Ahead of an exhibition at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac in London, the artist reflects on John Berger’s influence and embracing ambiguity
Ahead of an exhibition at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac in London, the artist reflects on John Berger’s influence and embracing ambiguity
In his new two-part exhibition, artist Robert Longo is going back to where it all began. On view at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac concurrently is Searchers, a series of drawings including new works revisiting his Combine formats of the 1980s and the montaged image sequences that brought him notoriety in the late 70s, before a quick and ill-fated brush with Hollywood. “Johnny Mnemonic was a fucking horrible experience,” remarked the celebrated artist, talking about his ’95 sci-fi feature to his long-time friend and fellow filmmaker Richard Price.
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Longo and I spoke in his studio in August 2024 before he traveled to Europe, in a conversation that ranged from his current shows to his beginnings as an artist, from how he finds and uses images gleaned from the internet to his desire to make work that is immediate—that “happens every time you see it.” This interview is drawn and edited from our exchange.
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There is an Ocean wave gathering strength, filled with ominous portent, set to come crashing before us. It began with Ferguson, but it’s always been there, only now it’s gained the weight and heft of a Death Star, a collection of all the AR-15 bullets fired in a year of mass shootings. It is Albrecht Durer’s “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” come to life during the pandemic, with its resisters at the Women’s March, at Gun Control protests, at Black Lives Matter Rallies, and in the demonstrations at the Supreme Court regarding the repeal of Roe v. Wade. It is there in the windows of Kiev’s stores – the three graces and the sweet dreams of brides everywhere – under attack, besieged by gunfire. It is a whole world turned inside out and a year’s worth of New York Times stacked high.
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The cover of this issue features a work-in-progress drawing of the Capitol riot by artist Robert Longo. Longo’s piece, which he is in the process of making for his debut exhibition at Pace Gallery on September 10, is based on an image by photographer Mark Peterson (who recently shot New York’s Andrew Yang and Joe Biden covers). “I wanted to depict this scene as performative,” Longo says. “I am shocked by the degree of rage and anger in these insurrectionists, but it is ineffective to dismiss these people as merely Trumpified crazies. Rather, in order to move forward and to better understand, we must consider the origin of this destructive anger and ask ourselves the question: Is it truly possible that we can come together as one country or are we ultimately destined to fall apart as a nation?”
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More than initially meets the eye rewards viewers who get up close with Robert Longo’s artwork. What first appears simply black and white reveals itself as “medium black,” “warm black,” “black black” “cold black,” “regular black” and a dozen other subtle variations of the shade. Most astonishingly, photographs turn into drawings.
When coming face-to-face with Longo’s monumental pictures, jaws drop when that realization is made. No one working in photorealism produces at this scale. The mind boggles at the labor involved.
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THE IMAGE IS EPIC, iconic, alien: Massive rings of singed-orange fire belch from boiling waves that menace nearby drilling platforms, the conflagration dwarfing the vessels en route to douse its flames. And although the cause of the sublime blaze is concrete enough—a gas leak from an underwater pipeline in the gulf off the Yucatán Peninsula—the scene’s elemental yet unreal appearance would nevertheless prompt the New York Times to turn to cinematic description, opening its coverage by noting how the inferno “drew comparisons to Mordor, the volcanic hellscape from ‘The Lord of The Rings.’”
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The rioters who attacked the US Capitol building this past January were emboldened not only by ex-president Donald Trump’s dispute over the 2020 election results but by the evolving phenomenon of people disseminating false information on a vast scale via social media. Robert Longo addresses the infamous incident and its attendant conundrums in Untitled (Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; January 6th, 2021; Based on a photograph by Mark Peterson), 2021, a charcoal-on-paper drawing measuring more than seven by eleven feet.
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This is not a photograph. Looks like one, right? Nope. Artist Robert Longo used maybe the oldest medium known to man/woman to create it. It's a drawing he made with ... charcoal.
