Pilots, sharks, sexy girls, dancers, the ocean, impressive explosions - this is what New York artist Robert Longo depicts. His illustrations are extremely deep, mystical, powerful and magnetic. Perhaps this effect is achieved due to the black and white picture, which the author carefully writes out using charcoal.
Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York. Talking about himself, the artist never forgets to mention that he loves cinema, comics, magazines and has a weakness for television, which have a considerable influence on his work. Robert Longo draws most of the themes for his paintings from what he has seen and read before. The author has always loved to draw, and although he received a bachelor's degree in sculpture, this does not prevent him from doing what he loves, but on the contrary. Some of the artist's drawings are very reminiscent of sculptures, he likes those outlines that come out from under the hand. There is some power in this.
The main exhibitions of paintings by Robert Longo are held at the Museum of Art in Los Angeles, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art in Chicago.
Chief Curator of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
Kate Fowl and Robert Longo
Robert Longo
whom Posta-Magazine met during the installation of the exhibition, spoke about what is hidden under the colorful layer of Rembrandt's paintings, the power of the image, as well as "primitive" and "high" in art.
Looking at Robert Longo's hyper-realistic graphics, it's hard to believe these aren't photographs. And yet it is so: the monumental images of the modern city, nature or catastrophes are drawn in charcoal on paper. They are almost tactile - so elaborate and detailed - and for a long time attract attention with their epic scale.
Longo has a quiet but confident voice. After listening to the question, he thinks for a second, and then speaks - confidentially, as with an old acquaintance. Complex abstract categories in his story gain clarity and even seemingly physical form. And by the end of our conversation, I understand why.
Inna Logunova: Having looked at the mounted part of the exhibition, I was impressed by the monumentality of your images. It is amazing how modern and archetypal they are at the same time. Is your goal as an artist to capture the essence of time?
Robert Longo: We, artists, are reporters of the times we live in. No one pays me - neither the government nor the church, I can rightly say: my work is how I see the world around me. If we take any example from the history of art, say, the paintings of Rembrandt or Caravaggio, we will see on them a cast of life - such as it was in that era. I think this is what really matters. Because in a sense, art is a religion, a way to separate our ideas about things from their real essence, from what they really are. This is his great strength. As an artist, I don’t sell anything to you, I don’t talk about Christ or politics - I just try to understand something about life, I ask questions that make the viewer think, doubt certain generally accepted truths.
And the image, by definition, is archetypal, the mechanism of its influence is connected with our deepest foundations. I draw with charcoal - the oldest material of prehistoric man. The irony is that at this exhibition, technologically, my works are the most primitive. Goya worked in a complex, still modern etching technique, Eisenstein made films, and I just paint with charcoal.
That is, you use primitive material to pull out some ancient principle?
Yes, I have always been interested in the collective unconscious. At one time, I was simply obsessed with the idea of finding and capturing his images, and in order to somehow get closer to this, I made a drawing every day. I am American, my wife is European, she was formed in a different visual culture, and it was she who helped me understand how much I myself am a product of the image system of my society. We consume these images every day without even realizing that they are part of our flesh and blood. For me, the process of drawing itself is a way to realize what of all this visual noise is really yours, and what is imposed from the outside. Actually, the drawing, in principle, is an imprint of the unconscious - almost everyone draws something while talking on the phone or thinking. Therefore, both Goya and Eisenstein are presented at the exhibition, including drawings.
Where did you get this particular interest in the work of Goya and Eisenstein?
In my youth, I was constantly drawing something, making sculptures, but I did not have the courage to consider myself an artist, and I did not see myself in this capacity. I was thrown from side to side: I wanted to be either a biologist, or a musician, or an athlete. In general, I had certain makings in each of these areas, but in fact the only thing I really had abilities in was art. I thought that I could find myself in the history of art or restoration - and went to study in Europe (at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. - Approx. Aut.), where I watched and studied old masters a lot and enthusiastically. And at a certain moment something seemed to click in me: enough, I want to answer them with something of my own.
I first saw Goya's paintings and etchings in 1972, and they struck me with their cinematic quality. After all, I grew up on television and cinema, my perception was predominantly visual - in my youth I didn’t even read almost, books entered my life after thirty. Moreover, it was black and white television - and the images of Goya connected in my mind with my own past, my memories. I was also impressed by the strong political component of his work. After all, I belong to a generation for which politics is part of life. A close friend was shot dead in front of me during student protests. Politics became a stumbling block in our family: my parents were staunch conservatives, and I was a liberal.
