Close encountered.

As the 120-odd portraits in Chuck Close's full-scale retrospective found their places on the walls of New York's Museum of Modern Art this February, Brooks Adams visited the installation in progress and talked with the artist and the show's curator Robert Storr about the work, its development, and the issues surrounding its presentation. Photographer Tina Barney shot the proceedings for Artforum. And, in the essay that follows, art historian Richard Shill provides a critical overview.

BROOKS ADAMS: So we're opening with the big grisaille portraits from the late '60s and '70s, right?

CHUCK CLOSE: Uh-huh. This is the earliest painting, 1967-68 - Big Self-Portrait.

BA: Is this where you feel your work begins?

CC: Well, I did a nude just before this which I consider part of my mature work. We thought for a while about putting it in but decided just to stick with heads.

BA: How did you decide against the nude? I mean, it was the most surprising image in the catalogue.

ROBERT STORR: The only place we could have put it is on the balcony overlooking the garden. The interior spaces wouldn't have permitted it because of the height of the ceiling. I also felt that to start out with a nude would upstage the surprise of coming into this gallery, where you really see him hit it with the heads.

CC: And, actually, nobody has really seen the nude. Well, I did show it in Europe, at a 1994 retrospective. Also, I think it's coming to the Whitney for a nude show there. But in terms of duplicating the work's initial impact - these are the first paintings that anybody saw.

BA: This is a very iconic beginning-the Gallery of Worthies.

CC: Phil [Glass] said in an interview - he and Richard [Serra] and a bunch of other people were all photographed on the same day - that anybody who showed up ended up being well-known in their field. He said it was like a magic moment. And I was just trying to paint anonymous people.

BA: Am I right in thinking your '70s sitters are more anonymous than your '80s and '90s sitters?

CC: I just gave up on "anonymous." A lot of people that I have been friendly with for thirty years are household names.

BA: Which of these heads are least familiar to you at this point?

CC: Well, I haven't seen Richard or Nancy[Graves] since 1980. Actually, I haven't seen the self-portrait for a while, either. Phil I see all the time, because it's at the Whitney. Joe I just saw when Charles Saatchi sold it. I went to Japan and saw it then.

BA: I had no idea this was Joe Zucker. I didn't recognize him in this outfit.

CC: Well, he was incognito - which was his idea. He said he wanted to look like a Midwestern used-car salesman. He had all this hair - a big curly Harpo Marx fright-wig kinda thing. And he greased it down with Vaseline.

BA: And who is this?

CC: John Roy. [A painter friend who lives in Amherst, Mass.]

BA: Is that a tweed coat he's wearing?

CC: A knitted sweater. It's variegated yarn, and it's out of focus.

BA: It almost looks as if you're offering a preview of your '80s work.

CC: Well, this was during the heyday of lyrical abstraction, and I thought I could make lyrical abstractions and it would still represent a sweater.

BA: This whole section reminds me of The Ice Storm - have you seen the movie?

CC: I haven't seen it.

BA: It's a big '70s hair moment. What's it like to see all this hair these days?

CC: Well . . . it's not mine, that's for sure.

BA: It's amazing the way people looked back then. I mean, these are more real than any photographs.

CC: I was saying to Rob earlier that I don't think the paintings look thirty years old, but at the same time they really do nail down what people looked like then.

BA: Rob, what's the particular challenge of hanging a room of big heads?

RS: To make sure that they're not just a kind of cavalcade. You have to hang it so that people can readily see that each one is truly made differently. There's an idea people have from looking at reproductions on the page that all the work is basically the same. Also, in most cases, these are paintings you have to see both at a distance and close up - even the small ones.

CC: As I was growing up in the '40s and '50s, paintings got bigger, the marks got bigger, the brushes got bigger, and yet the part-to-whole relationships stayed the same. What I was trying to do with these paintings was to make a big, aggressive, confrontational, knock-your-socks-off image from a distance that was also extremely intimate - that was made with teeny little marks.

RS: There's a certain coldness in the initial image that changes once you realize the delicacy of the touch that's involved. I mean, there's a kind of tenderness in the way they're painted, even though the eye that's looking is fairly merciless.

BA: What's the subject of that doughy painting?

CC: That's my daughter, Georgia.

