Though he's met with resistance to the idea, Close hopes that Glass's face will also find its way onto the set. "I wanted to use Phil, but they kept saying, 'It's a portrait of you,'" he says. Still, in his mind, an artist's work, even a portrait, always says more about the artist than the subject. "And I think Phil's music stays more Phil's music than it becomes about me." It all comes down to what Close calls "the fabric of the art world: Some threads are music, some are painting, some are words." In the Sixties and Seventies, he says he spent "thousands of hours lying on the floor of some loft listening to someone's music or watching someone dance. We were all trying to figure out: What makes art now? What makes this time different from other times? And if you want to make something specific to the time in which you live, looking at somebody working in another medium is the way to figure that out, to see the character of society." It's a concept that, judging by his latest round of media-mixing, is no less valid today.
Portrait of the Artist
Chuck Close and his work are the subject of a new ballet.
continued (page 5 of 5)
- Keywords
- Chuck Close,
- profile,
- Philip Glass,
- music,
- Art Issue
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