As for Eisenstein, I have always admired the thoughtfulness of his images, the virtuoso work of the camera. He influenced me a lot. In the 1980s, I constantly referred to his theory of montage. At that time, I was especially interested in collage: how the connection or collision of two elements gives rise to something completely new. For example, cars crashing into each other are no longer two material objects, but something third - a car accident.
Goya was a political artist. Is your art political?
Not that I was deeply involved in politics, but certain situations in life forced me to take a political position. So, in high school, by and large, I was only interested in girls, sports and rock and roll. And then the cops shot my friend and I couldn't stay away anymore. I felt an inner need to tell about it, or rather, to show it - but not so much through the events themselves, as their consequences, slowing down and enlarging them.
And today the main thing for me is to stop the flow of images, the number of which is constantly increasing. They pass before our eyes with incredible speed and therefore lose all meaning. I feel that I must stop them, fill them with content. After all, the perception of art is different from the everyday, sliding look at things - it requires concentration and therefore makes you stop.
Was it your idea to combine Robert Longo, Francisco Goya and Sergei Eisenstein in one exhibition?
Of course not. Goya and Eisenstein are titans and geniuses, I don't even pretend to be next to them. The idea belongs to Kate (Keith Fowl, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art's chief curator and exhibition curator. - Author's note), who wanted to put my work of recent years in some context. At first, her idea confused me a lot. But she said: "Try to look at them as friends, not sacred monsters, to establish a dialogue with them." When I did decide, another difficulty arose: it was clear that we would not be able to bring Goya from Spain. But then I saw Eisenstein's graphics and remembered Goya's etchings that impressed me so much in my youth - and then I realized that the three of us have in common: drawing. And black and white. And we began to work in this direction. I selected drawings by Eisenstein, and Kate etchings by Goya. She also figured out how to organize the exhibition space - I myself, to be honest, felt a little lost when I saw it, I did not understand at all how to work with it.
Among the works presented at the exhibition there are two works based on X-rays of Rembrandt's paintings Head of Christ and Bathsheba. What special truth were you looking for inside these canvases? What did they discover?
A few years ago in Philadelphia there was an exhibition "Rembrandt and the faces of Christ." Once among these canvases, I suddenly realized: this is what the invisible looks like - after all, religion, in fact, is based on faith in the invisible. I asked an art restorer friend of mine to show me x-rays of other Rembrandt paintings. And this feeling - that you see the invisible - only strengthened. Because X-ray images capture the creative process itself. What is interesting: while working on the image of Jesus, Rembrandt painted a whole series of portraits of local Jews, but in the end, the face of Christ is devoid of Semitic features - he is still a European. And on x-rays, where earlier versions of the image are visible, he generally looks like an Arab.
In "Bathsheba" I was occupied with another moment. Rembrandt portrayed her as resigned to fate: she is forced to share the bed with King David, who desired her, and thereby save her husband, who, if she refuses, he will immediately send to war to certain death. The x-ray shows that initially Bathsheba has a completely different expression on her face, as if she is even waiting for the night with David. All this is amazingly interesting and excites the imagination.
And if your work were x-rayed, what would we see in these pictures?
When I was young, I was pretty angry - I'm still angry now, but less so. Under my drawings, I wrote terrible things: whom I hated, whose death I wished. Fortunately, as an art historian friend told me, charcoal drawings usually do not show through X-rays.
And if we talk about the outer layer - people who do not look closely at my work, take them for photographs. But the closer they get to them, the more they get lost: this is not a traditional figurative painting, and not a modernist abstraction, but something in between. Being extremely detailed, my drawings always remain shaky and a bit unfinished, which is why they could under no circumstances be photographs.
What is primary for you as an artist - form or content, idea?
I was formed under the influence of conceptual artists, they were my heroes. And for them, the idea is paramount. It is impossible to ignore the form, but the idea is extremely important. Since art has ceased to serve the church and the state, the artist has to answer the question to himself again and again - what the hell am I doing? In the 1970s, I was agonizingly looking for a form in which I could work. I could choose any: conceptual artists and minimalists deconstructed all possible ways of creating art. Anything could be art. My generation was engaged in the appropriation of images, images of images became our material. I took photos and videos, staged performances, made sculptures. Over time, I realized that drawing is somewhere between "high" art - sculpture and painting - and something completely marginal, even despised. And I thought: what if we take and enlarge the drawing to the scale of a large canvas, turn it into something grandiose, like a sculpture? My drawings have weight, they physically interact with the space and the viewer. On the one hand, these are the most perfect abstractions, on the other hand, the world in which I live.