RS: And that's pulp . . .

CC: Yeah, it's done in wet pulp.

BA: It's the most amazing process . . . it makes me think again of your old friend Joe Zucker.

CC: Joe was very influential - not only for me, but also for a lot of others - because we were talking a lot about the idea of building a painting, rather than painting it, and, you know, he was building up his surfaces with cotton balls.

BA: How was Georgia put together?

CC: It was done on the floor, and I had scaffolding over it. I would kneel on the scaffolding and call for a particular color of pulp. They'd throw me a handful, and I would put it down - like making the biggest pizza in the world.

BA: What a topping.

CC: This one [Jud, 1982, of the sculptor Jud Nelson] is made from pulp dried into chips, and then glued down, on top of each other. It's another use of the material.

RS: It's the Pringles version of the pizza you're seeing over here.

BA: Your choice of sitters is an interesting mix of known and unknown. Fanny is your mother-in-law?

CC: My grandmother-in-law. My wife's grandmother - my kids' great-grandmother.

RS: Here you can see all these edges.

CC: I went back in to clean up some of the whites with an electric eraser and just cleaned off any smudges. I did it in parts of the lips, too.

BA: What's going on with her throat?

CC: Everyone thought it was a tracheotomy - it's just lots of old skin hanging.

RS: It's our future.

BA: Yeah, a vortex, And the image of Richard Serra is all airbrushed, right?

CC: Airbrush with scratches scraped in. See that red scrape in the neck? There are scratches made with razor blades in that section. This part [the chin] was erased. The ear is almost totally gone. There's as much paint taken off, practically, as put on.

BA: Do you still do a lot of removal, in the more recent paintings?

CC: No. As I went along, the paint handling got more sophisticated, I suppose. In the last painting in the room [Phil], it's not as easy to see how the paint's been scraped or eroded.

BA: What was Nancy Graves doing when you took her picture? She looks so crazy.

CC: Part of it was that the lens of the camera was closer to her face than we normally stand, so she appears a bit cross-eyed, perhaps. I also usually shoot the person slightly from below, so that the image really makes sense when it's looming over you. You want to look up at it - as if it were a big Easter Island head.

BA: Rob, you're a longtime supporter of Graves' work, aren't you?

RS: She was a marvelously eccentric and energetic person, so this energy comes through in the portrait. Nancy was a lot like Chuck - I think it's partly a product of their Yale background. Her premises were sometimes kind of kooky, and all the better for it, but she was a rationalist in her way. She applied herself with incredible diligence to solving a problem - and that's what Chuck does.

BA: Do you get a feeling of loss when you look at some of these pictures? About the people who are no longer here?

CC: Well, in this show there are three: Nancy, Roy [Lichtenstein], and Fanny. And, of course, there are many people I wanted to paint who died before I had a chance to do it. I was going to try to paint Andy Warhol. In fact, as soon as he got out of the hospital he was going to paint me and I was going to attempt to paint him.

BA: Had you taken the picture?

CC: No. I had also become quite friendly with Allen Ginsberg, and I really wanted to paint him. I wish that I'd photographed my mother. I was angry with her, and she died before I ever had the chance.

BA: Why did you paint Francesco [Clemente] - are you friends?

CC: No, I'm not terribly close to him. I did a series of paintings of four artists - Francesco, Cindy Sherman, Alex Katz, and Lucas Samaras - because I decided I wanted to make images of people who we know what they look like, or think we do, because they paint or photograph themselves. So I picked four people who present themselves in very different ways. It was an acknowledgment of a dialogue I felt I had with other artists who are making images of themselves. And for that reason, I didn't feel like they had to be my closest friends in the whole world. Sometimes to make a portrait is a good excuse to get to know somebody. I always thought the reason people have dogs in New York is to be able to meet people.

BA: Deborah Solomon referred to your work in The New York Times Magazine as being "Friendly Art."

RS:/Laughs] It's an unfortunate term.

CC: Except that last night I was watching this wonderful documentary on Motown. And all that music is what I painted to. I named my daughter, Georgia, after Ray Charles. Every painting is made with Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, whatever. Someone said in the program that the thing that made the music different was that it was friendlier. And I thought: If I'm friendly, if the work is friendly, in the same way Motown was, I guess I can live with that.

