I first started looking at Chuck Close’s work when my high school art teacher handed me a book of his portraits in 1997. I was stunned, look at the way he marries portraiture and the language of digitalization. Close claims to be anything but a technocrat, but it is hard not to see his work as commentary on digital information sharing. And yet the human touch exudes from each piece. Each piece is unforgivingly systematic and yet the result is that the accidents and spontaneous choices have more space in which to shine.

My second discovery of Close’s work came when a college professor handed me a catalog of his handmade paper portraits. Wow. These pieces, even in their full frontal stolidity, made me shiver. One criterion for success in a piece of work – although a slippery, vague and subjective one at best – is whether a piece of art has a ‘presence’. You know when it does and you don’t really have the urge to own the piece as much as to be in the presence of the piece.

These paper pieces have presence.

Robert I, 1982
colored, pressed, handmade
paper pulp
Image size: 16 1/2 x 13 inches
Paper size: 25 x 19 inches
Ed: 20
courtesy barbarakrakowgallery.com

As background, Close started working with handmade paper in the early ’80s with Pace Editions director, Joe Wilfer. “Together, they often capitalized on mistakes and accidents and incorporated them into the work. While making the paper pulp multiples, Close discovered that spilled paper pulp pools into little chips, which then can be used to develop other images. Eventually, Wilfer began to manufacture these chips purposely for other pieces… Close and Wilfer produced fourteen editions in eighteen months.” (artscencecal.com) Close continues to produce handmade paper portraits – see Lucas Paper/Pulp, 2006 below.

Lucas Paper/Pulp, 2006
Stenciled handmade paper print in nine colors
Image Size: 48 x 40 inches
Paper Size: 48 x 40 inches
Printed by Pace Editions Ink
Published by Pace Editions, Inc.
Edition of 50
courtesy paceprints.com

I had the opportunity to see the print survey at the Met for which this catalog was written. This was February 2004. The texture of the paper was warm and organic. The system of color separation adopted more organic forms in the later pieces, but in each portrait, every face stared straight ahead in classic Close style. These pieces are larger than life, but not as grandiose as the paintings.

Very interesting in its own right is the mechanism by which Close produces the handmade paper pieces. Michael Kimmelman commented in his New York Times review, “for anybody curious about how art gets made, this exhibition is a model of eloquent didactics, including a few tools of the printing trade, which are themselves oddly riveting.” Imagine a brass matrix consisting of several hundred small shapes all formed by hand soldering each piece of brass to the next. In each of these ‘wells’ the printers would squeeze a small amount of wet colored handmade paper via squeeze bottles. The end result are the images you see here.

Georgia, 1984
Handmade paper, 56 x 45″ (142.24 x 114.30 cm.)
courtesy butlerart.com

Collaboration is one of Close’s primary leitmotifs. Considering his physical condition, he could not have realized much of his work without collaboration. Kimmelman notes,

Big-time printmaking today is a collaborative business. The lone artist in a garret with a woodblock, ink and spoon is a quaint notion that bears no resemblance to Mr. Close’s modus operandi. His partners have included master printers like Joe Wilfer and Kathan Brown and Tadashi Toda, experts, variously, at the ins and outs of spitbite aquatints, reduction linoleum cuts, screen prints, handmade paper pulp multiples and other arcane techniques seemingly impenetrable to the uninitiated.Mr. Close, whose work has always had so much to do with elaborate systems and processes of operation, has needed these printers as they have needed him. Achieving a balance of authority is itself part of the art of printmaking.

Close’s prints redefine printmaking as an artform and offer exciting an exciting paradigm for those of us interested in the discipline.

Self Portrait/Pulp/Pochoir, 2000
Colored, pressed handmade paper pulp, pochoir (11 colors)
Image Size: 24 3/4 x 19 1/2 inches
Paper Size: 24 3/4 x 19 1/2 inches
Published By Pace Editions, Inc
Edition of 40
courtesy moma.org

Read the New York Times review of the exhibition: ART REVIEW; Savoring Chuck Close By Savoring The Process

Further (official) discussion of the show: Close & company: a traveling survey of Chuck Close’s prints and the devices used to make them offers insights into the collaborative processes of contemporary U.S. workshops

You may have noticed the term pochoir in the image credits. The definition of this french word is:

“French for stencil. The term is applied to a class of print usually hand-coloured through a series of carefully cut out stencils. This process was much used in Paris during the early decades of the 20th century. Especially popular in the art deco period, used for fashion plates.” (collectorsprints.com)

Hyena Stomp 1962
Oil on canvas
support: 1956 x 1956 mm frame: 1982 x 1981 x 91 mm
Courtesy of the Tate

The Wikipedia article on syncopation includes the following observation, “playing a note ever-so-slightly before or after a beat is another form of syncopation because this produces an unexpected accent.” I do not have a musical background, but listen to Jelly Roll Morton laugh in his Hyena Stomp and you’lll notice he throws the whole beat of the song off from the rest of the band. It’s marvelous.

