You Are Looking At Chuck Close Analysis

You are looking at Chuck Close. Close is a post-modern, American artist who exhibited during the 1970s. Technically, you are looking at Big Self Portrait (1968) – a painted self-portrait of the artist. The original version of the picture measures just less than nine square metres, and in it Close's eyelashes and pores are individually visible. Close worked in a technique that came to be known as ‘photorealism', in which artists produced astoundingly life-like paintings, that presented ‘reality' as closely as photographs could. Where the modernists had exalted the use of the material (creating ‘painterly' effects like those of Jackson Pollock; or using abstraction like Mark Rothko did, to emphasise experience) in the production of art, to highlight the experience of reality, the postmodernists shunned the material in an effort to demonstrate the tentative nature of reproduction. In this way, photorealism embodied the post-modern debate surrounding the nature of reality. In his introduction to literary theory, Michael Ryan (2007) explains how post-modernism
According to Woodward, Lyotard contends that the technical and technological changes over the last few decades - as well as the development of capitalism - have caused the production of knowledge to become increasingly influenced by a technological model. Knowledge has become a commodity, and is no longer valuable in itself. This is linked to the division between what Lyotard calls ‘narrative knowledge' and ‘scientific knowledge'. Narrative knowledge bases its authority on obedience or faith (like religion, or a metaphysical conception of reality) while scientific knowledge demands legitimation. However, Lyotard does not believe that science has any justification in claiming to be a more legitimate form of knowledge than narrative