BA: I think It's wishful thinking, though. Your early work can be quite terrifying.

CC: I'm glad you said that. They pissed a lot of people off. They were aggressive and confrontational. The later paintings have warmer colors, much more visible strokes, and so on, but they're not necessarily more friendly.

BA: I don't think so either, I think the two Images of Alex [Katz] - the small one from '89 and a bigger one from '91 - have a really psychologically tortured expression and also form one of the real cruxes of the show. Rob, can you explain what you were trying to do here? This small painting of Alex is the first work made after the "event," right?

RS: Exactly. This was made in the hospital, as I gather.

BA: Then you have this bigger painting of Alex on the same wall, but in the next room.

RS: What I wanted to do was to have things sort of relax, then get combustible, and then relax again. This represents the bridge between being sick and making this terrific painting - even under the worst possible conditions - and then getting back into full gear. It's a biographical note that not everybody will get, but I thought it was important to have it there all the same. Plus you've got Alex translated in one way, then another.

BA: You might not want to hear this, Chuck, but I'll never forget seeing one of your Alex pieces in the Jean Clair show at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, "Identity and Alterity," in a room having to do with the physiognomy of artists and criminals.

CC: [Laughs] Well, a couple of my subjects are near criminals.

BA: Rob, which portrait was the hardest one to hang in the big room of '90s images?

RS: John [Chamberlain] is certainly very intense. He's also very dark, like a Georges De La Tour painting with deep baroque color.

CC: Now, that's a case where he has a kind of crumpled, crushed face - but I had no intention of making it look like one of his sculptures.

RS: John is not an easy guy to know, and that comes through very clearly - he's watching back as much as being watched. I've played poker with him. His level of crime is just shuffling the deck. [Laughter]

BA: Let me just fire some questions at random. Have you ever taken a painting beck from an exhibition, museum, or private collection, and gone back Into It?

CC: No. If I have it around, I'll do some fine-tuning. I mean, I could go in there and do first aid on almost every painting in the show. There's always something in each painting that really drives me crazy. At a certain point, it's sort of like your children. You do what you can do, and then you push them out into the world and hope that they survive.

BA: What about the connections between the way in which artist-subjects are painted and the work of those subjects - it came up with the Chamberlain portrait.

RS: Well, you can see very clearly in Kiki [Smith] how many different rhythms and patterns are going on at the same time. You get these incredible bursts of activity, where everything is firing off according to one pattern - and then it slips, and you've got another pattern coming up against it, like tectonic plates adjusting themselves. It's incredibly active. If you let your eye wander away from the focus of the face, you find all this abstraction going on.

CC: Kiki is someone that I've really gotten to know well. She tries all kinds of things, and they don't always succeed, but she always looks for something new to do, and a new way to attack a problem.

BA: What about all the weaving metaphors that are applied to your recent work. Is this something that's just emerged?

CC: No. I always thought that the process was a little bit like what used to be called "women's work." Women had to be able to do some knitting, put it down, go feed the baby. Come back, a little more knitting, and then put it down and go start dinner. This really suits me well - the fact that I can start it, stop it, I don't have to be inspired. There are no good and bad days. You sign on, and if you believe in the system, eventually you get a work. In the same way that you make a sweater: you knit one and purl two long enough and you do it right - eventually you get a sweater.

BA: Why did you seek Paul Cadmus out?

CC: He's someone I met recently, and he's just the most fantastic guy. He has a great mind, he's ninety-three years old, and he's as sharp as - at eighteen I wasn't that sharp.

BA: Did you like his work when you were young?

CC: No. When I was in school I was totally involved with abstraction. I didn't have a lot of figurative heroes. So it's been fun to take another look at stuff that I chose to ignore the first time through.

BA: Did you have a eureka experience with Cadmus' work?

CC: The thing I like about them is that they're so ungiving in terms of the use of the medium; there's nothing likable, no liquid brushstrokes with lots of juice. Yet they're full of things that are about another level of pleasure. Here is this hot subject matter, delivered in the coolest, most arm's-length, amazing way, but dry, arid. I love that kind of dichotomy, between the image made and the stuff that makes it. Which is what I like about Mark Greenwold's work, too. I mean, here's domestic violence painted like a Vermeer.