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Robert Longo is a key figure of the Pictures Generation, an influential group of American artists who gave image-making conceptual cred starting in the late seventies. He is best known for his cinematic charcoal-on-paper works, epic in both subject matter—the eternal mysteries of the sea, in the case of “Untitled (Rumi),” from 2019, above—and scale (the magnificent hand-drawn piece is more than seven feet high). The exhibition “Robert Longo: A History of the Present” opens on Aug. 7 at Guild Hall, in East Hampton, New York.
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Asked if his work was “preaching to the choir,” Robert Longo responded, “It is not preaching to the choir – it is screaming at the choir.” The American artist, who opened a show of new works this winter at Jeffrey Deitch LA, has long been invested in navigating the world we live in and how we see it, creating a sense of opposition to the flurry of images we are presented with each day, which surround us and define our experience of the globe.
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Robert Longo looks every bit the New Yorker wearing a black button-down shirt by the pool of the Old Las Palmas house he’s renting. The artist has visited Palm Springs several times, staying at the bougainvillea-laced boutique hotel La Serena Villas and the second homes of his two longtime dealers, Helene Winer and Janelle Reiring, from Metro Pictures. He’s considering desert digs of his own, but this sojourn is coming to an end. He returns to his studio this month to finish drawings for a May exhibition in Paris.
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Longo is willing to see what most others look past even now in the Western world’s steady communications stream, and his “Pictures” practice remains among the most qualified to tackle the explosive imagery that has rendered our everyday political sphere—as represented in the media—so ambiguous and even remote. His is a history painting for a time when narratives are continually turned; he gives pictures renewed realism, as well as a necessary tactility, in an era when technological abstraction reigns.
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Film has always influenced my work. Cinematic elements—gestures, atmosphere, lighting, sets, the physical presence of the characters—have all contributed to the visual language of my work. Although I have made both film and performance art, I have spent the majority of my career producing work that is non-durational. Drawings and sculpture possess an incredible democracy that does not rely on the narrative structure of film. Yet, the power of cinema is undeniably singular and will continue to inspire me and my work.
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I’ve looked at a lot of digital exhibitions from art institutions in the last few months, and my response has almost unanimously been: I wish I could see this in person. One of the more satisfying examples of this kind of presentation — for me, at least — is “Robert Longo: Quarantine Films,” on the website of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. It functions as both a watch list and a kind of autobiography, interspersing examples of Longo’s work alongside his thoughts on various classics of cinema and how they’ve influenced him. (Longo made one deeply flawed but rather criminally underrated film himself in 1995: “Johnny Mnemonic,” with Keanu Reeves as the star and a screenplay by William Gibson.) Writing about Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film “Taxi Driver,” he reminisces about moving to New York and driving a cab to support himself. In a riff about Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963), which Longo describes as “a film about making a film,” he concludes that “sometimes beautiful is all art needs to be.” He even makes a fairly convincing case for 2019’s “Joker” — a film I walked out of — as a useful parable about the importance of gun control.
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Images pulled from the media come with a slew of connotations. When confronted with them, we’re prepared to be stunned, swayed, and slandered. We’re told at times not to trust these images. At other times, we are saved by them. The war, peace and politics of the twenty first and even late twentieth century are shaped by the paramount role of the media and can seldom be understood outside of their media construction. Since the 1990’s, wars have become global media events, with 24 hour coverage and cameras attached to missiles. Hearings and inquiries clog the media cycle regularly, and local protests can stir solidarity around the world. At the same time, these images are fleeting, consistently replaced by the bigger, badder beast. Robert Longo’s large scale photorealistic charcoal drawings pause those moments and memorialize them. They say, “Hey, remember this? Remember this.”
