Scan of a Postcard. Linda by Chuck Close, Acrylic and Graphite on Gessoed Linen. 1976-76. Akron Art Museum.
Postcard Photograph by Anonymous, Copyright 1989, Akron Art Museum
Close: The Destruction of the Individual
The social atomism which over the past three centuries has served as the historical axiom of social analysis posits an elementary unit – the individual – on the basis of which groups are supposed to be formed and to which they are supposed to be always reducible. This axiom… has been challenged by more than a century of sociological, economic, anthropological, and psychoanalytic research… Analysis shows that a relation (always social) determines [this axiomatic individual’s] terms, and not the reverse, and that each individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of such relational determinations interact.
Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life, xi.
For Chuck Close the whole face really does not exist outside of circumstance; there is no singular identity to be found, only rather agglomerates of myriad individual and circumstantial factors, or, forces. The face is summoned out of nothing as a conceptual framework for the circumstantial coalescence of this indeterminate number of factors or forces. All of these individual atoms of the face, of identity, hang together and form some semblance of a shape, but never really merge together into one coherent, individual thing.
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