BA: Were you aware of Gerhard Richter's work in the '60s and '70s?

CC: By the end of the '60s I was. I still hadn't seen any of it. But I got a very early German catalogue and I was knocked out by it. I've been a big fan forever.

BA: Did you go to the 1972 Documenta, which included both you and Richter?

CC: No, I didn't. I've never been to the Documentas I was in. I don't know why I didn't go. I stayed home and painted. I thought that was the better thing to do. Now I wish I'd gone.

BA: It seems like this show is an opportunity to put Chuck's work in a more international context - the big picture of the '60s and '70s that we didn't know about at the time.

RS: I certainly hope so. Because I think Chuck's work has largely been treated simply on its own and not in terms of other things going on around him. Chuck's shows were visible, they were reviewed, but there was little theoretical discussion that brought him into the whole postmodern context. And he belongs there.

BA: So were you taken with Chuck's work early on?

RS: Yeah, and I was puzzled by it, too. A lot of people I've written about were those who both demanded attention and also gave me a problem in some way. I wasn't sure what to do about pictures that were, one, photographically based and, two, apparently dispassionate (I learned that they're not as dispassionate as they appear).

BA: Chuck, do you have to push yourself to go see new work?

CC: No, God, I love it. I don't understand why a lot of artists of my generation stopped going to look at art. I want to see everything. I always said I'd rather see crap made now, and try and figure out why it's being made, than just visit the greatest hits of the past. I'm very interested in a lot of younger artists' work.

BA: Tom Friedman, for example?

CC: Tom is a guy who's harnessed this desire to make things. He's willing to put in the time to do what he needs to do.

BA: You had a show together at the Art Institute of Chicago.

CC: Yes. It was wonderful to be paired with him. And Madeleine Grynsztejn, the curator, had no knowledge of my long-term commitment to Tom's work. I've been interested in it from the first moment I saw it.

BA: Rob, are you concerned about how this show is going to be perceived vis-a-vis realism today? Or is that a dead issue?

RS: It's not a dead issue, but it's not a primary issue. What's your sense of what's out there? I'm curious how you see the situation.

BA: The people I'm talking to are interested in painting again.

CC: Isn't that great. Boy, wouldn't that be wonderful?

BA: Whether it's John Currin or Laura Owens, I think a lot of people are just thinking about how you do it flat, and how you make it iconic, and dangerous. Do you know Marcus Harvey's work? He's a British follower of Chuck's.

RS: He's the one that did the painting of Myra Hindley in the "Sensation" show.

BA: Right. [Hindley is a '60s child-murderer who remains in prison in Britain. Harvey's painted image of her caused a furor and was vandalized in London last September, shortly after the exhibition opened at the Royal Academy.]

CC: No, I've never met him. But apparently he does other work that comes out of what I do.

BA: He's doing a big Hitler painting. Is there anything in this show that's potentially explosive in that way?

RS: I think Chuck's work is about a subtler level of provocation, a feeling that you're at one remove from the familiar, and, at the same time, you're offered degrees of intimacy that you don't quite know what to do with.

CC: I think people are put off by the intimacy. These things give you more information than you ever wanted.

BA: What, speaking of intimacy, were you looking at in Vienna the year you spent there on a Fulbright in the mid '60s? And why Vienna?

CC: You mean, why did I say I went? On the Fulbright form, I said I went to study Klimt and Schiele. And I felt obliged to go look at their work, since I used that as an excuse. But one of the funny things now is to look at Klimt's paintings, with all those incredible patterns - there's a real connection that I wasn't aware of until recently.

BA: Did you have a thing for Franz Xavier Messerschmidt?

CC: No, I love Messerschmidt now, but I didn't know it then.

BA: Do you see any relationship to Monet's 'Water Lilies in your recent faces - or "facescapes," as Rob calls them in his essay?

CC: Sure.

BA: It seems like one of the strongest links to your work in MOMA'S permanent collection.

CC: Well, at my advanced age, I'm looking at anybody who finishes strong. [Laughter]

Brooks Adams is a New York-based writer and critic.