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The eight epic charcoal drawings in Longo’s latest exhibition mark the next evolution of his “Destroyer Cycle,” which visualizes the “current politics of power, greed, aggression, and inhumanity” that impacts millions of lives in the US and abroad. Through their subject matter and their monumentality, these photorealist works aim to permanently memorialize harrowing media imagery that might otherwise be replaced all too quickly in our light-speed, ever-churning news cycle. But the final piece in the show supplies a glimmer of hope, embodied by the coalition of progressive female lawmakers who wore white as a silent—but unmistakable—act of solidarity at president Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address.
Iconic memorials, in the form of giant charcoal on paper drawings of global media images of death and disaster, are this month’s monumental fare at Chelsea’s Metro Pictures gallery. Ditto for Théodore Géricault’s shipwreck The Raft of the Medusa and Picasso’s antiwar masterpiece Guernica. In each of these cases—and in more recent artworks like the music video for the anti-gun violence song “This Is America” by Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino—catastrophes of various kinds take shape as iconic memorials. Call them epitaphs for humanity’s worst mistakes, reappraised, reconceived and reimagined.
The New York artist isn't preaching to the choir, he’s “screaming at the choir.”
Robert Longo wants his work to be like “a headbutt, a kick in the balls, and a punch in the face.” If you can’t tell, the New York artist—now 66—is a little frustrated with the state of the world. For the past few years his enormous and labor-intensive graphite drawings have memorialized snippets of a chaotic news cycle, from riot cops to protesting football players. His latest show, “Amerika,” opening tonight at Metro Pictures, centers on one of many American problems—gun violence—in the form of a massive, 1.5-ton metal sphere whose surface is covered with some 40,000 30 caliber bullets.
The New York artist’s storied career has led him to an incendiary new exhibition called Amerika which takes direct aim at the president and his party.
It wasn’t too long ago that the New York artist Robert Longo was seated at a boxing match with his son at Madison Square Garden. Longo described his latest exhibition, Amerika, which has just opened at Metro Pictures in New York – its layout includes a drawing of the White House, a sphere of bullets and a video of presidential tweets.
Robert Longo’s “Death Star II” will be at the Metro Pictures booth at Art Basel. It is studded with 40,000 full-metal-jacket bullets, representing victims of gun violence.
Unlimited “Death Star II” at the Metro Pictures booth has no connection with a galaxy far, far away. Robert Longo’s enormous steel-armature globe, studded with 40,000 full-metal-jacket bullets, is “about the mass shootings,” said Mr. Jetzer, the curator. The bullets represent “all the people who were killed by gun violence.” The first “Death Star” (1993) by Mr. Longo, who is American, used about half as many bullets.
The monumental sculpture at the fair's Unlimited section is made of 40,000 shell casings.
Although the photorealist virtuoso Robert Longo has been making politically charged work since his rise to prominence in the Reagan era, the blood tide of American gun violence has driven him into new territory. “Rage and helplessness is a real motivating thing for me lately,” the artist told artnet News by phone, just hours before departing for Art Basel. Sometimes his work provides a “weird sense of atonement, because I just can’t believe this shit is happening.”
In 1970, Robert Longo was a senior at Plainview High School on New York’s Long Island—a football star with long hair who smoked pot. “I wasn’t good in school, and I was worried about getting drafted and going to Vietnam,” he says. “I’d seen guys older than me come back totally scrambled.”
On May 4 of that year, the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students during an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University. One of them, Jeffrey Miller, had graduated from Plainview a few years earlier. In John Filo’s now iconic Pulitzer Prize–winning photo, Miller is the 20-year-old man lying face down on the pavement as a young woman crouches over him—the two forever a symbol of the country’s social unrest.
Where does an image begin? Standing beneath Robert Longo’s Untitled (Mecca) (2010), this question seems impossible to answer. It is as if all power has been stripped from the Kaaba and transmuted to dust. The thousands of pilgrims in the image are now misshapen, combined into shimmers and flares through an aperture–created by no God other than the camera. With painstaking precision, Longo renders all artifacts of his photographic sources in rich multi–toned charcoal. This is either his greatest strength or weakness: all subjects, sacred or profane, receive the same treatment under his democratizing hand.
Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein and…wait for it…Robert Longo? What connects the great Spanish artist of the of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the seminal Russian film director of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first-century American who works out of a studio in downtown Manhattan? I wondered about that when I saw the announcement of the new “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo” show, which opened earlier this month at the Brooklyn Museum. So I asked Longo if I could meet him at his studio and then have him walk me through the show.
In this arresting and contemplative show, titled “The Destroyer Cycle,” Robert Longo highlighted the epic quality of contemporary events. The thirteen recent monumentally scaled charcoal drawings on view were based on still shots culled from the daily flow of images across our screens and newspapers. Pictures of refugees, riot cops, and prisoners, all rendered with a heightened realism in velvety gray scale pushed to extremes of light and dark, offered a crepuscular vision of the world at this turbulent political and social moment.
In this arresting and contemplative show, titled “The Destroyer Cycle,” Robert Longo highlighted the epic quality of contemporary events. The thirteen recent monumentally scaled charcoal drawings on view were based on still shots culled from the daily flow of images across our screens and newspapers. Pictures of refugees, riot cops, and prisoners, all rendered with a heightened realism in velvety gray scale pushed to extremes of light and dark, offered a crepuscular vision of the world at this turbulent political and social moment.
The New York-based artist talks about Goya and Eisenstein, making art from catastrophe, and the curious resilience of Johnny Mnemonic.
American life, bringing them to the surface with a mix of irony and melodrama. Longo himself rose to prominence with his iconic "Men in Cities" series, which depicts figures that appear to be either dancing or falling. They are never happy. This was the early 1980s.
The acclaimed artist Robert Longo was already a feisty, passionate, pugnacious sort. And his work reflected it. Then, four years ago, he had a stroke.
Longo remembers that he was playing basketball—with a group of close friends that included the actor John Turturro—and then suddenly he was flat on his back, listening to his wife and Turturro talk to doctors about what the chances were that his life could be saved.
A love of the handmade, and of the monumental, are two of the worst clichés in art. Using your hands to make something huge should be seen as a hard-earned artistic privilege rather than an automatic esthetic right. In today’s Pic, Robert Longo’s new drawing has earned its wall-covering size and laborious hand-crafting, and the same can be said of many similar pieces in the Longo show that opened yesterday at Metro Pictures in New York.
Metro Pictures, New York is hosting an exhibition “The Destroyer Cycle” by artist Robert Longo, on view through June 17, 2017.
The exhibition presents 12 new large-scale charcoal drawings by New York based artist Robert Longo (b.1953), through which the artist examines world events captured in the lens of American media. Continuing with Longo’s ardent examination of how to re-engage pictures through drawing, the works on view are testimonies of his unique technique that reflects the medium of the drawing’s source image. Showcased are 12 painstakingly rendered works, as the representations of power, protest, desperation, futility, and aggression, together creating a searing portrait of contemporary world.
Marta Gnyp: 2017 looks like a big year for you. You will have a show in May at Metro Pictures in New York, then in September, Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo, from the GARAGE Museum in Moscow is coming to the Brooklyn Museum, a week later you will open a show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in London, and then an exhibition at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Finland.
Robert Longo: I’ve just been on the phone with New York and felt kind of guilty that I’m here in Berlin with all the work that needs to be done.
MG: What are you doing in Europe?
RL: I’ve been in touch with a few conservators because I’m very interested in X-rays of paintings. I went to see X-rays of Raphael’s Pope Julius II in London at the National Gallery and then I went to the Courtauld Gallery to see the X-ray of Manet’s A Bar of the Folies-Bergère. I realize that conservators don’t have contact with living artists.
Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, and Robert Longo are the three diverse artists compared in “Proof,” curated by Kate Fowle of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with Longo. The trio are linked by the idea of historical witness and by influence: Eisenstein looked back to Goya, and Longo has made drawings of images from both.
