Wils S. Hylton wrote a long read for the New York Times about the artist Chuck Close. Like most New York Times pieces, it's well-researched, engaging, and utterly pretentious ignorant garbage in equal measures.
The short version is: After years of perfecting his now-classic grid technique for portraiture, the wheelchair-bound 76 year old Close divorced his wife of 43 years and now spends his time in Miami Beach and Long Island, areas seemingly held in low esteem to the art scene in New York City. His portrait style has transformed from photo-realism, to his grid technique, and has now entered a new realm of flat, garish colors, which seems to send the writer into fits of confusion and rage at the very thought of his favorite artist changing his style.
However, we should begin with Hylton's complete misunderstanding of what happens when people get old:
Then he paused again, and a look of confusion came over him.
“Why am I talking about this?” he asked.
“You were talking about the therapeutic role of process,” I said.
“Right,” he said, and resumed the story. But a minute later, he lost his train of thought once more. Then another few minutes passed, and it happened again.
After half a dozen of these, I suggested we take a break.
The writer sees these lapses in thought as bizarre and out of character, however anyone with aging parents knows that this is, sadly, completely normal, especially someone with as many life-long medical issues as Chuck Close. Trying to find some insight into this forgetfulness in regards to his art is, at best, ignorant, and at worst like a chin-stroking college freshman trying to divine some insight into humanity from a midnight view of Titicutt Follies.
I am not saying there is no room for discriminating taste and judgment, just that there is also, I think, this other portal through which to experience creative work and to access a different kind of beauty, which might be called communion.
Personally I hate it when writers start throwing out terms like "communion" and "sacrament" in regards to art. Religion and art are in turns forever overlapping and separate realms, and using terms from one to describe the other has always struck me as a lazy shortcut to sounding insightful.
The writer takes issue with Close's changing art style, which seems odd because he defends Close's earlier transformation from photo-realism to grid painting.
...an incomplete portrait of the artist Cindy Sherman — eight feet high and wrought in a palette that dissolved from creamy greens and grays into a riot of hot pink at the bottom. At the time, I thought little of this shift on the canvas, or what it might portend. The intrusion of pink at the lower edge was unlike anything I’d seen him paint before. It seemed lurid and garish, not at all to my taste, but it was, after all, an incomplete work, and he was Chuck Close.
The above quote closes with the admission that Close's artistic evolution is a continuing process, yet it doesn't seem to be a good thing when the evolution is into a place the writer's tastes don't overlap.
So when I entered his studio on a sweltering afternoon last summer and discovered, mounted upon the easel, a looming self-portrait in glaring neon, utterly devoid of depth or detail, as if he had taken the pink bottom of that Cindy Sherman portrait from a few years earlier and, rather than complete the painting, embraced its crude quality as a new technique, I couldn’t help wondering what Close, after 50 years of struggling to capture the human face and human identity, was trying now, at the end of his life, to reveal about his own.
From a simple technical perspective, Close has simply been changing what he fills in each square on the grid with. His earliest grid paintings had an abstract, liquid, organic quality to the paint work when you were close to the work, but as you backed up they coalesced into a portrait that used your brain to fill in the gaps that the abstract technique left behind. Now that he is filling each square with a simple flat color, the writer is aghast. Suddenly the efforts at defending his grid paintings fall away when the style isn't suited to the writer's interests, and he retreats to psychobabble in an attempt to discover why his favorite artist no longer makes pieces he likes.
Later the author goes into cringe-inducing detail of Close's love life, a bizarre tangent that reveals nothing other than some titillating details of an older man's love of younger women. Anyone who's spent time with the type of aging established heterosexual male artist knows they are rarely without a courtier of indistinguishable young women.
The article runs out the word count with gossipy facts viewed through the supposedly legitimizing lens of using meta-commentary to ruminate over the same gossip. Should the writer say these things (oh look he said them), what would the artist think (oh look he told him). There's an entire paragraph that simply cut-and-pastes details of Close's childhood that were described earlier, trying to divine some new insight through boring repetition.
The author has the provincial nearsighted insight to his fellow people as anyone who spends the majority of their time in and writing about New York City. The article reads like the physical manifestation of everyone who ever saw the famous New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg and failed to see the criticism leveled at them. The novelist flourishes, the references to dog-eared copies of ancient philosophy books read at sidewalk cafes, all of it points to a view of humanity spent picking it apart in a laboratory instead of experiencing it.
The article ends with the writer seeing an unfinished Close painting as an accusation at himself, because what would any highbrow writing in 2016 be without ending on complete solipsism?
The sprawling white emptiness suddenly felt overwhelming, the horizontal streaks of pink and blue insufficient, and I stood there for a moment, wondering where he would take it, whether he would ever complete the painting, or if, as in his deepest fears, he had already finished his final work.
It seems toxic to write as if you're concerned with an elderly man's twilight years when you're really just writing about your own failures and doubts as a writer, like some low-rent Charlie Kaufman, forever naval gazing. Not once does the writer see the correlation between the new Close style and the pixellation of digital images, especially since most of his life is probably spent staring at screens. That seems like more fertile pasture for the writer to till, what with his own earlier (admittedly well thought out) insight into Close's photo-realistic portraits in the '60s and how they were not well regarded in an art work more interested in concepts than finished pieces.
My favorite part is Close's adherence to craft as its own reward, lambasting the high rents in NYC that force artists to draw up plans for their art without having the room to build it. The man likes to paint, and now he's painting in a slightly different way. Is that enough to give a tweed jacket New York writer a sudden crisis of self-identity? It's just paint on canvas, and as any artist gets older they tend to break down their creations to their elemental parts. Chuck Close puts colors on rectangular canvas. Musicians write instructions for creating sound waves. Perhaps it's better to let the art wash over you than tie your very identity to it. That never ends well.
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