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RICHARD SHIFF

Long ago, sometime during the '70s, I heard that Chuck Close kept the TV on while painting. He didn't actually watch it, but he listened to it, the sounds of game shows and soap operas.(1) This didn't surprise me. Since Close was thoroughly occupied in his studio, he needed no entertainment, but rather distraction. During long hours of meticulous rendering, the sounds of television - the flat, utterly boring sensory effect of formulaic daytime programming - could serve Close's art by muting whatever irregularity or shock the sounds of the world might generate. Once the rest of existence was reduced to a drone, Close could concentrate on something comparably flattened and featureless: an oversize canvas with a superfine grid comprising innumerable puffs of airbrushed acrylic. In the flat environment of a gridded picture, you pass from boredom to excitement just by being attentive. Each little puff of paint is an event. With visual amplitude in the canvas leveled like television's audio, a painter reacts by becoming hyperaware.

Tuning in by tuning out. There are advantages to eliminating saliencies in this manner, becoming attuned to the slightest incidents. It can be a way of throwing off prejudices and hierarchies. It also suits a society dominated by images already flattened out through overuse or habituation; you work to see the details the culture glosses over. The more traditional attitude on the part of artists is to focus on the big events that play on the emotions. If there aren't any big events, "artists" will create them. In either case, found or made, the big event is supposed to make its appearance spontaneously, and therefore genuinely; but there always remains the danger that whatever seems noteworthy has already passed the censors, been orchestrated by the cultural authorities, and is as programmed and generic as the game shows.

Close has always been a wary individual, aesthetically as much as politically. With his Minimalist generation he distrusted the aesthetic instructions he received during the '50s and '60s. Having assimilated the elegantly agitated stroke of Willem de Kooning, hero of his student years, Close nevertheless decided not to pursue an expressionist style. By 1969, having painted Phil and other giant black-and-white portrait heads, he had virtually inverted the de Kooning model, at least as it figured in Harold Rosenberg's notion of the "event" of Action Painting. The effect of Rosenberg's writings, whether or not he intended it, was to encourage artists to make the broadest possible gestures within the dramatic "arena" of the canvas - a punctuated shout or distinctive cry, anything but a drone. Close retained the extra-large, extra-loud format of Action Painting, but chose to make the quietest, least substantial marks within it; he used neutral tones of watery gray and, except for certain fine adjustments, his airbrush technique enabled him to avoid touching the canvas directly. He eliminated color; he eliminated gesture. He worked slowly and methodically; during the time he spent concentrating on a single painting, he might have made a hundred.

Having abandoned abstraction, Close first turned to the nude figure but then narrowed his interest to the head. He reduced his subject matter further by choosing psychologically opaque photographs as his source material, which left little room for anxiety, idiosyncrasy, genius, fetish, obsession, the struggle for identity, or whatever else might have been associated with "expression" at the time. Close staged one of the most disciplined aesthetic breaks Modern art has ever witnessed, rejecting much of his present as well as most of his recent past. This ex-abstractionist resisted identifying himself as a realist, especially if that meant Photorealism, whose practitioners he regarded as stuck in habits of "iconography"; they were developing pointless variations on nostalgic pop-cultural images - trucks, sexy lingerie, shiny diners with neon. In an interview conducted by Robert Storr, curator of the retrospective exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, Close recalled his strategies and those of like-minded '60s painters and sculptors who radicalized the material factor, such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, and Richard Serra: "The way to liberate yourself from the conventions and traditions of the past was to find a material that didn't have historic usage and see what it would do . . . to find a process and go with it. . . . I wanted to make a painting in which every square inch was made the same way."(2) Close's decisions needn't have resulted in an art of representation; but given his background, it was the human form that allowed him to break his own worst habits of "expression."