Robert Longo and Kate Fowl at the Russian State Archives
literature and art
Details from Posta-Magazine
The exhibition is open from September 30 to February 5
Museum of Contemporary Art "Garage", st. Krymsky Val, 9, building 32
About other projects of the season: http://garagemca.org/
Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Long Island. As a child, he was greatly influenced by popular culture—film, television, magazines, and comics—which largely shaped his artistic style.
In the late 1970s, Longo performed experimental punk music in New York City rock clubs for Robert Longo's Menthol Wars. He is a co-founder of the avant-garde group X-Patsys (with his wife Barbara Zukova, Jon Kessler, Knox Chandler, Sean Conley, Jonathan Kane and Anthony Coleman).
In the 1980s, Longo directed several music videos, including the song The One I Love by R.E.M. , Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order and Peace Sells by Megadeth.
In 1992, the artist acted as the director of one of the episodes of the series "Tales from the Crypt" called "This will kill you" (This'll Kill Ya). Longo's most famous directorial work is the 1995 film
At the Museum of Modern Art "Garage" exhibition opened "Evidence": Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo. Stills from Eisenstein's films, Goya's engravings and Longo's charcoal drawings formed a black and white postmodern mix. Separately, at the exhibition you can see forty-three drawings by Eisenstein from the collection of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, exhibited for the first time, as well as etchings by Francisco Goya from the collection of the State Museum of Contemporary History of Russia. ARTANDHOUSES spoke with the famous American artist Robert Longo about how difficult it was to stand on a par with the giants of art history, about the self-sufficiency of youth and his experiences in cinema.
How did the idea for the exhibition come about? What do the artists Longo, Goya and Eisenstein have in common?
Exhibition co-curator Kate Fowl heard me talk about these artists, how they inspired me and how I admired their work. She suggested that I collect our work together and make this exhibition.
I have always been interested in artists who witnessed their time and documented everything that happened. I consider it important that in the works of Eisenstein and Goya we see evidence of the eras in which they lived.
While working on the exhibition, you went to the Russian state archives. What was the most interesting thing about working with archival materials?
The museum's amazing team gave me access to places I would never have gone myself. I was struck by the archive of literature and art, its huge halls with filing cabinets. As we walked along the endless corridors, I constantly asked the employees what was in these boxes, what was in those. They once said: “And in these boxes we have Chekhov!” I was struck by the very idea of Chekhov in the box.
You also met with Naum Kleiman, a leading expert on Eisenstein’s work…
I went to Kleiman for some sort of permission. I asked, what would Eisenstein think about what we are doing? Because I felt that the exhibition was quite boldly conceived. But Kleiman was very enthusiastic about the project. We can say that he approved in a certain way what we were doing. He is an amazingly lively person, fluent in English, although at first he claimed that he hardly spoke it.
Is it difficult for you to compare with Goya and Eisenstein? Is it difficult to stand on a par with the geniuses of the past?
When Kate asked me if I would like to participate in such an exhibition, I thought: what role will be assigned to me? Probably helpful. These are real giants of art history! But, in the end, we are all artists, each lived in his own era and depicted it. It's important to understand that this is Kate's idea, not mine. And what place in history I will take, we will know in a hundred years.
In your interviews, you often say that you steal pictures. What do you have in mind?
We live in a world saturated with images, and you can say that they penetrate us. And what am I doing? I'm borrowing "pictures" from this insane stream of images and placing them in a completely different context - art. I choose archetypal images, but deliberately slow them down so people can stop and think about them. We can say that all the media around us is a one-way street. We are not given a chance to respond in any way. And I make an attempt to answer this diversity. Looking for images that are archetypal from antiquity. I look at the works of Goya and Eisenstein, and it strikes me that I subconsciously use in my work motives that are also found in them.
You entered the history of art as an artist from Pictures Generation. What motivated you when you started borrowing images from the media space? Was it a protest against modernism?
It was an attempt to resist the amount of images that we were surrounded by in America. There were so many images that people lost their sense of reality. I belong to the generation that grew up on television. TV was my babysitter. Art is a reflection of what we grew up with, what surrounded us in childhood. Do you know Anselm Kiefer? He grew up in post-war Germany, lying in ruins. And we see all this in his art. In my art, we see black and white images, as if they came off the TV screen, on which I grew up.