The display of seven of Eisenstein’s films is unforgettable. Remastered, digitized versions are projected in slow motion, frame by frame, in a wall-filling frieze (with obvious debt to Douglas Gordon). The effect is both mesmerizing and disruptive.
Monocle’s Ed Stocker sits down with US artist Robert Longo to talk about his youth, the creation of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center with some of the leading artists of the time, his famous “Men in the Cities” series and the messy state of US politics.
"Do Goya, Eisenstein and Longo share a political imaginary, a common approach to conceiving images that channel the acute historical conflicts of their ages? This is the question put forward by the Garage Museum of Art’s autumn exhibition, Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo, curated by the estimable Kate Fowle in collaboration with Longo himself, and which brings together a handful of Goya’s and Eisenstein’s most salient works (select etchings from Goya’s famed print series; Eisenstein’s seven major films, each projected at 1 percent of their original speed) with selections from Longo’s prodigious output of the past 15 years."
Kate Fowle meets Robert Longo. Born in Brooklyn in 1953, Longo was among the five artists included in the seminal 1977 exhibition Pictures at Artists Space in New York. The subsequently named Pictures generation were proponents of appropriation as an art form, reasserting the immediacy and impact of the image after minimalism. Forty years later, Longo's drawings, sculptures, videos, and performances are infamous for how they invent, cull and recycle images from an expansive cultural visual cache to comment on their potency while examining the role of politics and power in society.
Burdened by a war of words between two pivotal post-war art historians (Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg), Abstract Expressionism is for American artist Robert Longo the cream that covers the cake. Appetizing over the riches of art history to arrive at artworks that are as much impressive, as they are inventive homages to the saints and spirits of centuries of avant-garde aesthetics; Rembrandt (Harmenszoon van Rijn), (Casper David) Friedrich, (Théodore) Ǵericault, (Pablo) Picasso and (Jackson) Pollock among them. More antagonistic of everything that is real, Longo better engages with art, film and literature, as though the invented proves far more convincing; the light in the room.
A little more than a year after terrorists stormed the Paris headquarters of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, artist Robert Longo has unveiled a new work that confronts the violence and horror of that deadly attack. A massive drawing of a bullet hole in an office window greets visitors to “Luminous Discontent,” his new show at Paris’s Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. Having lived for a time in the City of Light, as he told artnet News in a phone interview, he chose to take on some subjects specific to that city in the exhibition, which opened Saturday.
At Petzel, Longo looks to the U.S. Capitol building and the American flag, two highly polarizing national symbols. In Longo’s enormous seven-panel drawing of this historic building, the immutable monumentality of the U.S. Capitol image is particularized by subtle variations in the molding above each of the building’s windows and by their individual curtains. Longo’s most recent confrontation with the contentious nature of the American flag as symbol of both nationalism and protest is a 17-foot high black wax surfaced sculpture that appears to collapse into or fall through the gallery’s floor. A mediating note is a drawing of the poignantly solemn image of the riderless horse that led JFK’s funeral procession.
An original member of the “Pictures” generation, Robert Longo recalls that during the 19th century, painters who wanted to have their works photographed for books would prepare their paintings for that process by making black and white copies of their own paintings. In a similar vein, his “Gang of Cosmos” show at Metro Pictures presents Longo’s charcoal drawings of works by some of the biggest names in Abstract Expressionism from the years 1948–1963. Longo’s “Strike the Sun” exhibit at Petzel Gallery takes its title from a phrase spoken by Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick. Melville’s novel, the artist says, “is kind of like the genetic code of America for me.”
An original member of the Pictures Generation, Robert Longo is mounting one of his most ambitious undertakings in years, with concurrent exhibitions in Chelsea at Metro Pictures and Petzel Gallery. “Strike the Sun” at Petzel will present a sculpture of Old Glory, plus Americanthemed works including a massive rendering of the U.S. Capitol. Meanwhile, huge drawings of Abstract Expressionist paintings will be on view in “Gang of Cosmos” at Metro Pictures. Time Out sat down with the artist at his studio to discuss his latest efforts, and what they might say about our country.