To compare Close's recent art to works like Phil is to notice how much his method of painting has changed: from hands-off, airbrushed acrylic monochrome to hands-on oil painting in either monochrome or full palette; from tiny grid elements to large, bold ones, often set on the bias; from a minimized quality of "touch" to something approaching maximum intensity.(3) Yet there's more continuity of purpose than divergence. Although Close plays on familiar tensions between medium and image, he has for years been pushing his devices to extremes, exhibiting a one-of-a-kind talent for doing so. His airbrush was an extreme. So, too, is his method of beginning a picture from one corner and working toward the opposite one without ever losing a sense of the aesthetic of the whole - see the view of Robert, 1997, as it was in progress in Close's studio. He moves systematically through an image, as if he were walking through a city strange to him and yet could discern, from the street just traversed, where all other streets must lead. It's typical of Close to repeat his images from work to work, becoming entirely familiar with the specific paths that strands of hair, furrowed brows, or parted lips establish. But he also alienates himself by changing the scale or position of his grid, not to mention shifting from painting to drawing, printmaking, or collage. In the case of Robert, Close was working with a new image, as he has tended to do during the '90s; yet he could still proceed straightaway and with confidence from top to bottom.

Close starts at the upper left corner, seeking to establish a mimetic relation between that part of the canvas and the corresponding area of his source photograph. But in a sense he starts from nowhere and nothing: there's no true origin, because the artist immediately subdivides by eye each unit of the grid of his photograph. For every unit of this source image, Close gives the painting four units. Initially, they can be colored arbitrarily because each will be calculated to correct or average out the excesses of its neighbors. In the first layer of Close's painting, a photographic unit of shadowed flesh might be translated into two units of pale violet and two of peachy orange. The violet might then be modified by strokes of orange, and the orange by strokes of violet; and both orange and violet might eventually be overlaid by circles and ellipses in magenta and green. This method is approximative from the start, and no single detail need be "accurate," yet the totality becomes remarkably accurate in its own right and true to the effect, if not the "real" appearance, of the photographic source. Close often uses the metaphor of golf - getting closer and closer to the cup - to describe the process. It's also like speaking spontaneously in complete paragraphs, correcting or regulating the drift as you go along, taking advantage of chance alliterations, aware that you can always keep the paragraph growing.

Using his method of approximation, Close gets combinations of orange, violet, magenta, and green to look like flesh tones. Although the hues or values of an individual unit of the grid cancel each other out at a distance, the contrasts are so bold, and the canvases usually so large, that from a comfortable viewing position you're likely to see blending and opposition simultaneously. The same effect holds for the linear directions established by bars or lozenges within squares or circles: these configurations signify both the repetition of the basic grid unit and the unique directional force passing through it. Follow what appear to be the jagged edges of the teeth in Robert or the serrated contour of the face in Bill, 1990: one moment the irregularities seem to average out to form a descriptive curve; the next moment they stubbornly retain their angularity.

This incommensurability results because Close virtually always compromises the dominant statement that an individual unit of the grid appears to be making. Where the image demands that one of these elements tend toward white - as with the pale yellow, pale blue, pale violet combinations that constitute the teeth in Robert - Close is likely to make the hues too whitish, requiring the correction of a darker element, perhaps just a dot's worth of magenta. But any darkness at the interior of the whitish element will also allude to and seem to gravitate toward the adjacent, darker tones of the lips. By allowing light colors to enter dark areas and dark colors to enter light areas, Close manages to establish an edge - more virtual than real - between the light teeth and the dark lips. And because this penetration of opposites occurs with the lines of the grid remaining essentially unbroken, like a barrier that can be jumped but not removed, we understand why Close's recent images present such a discontinuous look. The grid creates a faithful picture, yet one that must yield to an alien constructive order. In Roy II, 1994, fragments of chin lie on what seems to be the wrong side of a squared-off jaw; the prominent right angle belongs not to the chin but to the vertical grid. This doesn't mean that the representation has become inaccurate or misleading, rather that the medium is revealing the potential for Roy's jaw to assume a truly squarish cast. The grid discloses a feature otherwise hidden.

In effect, Close has invented a way of depicting the human countenance as if it had no predetermined points of interest. I'm alluding to the fact that the most obvious facial features - pupils, nostrils, lips, teeth - play an oddly restrained role in Close's constructed illusions. In Robert, the painted teeth, unlike the photographed ones, must share the play of a diagonal grid with a great many nonrepresentational pictorial features. The viewer has an incentive to pass over mouth, nose, or eyes, because there's always more to see among the spots, loops, and ellipses. Robert is a huge face with features everywhere. In its own way, Close's art explores nothing less than how a medium structures observation and how we feel our way through the image. This is why Close finds so many new features in both his medium and his subject matter. He asks that we suspend habits of observation and recognition so as not to depend on the glance of an eye or the flare of a nostril when evaluating a person's character. There's more to be seen.

