Chuck Close turned on the speakerphone so he could do his interview
while photographing himself in a Polaroid
studio on Broadway in
New York. He and longtime collaborator John Reuter couldn’t get the
shadows quite right, especially around the nose, without losing the
glint of the eyes. The final photograph would go to Chinese artist
Zhang Huan, who planned to use it to make Close the subject of one of
his ash paintings.
“I hope you have a lot of whatever minutes,” Close called into the
phone. His voice turned away. “One, two, three,” he chanted to Reuter.
The black-and-white instant camera shuffled as it shot.
We were talking because Close was about to travel to Tacoma to give
a talk with his friend, the poet Bob Holman, in conjunction with their
joint traveling exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum through June 15.
(The talk is now over, but the show remains up.) Close didn’t want to
be interviewed in person while he was here, except on one TV program.
The phone compromise seemed fitting for a celebrity artist who makes
tight close-up portraits of faces obstructed on the micro level by some
distracting technique—promises of intimacy that inevitably
deliver just as much distance. Close was coming back home—he was
born in Monroe, lived most of his childhood in Tacoma and Everett, and
studied with Alden Mason at the University of Washington—but
there would be no sit-down interview over coffee in some nostalgic
spot, no constructed confidences. Instead: a studio session overheard
but not seen. As knowledge and information works in the world of
Close’s art, it seemed perfect.
“Right now it’s too flat,” Close told Reuter. “I want to get more
light into the eyes and more direction, not so much straight on. It’s
not bad to have a shadow here, and let the backlight do most of this.
Let the nose cast a shadow over here.” Reuter said something
unintelligible, and Close responded, “Have this light be more like that
light? Actually, that’s probably not so bad.”
This was the third try. Even though the photo was going to Zhang,
Close wanted to shoot it like an image he’d use in his own
work—ruthlessly and dramatically, in high contrast. So
dimensional that the subject appears to poke into this world.
Over the years, using photographs as sources, Close has recorded in
painful detail
the pores, bags, wrinkles, facial hairs, pimples,
and scars of family,
friends, and acquaintances—
often
famous people, from a tired and puffy Philip Glass to Kate Moss without
makeup to a steely-eyed Andres Serrano. If Close were a writer, he
might be in trouble. But honesty has a different currency in
images.
“I’m not out to flatter,” Close said. “Carly Simon and Christopher
Plummer were the worst. Carly Simon wrote ‘You’re So Vain’ about
herself. Christopher Plummer was a nightmare. He wanted his age spots
erased out. I offered to give him a photograph at the end and he said,
‘Who would want one?’ Some people will not be taken.”
The exhibition at Tacoma Art Museum (and a book published by
Aperture under the same name, A Couple of Ways of Doing
Something) is based on a series of daguerreotypes Close made of
artist friends. The images are paired with exuberant praise poems by
Holman—an idea that came out of a birthday party for the late
painter Elizabeth Murray (Holman’s wife). The poems may be caresses,
but the photographs are punishments. Daguerreotypes are an early type
of 19th-
century photography in which images are exposed directly
onto a mirror-polished surface. Close loves them for their intensity
and intimacy, but a humongous amount of light is required to make
instant daguerreotypes. He flashes six powerful strobes at once at his
subjects.
“Your eyes slam shut so fast, it feels like somebody stuck an ice
pick into the middle of your eye,” he said. “If we don’t have the
shields, you can smell your hair and your face burning.”
A certain amount of hostility is inevitable in the resulting images.
Photographer Cindy Sherman wears a disgusted and almost fearful look in
her portrait—it’s not only that she’s appearing without her
trademark disguises but also that she’s being, quite literally,
overexposed. But the psychology of Close’s works has been largely
overlooked by an art world mesmerized by what he does formally and
technically. He has used airbrushed acrylics, scribbles, fingerprints,
brush strokes, and paper pulp to make his massive paintings resemble
blown-up pixilated photographs. They provide only the illusion of
detail, though. Look closely and you’ve entered a world of abstract
loops and marks.
Except Close didn’t always use the facial close-up to promise total
revelation, only to withhold it. In 1967, he made a single enormous
photorealistic nude based on a photograph he had taken of a secretary
at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he was teaching.
She is reclining and has her hair pulled up, like a classical nude, but
she is 22 feet long and almost 11 feet high. “Kiki Smith said it was
the first piece of body art because of the stretch marks and the
cesarean scar,” Close told the speakerphone.
Big Nude is the only painting of its kind. Close never made
another full body at that size and with that level of straightforward
detail. Into the speakerphone, he said it wasn’t large enough. He
wanted more closeness, more detail, so he focused in on a
smaller area. The way he describes it, his portraits should be so close
that the viewer experiences them as landscapes, like the Lilliputians
walking on the giant—Gulliver—in Gulliver’s
Travels. (Taking the literary reference further, it’s the viewers,
not the subjects, who are out of scale.)
In Close’s Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1998 (which
traveled to Seattle Art Museum), the earliest work was a
nine-by-seven-foot hairy facial self-portrait, which became, by
default, the beginning of his career. But Big Nude is another
source for Close’s art, the last moment of a certain unabashed,
knee-knocking, intensely sensual full exposure in Close’s career.
Characteristically, he’s hidden it. It lives in Seattle, tucked away
in a private home, and has only been exhibited once, in Germany. (I saw
it by chance a few months ago.) The real thing is approximately 26
times larger than the reproduction at the top of this page, meaning
that you’re hardly seeing it at all, even now.
After about an hour of interviewing and eight Polaroids of Close’s
face, the speakerphone began to beep because it was running out of
power. “You’re really getting to see how we work,” Close said. But I
never did get a look at the final photograph. 
