Exhibition Review #4: Chuck Close

First, a confession: the exhibition about to be chronicled is not in Los Angeles, and therefore technically does not fit within the scope of this blog. However, while at home in San Jose, CA for Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to view “Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration,” an exhibition of Chuck Close prints currently showing at the San Jose Museum of Modern Art. Featuring more 125 works by the artist, the exhibition includes not only the finished works but also preliminary proofs, etching plates, and editions at various stages of development> the result is a comprehensive look at the artistic process of one of the most prominent contemporary American artists.

Close’s personal background reveals much about the development of his unique style. As an MFA student at Yale from 1962-1964, Close struggled to find his own style within the dramatically-shifting American art world of the late-1960’s. As he recalls in a recent interview,

“If you think about the late 1960s, painting was dead, sculpture ruled. Painting seemed like a senseless activity. If you were dumb enough to make a painting, it had better be abstract. It was even dumber to make a representational image. Then the dumbest, most moribund, out-of-date, and shopworn of all possible things you could do was make a portrait. I remember Clement Greenberg said to [Willem] de Kooning that the only thing you can’t do in art anymore is make a portrait.”

Ironically, rather than taking Greenberg’s words as a warning, Close took them as a challenge. Seeking to “mitigate against the standard hierarchy of the portrait,” he turned to “the mug shot as a way around commissioned portraiture.” Thus, his signature photorealist style was born.

Over the last 40 years, Close has continued to produce “mug-shot” portraits, often photorealist in style. That said, it is difficult to label and/or summarize the works featured in “Process and Collaboration.” Close constantly experiments with new artistic styles and mediums; this exhibition alone features collages, aquatints, lithographs, silk-screens, tapestries and wood block prints. One of the exhibitions most striking works is Leslie/Fingerprints (top left), a direct gauvre from 1986. Close created the image by dipping his fingers in ink and pressing them onto a sheet of Mylar, varying the pressure of his touch in order to create a range of gray shades. The end result is extraordinary. Up close, the work appears merely a mass collection of fingerprints; upon stepping back, however, the image suddenly snaps into place.

Close exhibits similar creativity in Self-Portrait/Pulp (2001) [top right]. A large “mug shot” of the artist, it is composed of paper pulp in 11 shades of gray. To create the piece, Close created a plastic mold of his face with an elaborate grid; established a gray scale, giving each tone a number; carefully numbered the grid; and then filled in the grid with paper pulp dyed the appropriate tone. The end result is equal parts photograph, tapestry, and Impressionistic.

My favorite work in the exhibition was Lyle (2002) [bottom left], a silkscreen composed of an astounding 149 colors. The work demonstrates Close’s mastery of the illusions and mechanics of visual perception. Composed of the Kandinsky-esque cocentric circles arranged in a gigantic grid, the work simultaneously abstract and a photorealistic. My eye continued to jump between viewing Lyle as a series of circles and as portrait – this is a silkscreen that messes with your mind (in a good way)!

Beyond the standout pieces featured in “Process and Collaboration,” however, what I find intriguing about Close’s work is how it manages to straddle so many of the artistic debates that polarized the art world during the 1970s and 1980s. One could argue that Close exemplifies “postmodern” art; equal parts painter and photographer, his works draw upon both traditions while adhering to neither. At a time when the art world was up in arms over the future of painting, Close’s work returns to traditional figurative forms but in a whole new way. Moreover, Close in an exemplary postmodernist in that his art clearly consistently engages with the signifier. He does not paint the human face as much as he investigates the principles of perception; as described in the exhibition catalogue, his works strive to make the viewer become aware of the manner in which we see.

Walking out the gallery and back to my car, I happened to pass by “Downtown Doors,” and ongoing project where high-school artists are selected to paint utility doors in downtown San Jose. Stopping to admire the works, I noticed that one painting (see below) was clearly done in the style of Chuck Close. While Greenberg declared portraiture dead, it looks like Close got the last laugh.

Sources:

Siri, Engberg and Madeleine Grynsztejn. "Navigating the Self
Chuck Close discusses portraiture and the topography of the face." Walker Art Center, 2005. http://visualarts.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=2036&title=Articles

Hiroshi Sugimoto: (Post)(Modern) photographer?

Hiroshi Sugimoto, "Theaters" (1978 -)
Pictured: Cinerama Dome, Hollywood, 1993

During our class trip to the "MOCA's First Thirty Years" exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary, I was struck by the three featured works of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. I had first seen Sugimoto's work several years ago at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco and was struck by their beauty and technical perfection. With this knowledge gained through this class, however, the photographs took on a very different meaning this time around.

In class, we've discussed at length the differences between modernist "art photography" (as Solomon-Godeau labels it) and postmodern photography, as exemplified by the "Pictures" generation. What I find so intriguing about Sugimoto's work is how it straddles - or perhaps blurs - the distiction between these two photographic movements. Consider the two works that I have featured in this post, selections from Sugimoto's "Theatres" and "Seascapes" series. At a technical level, these works are brilliant; they remind me of the work of Edward Weston in their rich black and white tones and undeniable visual beauty. Interestingly, Sugimoto - like Weston - uses a traditional 8 x 10 manual camera, despite the availibility of new photographic technologies.

That said, there is a definite postmodern aspect to Sugimoto's work. Postmodern art as a whole priviledges the signifier over the signified, and accordingly, Sugimoto's work is also a reflection on the medium of photography itself. In his own words, Sugimoto describes photography as "the fossilization of time," and his work is centered upon the idea of "capturing" the passage of time. To make his "Theaters" series, Sugimoto sets his exposure to last for the duration of the movie. Similarly, to make his "Seascapes," Sugimoto stations his camera above the sea and then leaves the exposure open for anywhere from several days to two to three weeks. The result, I would argue, is images (the signified) that are both beautiful in a traditional technical and stylistic sense as well highly aware of the processes of signification.