If you glance briefly at Stella’s painting, you have it summed up instantly. The red, blue and green rectangular bands thrown off beat by the five offset yellow bands. You move around the whole painting quickly, following the yellow bands. Then you turn to look at the next painting (if you happen to be standing in the Tate.) Or you look again and realize that the rectanglular bands are not really coherent. Distinct colors abutt at the diaganols – yellow against green, red against blue. The whole painting is a clockwise movement inward: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, red, orange, yellow, etc. Into the center where the illusion of a coherent set of rectangles really disintegrates and the beauty of the syncopation reaches its logical conclusion with a lone triangle that cannot resolve into a rectangle.

Now listen to Jelly Roll Morton’s Hyena stomp while looking at the painting and you’ll find yourself bouncing around the rectangles. It’s a pinwheel in motion.

An excerpt of Jelly Roll Morton’s Hyena Stomp is available from Amazon – click here.

Looking at Hyena Stomp as an interior or a logical 3D diagram of an environment – this is inevitable – I can’t help but notice how all of this syncopation and rotation can freeze if you look at the lower right hand diagonal. The horizontal bands on the left of it jump forward as a plane and the vertical bands on the right form a plane that is some distance behind. I think this has everything to do with the offset of the smallest bands in the center, but the ambiguity of logical one-point perspective and flat overlapping planes is worth noting. This reminds me of many of Matisse’s diaganol dissections of bold color planes.

Courtesy UbuWeb

(2002) This documentary follows the making of Marsyas, from the earliest maquettes to the production of the piece. It stops short of the installation at Tate. Kapoor comments on each stage of the process, and on the ideas and concerns of his art. He makes a number of interesting statements:

“form has metaphysical memory…”

“You set up the ends and the form in between is at one end logical and at the other end I like the idea of it being imaginary.”

“It’s not the idea that matters. I think it’s to do with how one deals with the very simple almost pragmatic problems that are set up by the architecture and how one overcomes those, and yet holds onto one’s artistic project.”

Kapoor’s maquettes remind me of Brancussi. The analog to Brancussi’s base is how Kapoor attempts to incorporate the space around the object.

Charlie Rose interviews Chuck Close and Robert Rauschenberg. This is a candid, accessible hour of interviews.

Walker Evans took this photograph in 1936. The steel mill strikes me in its resemblance to a battleship. It looms in the background as though at port of call as occupier of a land of bare dirt yards and one-room houses.

Steel Mill and Workers’ Houses, Bessember, Alabama, 1936, 1936-1971

Courtesy MoCP

Q: What is the role of the visual artist?

I think one role of the visual artist is to present something to the world that influences the viewer to rethink his cultural and biological assumptions and prejudices.

Q: How does this differ from the science or religion?

The scientist’s inquiry produces evidence from experimentation. The artist may also employ inquiry and experimentation, but he is not bound to the same scientific method. If it chooses, visual art can ignore the rigidity of empirical facts that bind science.

I suppose that it could be possible for an individual piece of art to declare a cosmology independent of religion and science. But unlike religious doctrine, visual art is not relegated to the role of dictating a creation myth or world view. Certainly a lot of the history of art has been exactly this – it has served as the visual method of solidifying religious views to largely illiterate populations. But contemporary art can foster questions, even skepticism and rebuke from the viewer as part of its intended purpose. This separation of art from being the visual pillar of religion is apparent in the west’s first landscape, Giorgione’s The Tempest. It is a piece of art that is truly ambiguous and open for interpretation.

The Tempest (c. 1508)
Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy

Q: Does visual art expand our understanding of the world?
I’m not sure that art expands our world in the same way that science expands understanding or religion defines a world view. I think visual art can get us to reflect on human nature, social relationships and the world around us (space, reality, natural phenomenon etc.)

If we look at this question in a contemporary light, it would be hard to claim that visual art has expanded our understanding of the world as much as astronomy and astrophysics have in the past 50 years. But who says that the images produced by the Hubble, Discovery and other NASA cameras are not visual art? These images communicate the depths of space and grandeur of the universe in a way that the statement “the universe is immense” cannot.

An infrared view of the Helix nebula. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz.
The Cone Nebula Neighborhood
Credit & Copyright: Adam Block and Tim Puckett

New Horizons at Io
Credit: NASA, JHU/APL, SwRI – Additional Processing: Sean Walker

Q: Looking at these images of space, do you think art is more effective when it represents a recognizable object or when it is abstract?
I would quote Anish Kapoor in a recent issue of Sculpture, “there’s no such thing as abstract art. All abstract objects have residual meaning.” He goes on to say, “the objective of my work over many years has been to fight and direct those residual meanings.” Even abstract form communicates meaning.

Q: What makes contemporary art different from art made in the past?
Technology changes, world view changes. I think there are many conspiring events that place us in a unique situation to create art that could not have been made a century ago or even twenty years ago. But I also think that many of the classic themes of art are still very alive. Fracturing the landscape can be as pertinent in a contemporary forum as it was when Georges Seurat painted. Likewise, it would be premature to claim that we have examined the human body in such depth as to no longer warrant producing art based on it. I think the need for honest investigation is still much needed.

Sleeping Venus (c. 1510)
Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Elizabeth Murray The Sun and the Moon 2005
oil on canvas on wood, 9′ 9″ x 8′ 11-1/2″ x 2″
Courtesy PaceWildenstein