Of the contemporary artists who came to prominence in the 1980s and went on to try their hand at filmmaking in the '90s (among them Julian Schnabel and Cindy Sherman), Robert Longo seems like the perfect fit for the role of Hollywood-style director. His sleek, 1995 sci-fi feature Johnny Mnemonic, starring an already famous Keanu Reeves, was an experimental outgrowth of an aesthetic path that the New York artist had been pursing on paper for more than a decade. Longo is technically a draftsmanhis signature large-scale works are amalgams of charcoal on paper, and the tactility of the medium is explicit when faced with the work. But Longo's productions are arguably much closer to cinema, his chiaroscuro subject matter seemingly created out of shadow and light. And like cinema, Longo's works straddle a line between hyperrealistic and disturbingly surreal—time is frozen or extended or simply disintegrates, as what happens in his work refuses to resolve.
“I was one of those guys that got blamed for the ’80s,” Robert Longo once remarked, referring to his iconic 1979 installation Men in the Cities, which prefigured the shoot-em-up, Reaganesque ’80s. Those drastic images of collapsing urbanites were followed by charcoal depictions of black flags, handguns, crashing waves, and atomic-bomb blasts. Longo’s subject has always been power.
Longo’s two recent, interrelated exhibitions featured the starkest, most metaphoric, and most impressive work he has done to date. At Metro Pictures, “Gang of Cosmos” (from Walt Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass) was a competitive homage of sorts to artistic power: formidable charcoal replicas of 12 paintings by 12 members of the Abstract Expressionist generation. Shown without glass, the drawings were astonishing tours de force.
Robert Longo’s art is typically as subtle as a head butt. His two related Chelsea exhibitions aren’t exceptional in that respect, but it is impressive for its sweeping allegorical vision. At the Petzel gallery the main attraction is an immense, photorealistic drawing of the United States Capitol. Rendered in charcoal on seven separately framed sheets of paper by Mr. Longo’s team of expert illustrators, it measures 10 feet high and over 37 feet across. It’s awesome.
Conjuring some of the best-known images in American art through a method both meticulous and transformative, Robert Longo’s Metro Pictures show this past spring comprised a dozen charcoal drawings of classic works of Abstract Expressionism. Copied not exactly 1:1 but in sizes evoking the grand canvases of Jackson Pollock and the rest, the pictures seem instantly and deliciously familiar but at the same time strange, for while they minutely duplicate every detail of their originals, they of course lose all of those works’ color. That’s not so disorienting in the case of Franz Kline’s black-and-white New York, N.Y., 1953, but it’s a weird shift for Willem de Kooning’s Woman and Bicycle, 1952–53, with its reds and greens, creams and pinks—and yet not so weird, for we’ve all seen these works in black-and-white. At one time, in fact, probably more people nationally and globally knew them that way, through cost-cutting reproductions in books and the press, than knew their true palettes. But whereas those copies could be no larger than a page and had the texture of ink on paper, Longo’s hold the walls they hang on and are shown framed but without glass, so that we can see their soft matte surfaces soaking up light. The effect is altogether different from the visual and narrative layering of AbEx paintings, but it has its own kind of visual density. . .
Robert Longo’s powerful drawing of police holding back protesters in Ferguson is a vital record of the resurgence of racism and a history painting for our time.
2014 has produced horrific politics. Racism has returned, that hydra-headed idiot, everywhere from Missouri to Rochester, where a Ukip candidate won a by election after openly speculating about repatriating Europeans. It is not much by way of compensation to say the year also produced a mighty piece of political art. But it did. . .