"Seascapes" Series - Sea of Japan, Ruben Island, 1996

While researching Sugimoto, I found this excellent PBS documentary that features several contemporary artists (including Sugimoto). It's interesting to hear the artist reflect on his work, as well as discuss the influence of Duchamp on his photography. Definitely worth checking out.

Exhibition Review #3: "Traces of Being: Iran and the Passage of Memory"

Pantea Karimi, "Holy Vanity," 2009

“Traces of Being: Iran and the Passage of Memory” – currently showing at the Morono Kiang Gallery in downtown Los Angeles – features the works of four contemporary Iranian-American artists (Pantea Karimi, Hushidar Mortezaie, Amitis Motevalli, and Fereshteh Toosi). An intriguing examination of identity, memory, and hybridity in the contemporary art world., the exhibition was curated Shervin Shahbazi, who himself is Iranian-American. As detailed in the press release for the show, Shahbazi asked the participating artists to “create work based on their personal memories of Iran–or lack thereof—and, in the process, reflect on two different memories: One they would like to save and one they wish to delete even though purposeful forgetting is humanly impossible”. Moreover, in curating the exhibit, Shahbazi sought to expose the viewer to a deeply-personal, often quirky look at Iran, a nation that most Americans know only for its political strife and/or domestic turmoil. “[I] didn’t want to have something cliché and straightforwardly political,” he told the Los Angeles Downtown News. “If you see the exhibit, you will take away something and learn something new.”

The four featured artists utilize radically different tactics – both artistically and theoretically – to explore the questions posed by Shahbazi. Motevalli’s contribution, “Houri,” greets the viewer, as it hangs facing outward in the gallery’s front window. Light streams through the window, casting an eerie glow on the 72 photographic transparencies of the artist’s middle school photo, featuring Motevalli wearing heavy makeup and dressed like an American pop star. As critic Knight note, the work forces the viewer to confront the intersection of Eastern and Western cultural influences, as it “disturbingly melds a publicity-style head shot of a wanna-be pop star with the false Western myth of Middle Eastern martyrs being greeted by virgins in paradise.” Similar dynamics are at play in Mortezaie’s section of the show, a collection of fashion-based works. Most prominent are his plywood figures, dressed in traditional Iranian garb overlaid with Western media images and corporate logos. Recalling paper dolls, the figures are symbolic bodies on which the forces of globalization and cultural imperialism play themselves out.

The exhibition’s two standout artists are Karimi and Toosi. Karimi presents a series of watercolors and serigraphs – exemplified by “Holy Vanity” (2009) – which combine traditional Farsi calligraphy with contemporary western media images. Karimi uses these two mediums to her advantage, creating complex, layered works where image and text bleed into one another. Crucially, Karimi intentionally blur or decontextualize both the images and the calligraphy to the point of illegibility. Thus, “Holy Vanity” functions as a representation of her tangled, “illegible” identity formed from her experiences and memories of living both in and outside Iran.

Toosi’s untitled piece (at right) is the exhibition’s most eye-catching work. Taking up a corner of the gallery, it is a virtual universe of composed of foam spheres covered by knitted Afghan blankets and yarn Ojo de Dios (God’s Eyes). As Toosi points out in her description of the piece, both the Afghan blanket and the God’s Eye are traditional handicrafts that have been divorced from their cultural context and subsumed by middle-class American. The fact that the artist knitted these objects out of traditional Iranian yarn adds yet another level of complexity; in the words of the artist, the installation reflects “the obfuscation of culture,” presenting a universe where Iranian and American cultures are literally woven together into a new, hybrid state.

Beyond simply providing a window into the Iranian-American experience, “Traces of Being” is fascinating in that it grapples with the notion of (cultural) identity. The artists’ works (and their accompanying narratives) do not celebrate multiculturalism; instead, they are defined by a fundamental sense of confusion, of being caught in-between. In his research on hybridity in contemporary art, Nikos Papastergiadis argues that hybridity is used by diasporic and indigenous artists to mark their rejection of being “defined in terms of an exotic alternative or as a belated supplement whose incorporation could serve to both expand and reaffirm the parameters of the mainstream.” Refusing to fit in within any nationalist school or formalist movement, these works challenge the supposed “binary that separate[s] the containment of meaning within an artwork and the establishment of a framework for making meaning within culture."

I see the works in “Traces of Being” as furthering this postmodern, hybrid movement in art. Reflecting the complex identities of the artists themselves, these works revel in their state of perennial “translation,” combining American and Iranian influences only to collapse into an indeterminate, hybrid state of being. Refusing to fit neatly within the artistic traditions of either culture, the works demonstrate the artists’ continual struggle with their own hybrid, Iranian-American identities. In the end, perhaps the title of the show says it all; if the multicultural artwork represents a state of being, then these artworks are traces of being – traces of Iran and traces of America combining to form a complex, multiethnic identity.

Sources:

Knight, Christopher. "Art review: 'Traces of Being: Iran in the Passage of Memories' at Morono Kiang Gallery." The Los Angeles Times. October 2, 2009.

Papastergiadis, Nikos. "Hyrbidity and Ambivalence: Places and Flows in Contemporary Art and Culture." Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 4, 39-64 (2005).

Scott, Anna. "The Iran You Don't Know." Los Angeles Downtown News. September 18, 2009.