the close show was one of the strongest i have seen at the ago, so strong that the dundas collection, the reniassance masters, and the new art from india paled, and so strong i didnt have the energy or time to really look at the bernini corpus.

the show consisted of three media of potraits, from the same collection of people he has worked thru before: jaquard loom made large tapestries, digital pigment prints combined with poems, and daguertypes. all of what you expected to see in the daugertypes, esp the oval slice of sharpness, against the bluriness of the rest of the canvas. its about reproducing work mechincally, takling the thistory of machine made imagery, and reworking it, de and re historicizing it, with the words and the other images riffing on what portraiture means (often literally, by using people like elizabeth peyton or kiki smith, they become meta portratiurtes, discourses about what it means to represent humans now, by using andres seranno and cindy sherman, they become meta-photogrpahics, what does it mean to photograph people who;s career's have been about hiding, or displacing pesonal meanings thru the mediatation of the camera lens.)

having three images, often against each other, the small daugertype, the pigment print diptych with the poem, and the bigger then human sized tapestry, and have them all with the same effects, becomes a set of formalist excercises in tyhe reporducibilty of an image--what does it meant to artifically reproduce the flaw of an old form, what does it mean to use digital means to recreate the 19th century, what does it mean to dress these v. post-modern figures in black and shoot black and white--are these jaqard loom peices that different then the photo throws that cost 5o bucks at wal mart? does the jaqard looms beginning of a computer/binary peice at the same time as the daugertype is the bridge b/w the two kinds of imagery, a more effective bridge, because it connects all 20 ways of doing things, as opposed to the small connections, the web of interlacings, between the triptych of similar portraits (and that the curator refused to put the three images together, that the daugertypes are collected at a side table, and the pigment prints/tapestries of each artists are seperate, across the room or in other rooms, makes these interlacings more tennous)

the daugertypes in their black frames, with hoods, intended to be that way to perserve the images from hands and light, becauyse the glass plates decay too easily, become small, contained, dark and almost impossible to see, the poems beside the pigment prints are inscrutable collections of sounds and half images, impentrable except for impressions, but the images in the prints and the tapestries are large, concise, not monumental, but holy in their own ways, esp. the loom peices, are so much about surfaces--he has become smoother, tighter, more explicit, and it becomes difficult w/o a close looking to see the weft and weave of the actual work. the paintings that seem typical of close's work (so typical that they had to put them here) seem savage and dark next to the tenseness and vitusou skill of the work here.

this is esp true about a peice on the edge of the show, near the entrence, two daugertypes of his hands, and a tapestry self potrait, it had something iconographic about it, the hands like relics, like silver reminders in mexican churches, tailsmanic like hindu shrines, emblamtic of security, like in a spy movie, outside of time and place, difficult to resist putting your hands on top of them, measuring yr humanness next to his, the initimate urge matched to his face, inscrutable and almost glowering--seeing this image, one is reminded that lebowitz once chose him as the wizard of oz, and in his immediate knowing of people, he almost becomes the wizard here, but w/o the chicanery.