," writes Holman.

Close began experimenting with daguerreotypes in 2001, intrigued by the unforgiving nature of the medium and the hyper-detail that heightens facial flaws and marks. "The thing I love about daguerreotypes is that everything I love in photography was already there in the beginning," says Close in an interview in the exhibit catalog. "The incredible detail. The incredible range, from the brightest highlight of white . . . to the deepest, deepest darkest, most velvety black."

Fifteen daguerreotypes are featured in the exhibit, each 10-inch-by-18-inch silver-coated metal plate intimately displayed in its own black case. There's a curious thing about a daguerreotype. For all of the medium's precise detail, it's is an elusive thing: Because of the way it refracts light, a daguerreotype must be viewed at a specific angle in order for the image to be visible. "A mirror with memory" is how 19th-century writer Oliver Wendell Holmes described the daguerreotype shortly after its invention.

And it's just one way for Close to render the human.

Merging 19th-century technology with that of the 21st is another way. Though daguerreotypes were originally one-of-a-kind images that could not be reproduced, they can now be digitally scanned, which is what Close did to create the super high-resolution inkjet prints, which make up the second aspect of the exhibit. With their luscious tonal fidelity, the 26-inch-by-20-inch prints have a rich, silky tactileness to their finish. And yet the warts-and-all detail of each face is there in contrast to all the velvety tones.

Not content with just two ways of doing, the process-obsessed Close takes this series of ever-enlarging photos one step further. Long intrigued by tapestries made on 19th-century Jacquard mechanical looms (which can create optically blended colors from multicolored threads), Close took his digitized daguerreotype scans to a modern digital Jacquard loom to create the colossal 8-foot-by-6-foot portrait tapestries on exhibit. Each black-and-white tapestry is composed of as many as 17,800 threads in dozens of colors.

And again we get another variation of the original daguerreotype portrait, this one overwhelming in its scale, truly velvety in its finish and with the sharper lines in each face softened somewhat by the plush nature of the tapestry fabric.

(Close's forays into using the Jacquard loom have single-handedly re-introduced the Jacquard technique back into world of fine art.)

And yet the transition from shimmery daguerreotypes to rich-toned prints and luxurious tapestries reveals that Close is most interested in not just faces, but in the ways of looking at them.

"From the very beginning, what I wanted to do was mitigate against the standard hierarchy of the (traditional) portrait," Close once told an interviewer. "At first I just wanted the artificiality of the photograph between me and the painting. And then 30 years later, I'm still making portraits from photographs."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

'A Couple of Ways of Doing Something: Photographs By Chuck Close, Poems By Bob Holman.'

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays (Thursdays until 8 p.m.) 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. Sundays through Nov. 8

Where: Austin Museum of Art, 823 Congress Ave.

Cost: $4-$5 (Children younger than 12 free)

Information: 495-9224, www.amoa.org

'Chuck Close'

What: Documentary by the late filmmaker Marion Cajori examines Close's life and artistic process, along with his circle of artistic friends including Philip Glass, Kiki Smith and Elizabeth Murray.

When: 7 p.m. Sept. 10

Cost: $4-$5