Exhibitions
Chuck Close (Hayward Gallery, till 19 September)
Face to face
Martin Gayford
No picture,' the American artist Chuck Close remarked the other day at the Hayward Gallery, 'ever got made without a system. Some systems are just more obvi- ous than others.' Close's own system is not so much in your face, as a phrase of the early Nineties had it, as it is in his subjects' faces. For over 30 years he has painted nothing but faces, viewed with the intrusive curiosity and utter lack of flattery of a pass- port snap or a police mug-shot. Generally, he has also magnified them to the size of models on hoardings or Byzantine apse `Leslie', 1973, by Chuck Close, on show at the Hayward Gallery mosaics. The results of all this systematic activity can be seen in the lower galleries of the Hayward.
Why, you might be asking yourself, should an artist spend his life doing some- thing so repetitive? Right at the start, hav- ing abandoned abstract painting — which he found easy to do, but impossible to do with originality — he produced a nude in the same blankly factual manner. But, as Robert Storr writes in the catalogue, he was unhappy with the unevenly distributed focal points of a naked body. So from then on it was faces: boringly composed head shots, most staring straight ahead.
As bewildering as the unvarying choice of subject, on the face of it, is the actual method of execution. Early Closes go to extraordinary lengths to hide all signs of the hand — no voluptuous swirls of the brush, no impasto, no succulent little marks. Just a carefully air-brushed surface that mimics as accurately as possible the effect of a high quality, sharply focused photograph.
This was, as it happens, not only repeti- tive but also mind-numbingly laborious to do. His early paintings took up to seven months for a black and white one, 14 for a colour image. During that time, Close would have made millions of carefully anonymous marks with spray gun, sponge, rag or brush. As a result, every bristle on the artist's louchely stubbley chin in 'Self- Portrait' 1967-69 — in which he looks as if he has just got out of bed — for example, every pore and skin blemish and reflection are transcribed with an encyclopaedic pre- cision that Van Eyck could not rival, and on a scale generally reserved for the visages of the holy, or of Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe.
Robert Hughes once remarked that Close's faces looked as a human being might to a louse, if a louse had the optical equipment to scan it. They certainly look disconcerting, even repulsive. The combi- nation of huge scale and photographic detail is strangely unreal.
I'm not sure about a louse, which would be unlikely to hover in mid air in front of a face. But the Close effect is much as human beings might appear to a miniature alien cruising past in a match-box-sized spaceship — or like the view of the presi- dential heads on Mount Rushmore that Cary Grant and his leading lady get in. North By North West. In other words, the combination of scale and ultra literalness is disorienting. Consequently, Close's faces are both factual and weird giants frozen in time.
He tired of working in this manner after a decade or so, and has since been trying out various ways of analysing the faces into a regular pattern, a grid, of dots or marks. The results are considerably easier on the eye than earlier Closes. Some look like computer analyses of images into a mosaic of lozenges; some look like cyber-pointil- lism; the most recent, in which the faces are translated into a pattern of whorls, worms and ovals, each within a tiny rectan- gular cell, look, in detail, a bit like the work of Gustav Klimt. One, 'Lucas II', resembles an updated Van Gogh.
But has it been worth it, all that patient labour (which Close managed to continue, admirably, after he was stricken with paral- ysis in 1988)? He has certainly come up with a novel variety of portrait. There is nothing else in art history so grand in scale and at the same time so insistently, casually ordinary. In that way, his pictures express our era so obsessed by individuality, so unimpressed by rank.
Whether they are good as portraits is another matter. The subjects, Close insists, are people who are important to him. By and large, self-portraits apart, they are friends and colleagues, which means major American artists — this Robert is Rauschenberg, Roy is Lichtenstein, Richard is Serra, and so forth. But there is no suggestion that these pictures reveal anything about the sitter. On the contrary, they dissolve the person into a mass of fol- licles and pores, coloured dots and decora- tive wiggles.
Like several of his contemporaries among American artists, Close disciplined himself to a narrow field of activity (just as the abstract painter Robert Ryman paints only white paintings), The result seems to me too repetitive for a retrospective such as this, no matter how many variations of system Close comes up with. On the other hand, he has produced paintings like noth- ing seen before, and, to my eye, they are more interesting to look at than the pho- tographs of the moon explorations on dis- play upstairs. Whether that is because the human face remains more fascinating than the face of the moon, or because paint remains more interesting to look at than photographic film, I am not quite sure.
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