With its history of passing from black-and-white to color, Close's art seems televisual. The association nags at you, despite its hinging on the loosest of coincidental, metonymical links (I can't forget the fact that TV was his distraction, even if only the audio component). Close's earlier paintings evoke television's video through their muted, slightly fuzzy grays. And his rather cool color-separation paintings of the early '70s, inspired by three-color photomechanical printing, seem to mimic the workings of color TV as much as the photographs on which the canvases are modeled (although the physics of television and of color-separation printing are different). I can't avoid the impression that Close's imagery, a low-tech product of the human hand, is also somehow ultramodern and technologically advanced. This impression isn't weakened by the heated-up, hands-on look of his recent works. Why?

Perhaps there's been a historical accident. The use of a grid to transfer a pictorial structure from one surface to another (in Close's case, from photography to painting) is old, even ancient, and all artists are aware of its advantages. The grid was essential to Baroque experiments in anamorphic drawing, to nineteenth-century studio copying, and finally to a Modernist conception of the flat materiality of the picture surface. The grid isn't, however, a feature of television, which is structured instead by scanned, parallel lines of phosphorescence. In thinking of Close, it nevertheless helps to remember that when a TV is "on," its screen is illuminated whether or not the channel is actually broadcasting. With a broadcast, you get a picture (a face), accompanied by a bit of fuzz. Without a broadcast, you get nothing - no, you get static, which interferes with the nothing, the blankness. Static is pure medium, a medium without an image. It is its own image. Close approaches this effect in the extensive backgrounds of some of his paintings. There, where nothing is being depicted other than a quality of blank light or empty space, Close's picture is very much alive with static variation - full of plays of warms and cools that reverse to cools and warms - the featuring of what has no features. Close's backgrounds are never "off': they consume nearly as much material substance and creative energy as the more elaborate configurations that correspond to eyes and lips. The image in its entirety evens into pure information, which is itself a composite of medium and image.

The '90s are not the '60s. During the course of Close's career, the connotative field of the grid has shifted from old mechanical technologies to new electronic ones. Rather than suggest copying, grids now evoke computing, the use of electronic devices for organizing information as discrete digital units. The computer displays information as an array of pixels on a video monitor and in the form of an image seemingly more "advanced," or at least more capacious and accommodating, than that of analog television. A historical and technological loop has been completed: the computer is now linked to photography, with digital imaging having been applied to photographic manipulation. Photography - the mechanical device that caused painting to seem excessively manipulated and precious, too "expressive" to be objectively "real" - is now itself being manipulated. As the computer's digital technology transforms the analog technology of the camera, we face anew the question of representational objectivity. When is a feature true?

Close has always wanted to be "objective" about visual information but never confuses objectivity with truth: "When [the camera] records a face it can't make any hierarchical decisions about a nose being more important than a cheek. . . . The camera [isn't] truth [but] a more accurate and more objective way of seeing."(4) Close understands that objectivity is a cultural construct (an idea that has become a commonplace in our era) and also entertains the dicier notion that objectivity is a technological construct. How reliable, then, should we regard the information produced by his camera, the point of origin for his paintings? As a photographer Close favors the Polaroid process for its speed, but perhaps also because it eliminates the possibility of darkroom manipulation and therefore ensures consistency and standardization. His '60s desire to make "every square inch . . . the same way" evokes not only television and the Polaroid but now the computer, which is ever more efficient in leveling and depersonalizing information.

Without the benefit of a master plan, Close's art seems to have been synchronized with the developing position our culture has taken toward the objectivity question, a position ambiguous at best. His art coincides with where we are, armed with our television, our Polaroid, our computer. Close, however, is operating by his own strange devices, without the aid of the theory or the technology that may be bringing the rest of us to the same place (he's got hardly any interest in computers). His art now makes real and objective what for cultural critics has been a theoretical fantasy: a thoroughly constructed image, the arbitrary character of its features undisguised, which nevertheless becomes compellingly mimetic. The result doesn't drain the life out but puts organicism back into representational practice. It's challenging in ways that the cyborg and virtual reality are supposed to be challenging.

