“Making art is a political act. Period.”
We visited iconic American painter Robert Longo and met an artist who, with classic charcoal, records the time we live in.
“One basic nature of being an artist is this desire to share. So, I see something, and I want to tell you what I see. I remember, as a student, I had taken some acid. And I was walking down the street with a friend of mine. And in the tree, I saw Jimmy Hendrix. And I grabbed my friend and said, look, do you see Jimmy Hendrix’s face in the tree? That’s what art is. Art is like saying, this is what I see, and I want you to see how I see it.”
Rising to prominence in the 1980s as a leading figure of the Pictures Generation, Longo has long examined the effects of our image-saturated culture. The artist sources his subject matter from the media to create ambitiously scaled charcoal drawings that reflect on the construction of symbols of power and authority, including images of animals and nature, global conflicts, and protest movements.
“The thing about charcoal is it’s incredibly primitive medium. It’s so archaic. It’s almost somewhat funerary because it’s burnt. It’s like it’s dead. It’s like it’s a remnant of the earth. At the same time, I realized I could fool people into thinking that they’re photographs.”
“I mean, the thing about us artists is that we have the Cassandra curse. We can see the future, but nobody wants to listen to us. Still, I find it a moral imperative to do the work I do. It’s really weird. I feel like I am the worm at the bottom of the bottle, taking in all these poisons.”
Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn and grew up in Long Island, New York. He graduated high school in 1970, the same year as the Kent State University Massacre in Ohio, spurring Longo to become involved in political organizing. One press photo in particular became symbolic of the social unrest, winning a Pulitzer Prize. The dead student pictured was a former classmate of Longo’s, forever influencing his relationship with media images.
Longo is known for his monumental hyperrealistic works: powerful, dynamic charcoal drawings whose virtuoso technique and the visual force of the motifs mesmerize the observer. For his models, Longo uses photographs that record dramatic situations at the moment of their greatest tension. The artist is concerned with depicting power—in nature, politics, and history. He utilizes visual material that has been reproduced thousands of times and has long been a part of pop culture, of our collective visual memory. Longo isolates and reduces the motifs to raise their visual impact to a higher power. By enlarging the subject and intensifying the lighting into a dramatic chiaroscuro, we find ourselves before gigantic, previously unseen theatrical images. Longo draws on existing images, references reality secondhand, and creates impressive “copies” of the original black-and-white photographs, which pale beside their transformation into colossal charcoal drawings.
“I always think that drawing is a sculptural process,” Longo has explained. “I always feel like I’m carving the image out rather than painting the image.”
Besides countless solo exhibitions, Longo’s works have been shown at the Whitney Biennials in New York in 1983 and 2004, as well as at the 47th Venice Biennale. He is part of the collections of the Albertina in Vienna, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among many others.
Robert Longo was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in his studio in New York in June 2024.
Camera: Sean Hanley
Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024
Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, C.L. Davids Fond og Samling, and Fritz Hansen.
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