There are many black colors, black within black within black. Couple black with disturbing images like mass shootings or police riots, and black drops down even deeper. A black hole of images. Then take the black and the violent image, and draw it with layer after layer of charcoal, blown to a monumental size where you become aware that this is not a photograph but a work of art. You slow down and then stop, stunned. You are now seeing texture, line, negative space, and the sheer artistry in making these pictures. Pictures that we stare at every day online. You begin to realize these images are alive. These images have consequences. Archetypal images: an atomic bomb, crashing waves, a shark’s mouth, an old-growth tree, a rubber raft of refugees on the open sea—these are Robert Longo’s subjects.
I was honored to meet with Longo in his Soho studio, where he has worked for the past 40 years. Upon entering, Alex, one of his assistants, warns me that anything I set down will be covered in charcoal. Fresh white lilies are placed in vases throughout the studio, a sharp contrast to two huge gray tarps tented over projectors used for composing the images. Black dust covers every surface. On the walls are large works in process, all on paper. Long views—masses of refugees with umbrellas and close-ups—the head of a whale, its eye small yet seeing. As we talk, Longo takes an eraser and tweaks the eye.
In 1970, upon seeing the now iconic image of the Kent State shooting, he realized that he went to high school with the student lying dead on the ground killed by police. Longo was 17. “I became completely motivated,” he tells Observer. A few years later, he became known as one of the Pictures Generation that challenged mass media imagery with their art: Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons and Cindy Sherman, his partner for a number of years who remains his close friend. He made the series Men in the Cities, 1979-83, a sequence of graphite drawings of men and women, smartly dressed, displaying psychotic contortions. Recently, he reenacted these photographs using Nicole Kidman for a feature in W Magazine.
In between solo and group exhibitions, he directed the cyberpunk movie Johnny Mnemonic with Keanu Reeves, written by William Gibson. This was 1992. Longo says that he never wanted to work in Hollywood again. “After that, I was lost. Had no money. My wife at the time said, ‘Go and draw.’” The result was 366 drawings, one a day—it was a leap year—collectively titled Magellan, that “ironically became the vocabulary of everything that comes after.”
Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, Longo grew up on television and movies. After seeing his classmate dead, shot by the cops, “The light went on.” He came to realize that the images we are inundated with every day have weight, but you need to take them in differently. “Drawing is the basis for everything. It’s about looking. My work is for the viewer to reflect on these images. There are consequences of images on the psyche.”
Longo makes charcoal paintings. Working with one of the oldest mediums, one used in cave paintings in Indonesia 35,400 years ago, is a fitting way to render not only images of human-driven horrors but also beautiful depictions of the natural world. Charcoal is burnt; it is ash. Remnants of fire. And it is black. Longo paints on white paper, which is the only white he uses. Around his studio, I see jars with labels reading ‘black black,’ ‘warm black,’ ‘cold black,’ ‘regular black,’ ‘medium black,’ ‘gray black.’ All these blacks go into creating his works, which he calls “highly aggressive images with the fragile material of charcoal.” Each painting is labor intensive, requiring concerted time and energy. I told him that I felt like weeping when I studied his refugee painting and then one of an old growth tree—I felt their impact viscerally. How did he manage to do this work for decades without falling into despair? “I feel like I have a moral imperative to make this. I don’t want to. I endeavor to transform the horror.”
At the time of our interview, he had four different shows on in three different countries. His work is in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the National Gallery of Art in D.C., Tate in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris and other significant institutions. He is also a musician, and there is a rhythmic pulse in his paintings that he creates with his deft use of all those different blacks. They are also supercharged politically, coming from his rage and despair. “As St. Augustine said, ‘Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.’” Indeed, to make each work, Longo has to muster great courage to see them through to completion.
At the Milwaukee Art Museum through February 23 is the exhibition, “Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History,” featuring thirty-three drawings, three sculptures and two videos—work curated by Margaret Andera that represents the past ten years of his career. Longo describes it as “the last decade’s successive shocks to the American enterprise, beginning with Ferguson to the present,” then adds, “Margaret got the work, the emotional state and the psychic toll it can take on you. She is the closest to how my work should be presented. I’m very happy with it.”
Andera also found working with Longo rewarding: “Robert is good at collaborating and has such great instincts about everything. I’ve been struck by his strong dissection of the work, and the impact they have on him. He lives with these images in a deep way. He really feels them in his core.”
Some of these epic images measure in at over 10 feet by 16 feet, others are slightly smaller at 8 feet by 12 feet. Each is mounted on aluminum panel, with some pieces weighing 500 pounds. They are works that require you to slow down and take it all in: a shattering Nascar crash, towering icebergs inspired by Greta Thunberg’s activism, three satiny-white wedding dresses in a shop window in Ukraine shot through with bullet holes, the noble head of an eagle. You feel the energy it takes to make these paintings in your body.
“I chose the last ten years of his career for this exhibit because I feel this will be his legacy. He has perfected this technique over time,” Andera tells me. “There is nothing unresolved in them. I didn’t want this to be a series but a well-rounded exhibit. In it, he asks us to stop and consider. As a curator, I’m taking lessons from this show.”
Longo’s two-dimensional works are often called drawings, but I keep referring to painting as that better describes the way he approaches his work. The time it takes to get shadows, dimension, the light, the movement—it’s as if you’re witnessing the moment in real time. It is happening right before your eyes. Coming into a room of his work, you might at first think they are photographs, so meticulously rendered and gorgeous. Close-up, there’s shock. What Longo accomplishes is nearly unbelievable. As Nietzsche wrote, “Beware that… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” You feel the horror of these images. And the beauty. They stop you.