Robert Longo was in on the ground level of what’s now called the Pictures generation, having participated in the seminal New York exhibition organized by Douglas Crimp in 1977. But though Longo has received as much market attention as his peers, he hasn’t always gotten as much respect; there’s a crowd-pleasing drama to his drawing and sculpture, which are generally grand in scale, high in contrast, and often strong with a less-than-subtle intimation of apocalypse. A Damien Hirst before his time—he relishes guns, tidal waves, and mushroom clouds the way Hirst does sharks and dead butterflies—Longo seems to see everything in. . .
Apart from a few years in the 1960s when the New York culture czar Henry Geldzahler tossed some stardust around, the Metropolitan Museum was a fusty backwater for contemporary art, and an object of scorn in the art world. New work seemed to arrive only in bland job-lot batches. Exhibitions kept being awarded to angsty British painters who had peaked before World War II.
A few years ago things began to sharpen up. Modest but on-the-ball displays of recent photography quietly appeared, and, for the first time, video. Damien Hirst’s silly shark arrived. Kara Walker was invited in as a guest curator. And now with “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984,” the museum has finally made a big leap into the present, or near-present. A decades-long snooze may be over. . .
As the escalator rises to the upper floor of this city’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, a drawing of a gigantic revolver heaves into view, tilted toward the sky and seeming to float in space. The long-barreled Magnum can be read as a finger wag to the faint of heart, who may be discomforted by Robert Longo’s apocalyptic themes. But it can also be seen as an exclamation mark for a retrospective that confirms his rank as one of the pre-eminent American artists of our day.
The 100 works on view, selected by the independent curator Caroline Smulders, summarize the last three decades of the artist’s achievements. They represent Mr. Longo’s largest European show since 1991 in Hamburg and his most important retrospective since the one held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989. For viewers who know only isolated works, the diversity and intensity of Mr. Longo’s oeuvre may well come as a surprise.
The strobe lights flicker hypnotically and the dancers move robotically when the haunting face of the chanteuse Nico appears in “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” the 1966 road show of art, music and film organized by Andy Warhol. Amid the Velvet Underground’s droning guitars, Lou Reed’s voice emerges in all its steely grit.
Mr. Reed may have been among the first rock ’n’ roll stars to embrace art and film as inspiration. But he is certainly not the last, as “Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967,” a highly anticipated exhibition opening this weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, clearly demonstrates. . .
Guns. Waves. Mushroom clouds. And now, celestial bodies: planets, stars and nebulae. These are the subjects of Robert Longo’s continued mining of the sublime. Though his large-scale charcoal drawings on paper have become familiar – signature, even – the immensity of the work and their exacting facility never fail to seduce, which is no doubt a necessary part of Longo’s art. As with his previous show at Metro Pictures, which showcased magnifi cent nuclear explosions rendered in velvety black and the brilliant, seemingly impossible white of unmarked paper, seduction is integral to the discomfort. One stands in awe in front of these images, and then, slowly at fi rst, but with fair acceleration, that once-unadulterated aesthetic enjoyment runs up against the Idea: here we have the weed of science, physical forces propagating where they were never meant to, a sun on the surface of the earth.
This fi ts Edmund Burke’s equation for the sublime quite nicely: beauty + dread. Kant, however, required further specifi city. Knowing we are safe from such forces, that we occupy a position at a remove from any of their direct e ects, allows for an experience of the ‘dynamical sublime’. Recognising, in our capacity to reason, that we surpass our own ability to imagine o ers up an experience of the ‘mathematical sublime’.. . .
Never one to shirk excess, Robert Longo has filled the capacious Metro Pictures gallery from floor to ceiling with 366 black-and-white drawings, one for every day of the calendar and a leap year bonus, yet.
The 19th-century salon-style arrangement is a bit of a turnaround for an artist of such contemporary subject matter, who previously expressed yuppie angst in powerful large-scale sculptures and drawings. But like his earlier work, this mammoth miscellany of drawings -- each the size of a television screen -- is dominated by here-and-now content. Motifs from film, advertising and other media prevail, along with images of rock stars and concerts, sports heros, the artist's family, politicians, news events, animals and landscapes. . .