If Close's images have a fantastic air, he himself believes that artmaking always involves magic, and that he's merely tried to experience it, or rather, test it out. He sometimes says that his old method of working with the airbrush was like waving a magic wand in front of the canvas, the picture itself effortlessly appearing as if "an image [had] moved in on a fog and fell into the painting." It's a magic Close finds in an equally amazing pictorialist, who in his own time was regarded as too caught up in procedures, Georges Seurat: "While you're aware of the making, the artist's hand has almost disappeared. [Seurat's] drawings are almost apparitions. You're not quite sure where the edge is."(5) Seurat drew figures that didn't took handmade, at least not in any expressionistic sense, "just using the texture of the paper and growing with it."(6) His images in conte crayon are so well integrated with their own physical substance that viewers notice the materialized, real imprecision of a contour simultaneously with its idealized, unreal preciseness; they come to see that even a crisply drawn edge is never materially flat and straight but consists instead of irregular marks moving in and out of the texture or weave of the paper (the serrated-edge effect in many of Close's recent portraits is analogous, but at gigantic scale). Where Seurat's image is relatively light, its linear marks seem like fibers embedded in the paper; where his image is dark, its pigment seems like the paper's grain or cross-weave. You see both image and constitutive mark, both projective figure and material ground, with the disquieting realization that these dichotomous elements remain separate and distinct only in theory, not in practice, not in real-time experience. When experience contradicts the rule of commonplace theory, the effect is "magic," a challenge to principles of reason and objectivity. This, Close admires.

Is there also magic in a featureless face, or in a face that's nothing but features? What Close's method features, finally, is his method. For this is where creativity and judgment enter into objective procedure. Any one of Close's grids produces perfectly objective results, just as any vantage point for viewing an object provides reliable information. Close's grids tease new information out of things at hand; his animated images make familiar things so intensely interesting that you don't mind TV programming being boring. You can look at painting instead.

So when I look at Bill II, 1991, created the year of the large Seurat exhibition at the Met, I think I see Close's magic. The pupil of an eye to my left has shrunk to a dark point surrounded by four swelling units of the grid, while the corresponding feature to my right bulges, a swelling unit in itself. Yet there's no distortion as I view the image as a whole - Bill has two "normal" eyes. The contrast has occurred because Close chose a grid that happened to cross one pupil near its center while merely grazing the other. The pupil at the crossing can be marked only by a point; anything more would interfere with the grid's integrity. The surrounding units compensate for this irregularity. But there will be other irregularities. Close is playing with his rubbery representation and getting to manipulate every feature, yet he returns all the elements to where he found them, eyes included. A face is still a face. But now I see so much more in what I've always known.

1. Cf. Close's remarks as reported by Lisa Lyons in Lisa Lyons and Robert Storr, Chuck Close (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), p. 32. Close (who now tends to listen to National Public Radio) reiterated this information during conversations in his studio between 1995 and the present. In the account to follow, any direct quotations or restatements of the artist's concerns not otherwise attributed derive from notes to these conversations. I thank Chuck Close for so generously discussing his art.

2. Chuck Close in Robert Storr, "Interview with Chuck Close," Chuck Close (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pp. 88-89. In the same context, Close spoke of the example set by Frank Stella, who "experimented with the boring repetition of the artist's mark by creating a methodical process and doing it over and over and over so that no nuance occurred from one side to the other. . . . [Stella showed] a way out of building a painting the way the Abstract Expressionists did. . . . I took that alloverness from Stella, the lack of hierarchy, the fact that no area is more important than any other area."

3. A collapsed spinal artery suffered in December 1988 left Close paralyzed from the shoulders down; during the following months he regained movement in his arms, although not in his hands, and mastered a range of brushstrokes similar to those he was using in his oil paintings previous to his illness. There has hardly been a noticeable break in his stylistic development.

4. Chuck Close in Cindy Nemser, "An Interview with Chuck Close," Artforum 8 (January 1970), pp. 51-52.

5. Chuck Close in Patrick Pacheco, "Point Counterpoint," Art & Antiques 8 (October 1990), p. 73.

6. Chuck Close in Ann Temkin, ed., Chuck Close/Paul Cadmus: In Dialogue (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1997), n.p.