What was the role of the critic Douglas Crimp in organizing the legendary Pictures exhibition in 1977, where you participated with Sherri Levin, Jack Goldstein and others, after which you became famous?
He brought together artists. He first met Goldstein and me and realized that something interesting was going on. And he had the idea to travel around America and find artists working in the same direction. He discovered many new names. It was a gift of fate for me that at such a young age I was found by a great intellectual who wrote about my work. (Douglas Crimp's article on the new generation of artists was published in the influential American magazineOctober. - E. F.). It was important that he put into words what we wanted to express. Because we were making art, but we couldn't find the words to explain what we were depicting.
You often depict apocalyptic scenes: atomic explosions, sharks with open mouths, diving fighters. What draws you to the topic of disaster?
In art, there is a whole direction of depicting disasters. For me, an example of this genre is Gericault's painting "The Raft of the Medusa". My paintings based on disasters are something like an attempt at disarmament. Through art, I would like to get rid of the feeling of fear that these phenomena generate. Perhaps my most striking work on this topic is the work with a bullet mark, which was inspired by the events around the Charlie Hebdo magazine. On the one hand, it is very beautiful, but on the other hand, it is the embodiment of cruelty. For me, this is a way to say: “I'm not afraid of you! You can shoot me, but I will keep working! And you would go far away!
You shoot movies, video clips, played in a musical group, draw pictures. Who do you feel more like - a director, an artist or a musician?
Artist. This is the freest profession of all. When you make a movie, people pay money and think they can tell you what to do.
Are you not very happy with your film experience?
I had a difficult experience filming « Johnny Mnemonic. I originally wanted to make a small black and white sci-fi film, but the producers kept interfering. As a result, he came out about 50-70 percent the way I would like to see him. I had a plan - for the 25th anniversary of the film, edit it, make it black and white, re-edit and put it on the Internet. That would be my act of revenge on the film company!
You were a member of the artistic and musical underground in the 1970s and 80s. How do you remember those times?
With age, you understand that you are not entering the future, but the future is approaching you. The past is constantly changing in our minds. When I now read about the events of the 1970s and 80s, I think that it was not at all like that. The past is not as rosy as it is portrayed. There were also difficulties. We were without money. I went to terrible jobs, including working as a taxi driver. And yet it was a great time when music and art were closely linked. And we really wanted to create something new.
If you could go back in time to when you were young, what would you change?
I wouldn't do drugs. If I were talking to my young self now, I would say that in order to expand the boundaries of consciousness, you do not need stimulants, you need to work actively. It is easy to be young, it is much more difficult to live to old age. And be relevant to your time. The whole idea of destruction in youth may seem cool, but it is not. And now for more than twenty years I have not drunk or used any stimulant substances.
Eisenstein was supposed to work for the government, Goya - for the king. I work for the art market. Throughout the history of art, there has been a specific customer, church or government. Interestingly, as soon as the institutions ceased to be the main customers, the artists had a new problem of finding what they want to depict on canvases. Unlike the king, the art market does not dictate what exactly we need to do, so I am freer than the artists that came before me.
Goya's etchings were not made for churches or kings, so they are much closer to what I do. In the case of Eisenstein, we tried we tried to remove most of the political context, we slowed down the frames, leaving only images, so we tried to get away from politics. When I was a student, I never thought about the political background, the repression, the pressure that went hand in hand with making these films. But the more I studied Eisenstein, the more I realized that he simply wanted to make films - and for this, alas, he was forced to seek state support.
When Caravaggio was in Rome, he had to work for the church. Otherwise, he simply would not have been able to paint big pictures. As a result, he was forced to retell the same stories over and over again. It's funny how it looks like a popular Hollywood movie. So we have a lot more in common with the artists of the past than we used to think, and their influence on each other can hardly be overestimated. Eisenstein himself studied the work of Goya and even created paintings that look like storyboards - here are six of them, all together they actually look like storyboards for a movie. And the etchings are even numbered.
One way or another, all artists are connected and influenced by each other. The history of art is a great weapon that helps us cope with the challenges of each new day. And personally, I also use art to get there - such is my time machine.
Francisco Goya, "The Tragic Case of a Bull Attacking the Rows of Spectators in the Arena of Madrid"
Series "Tauromachia", sheet 21
We learned that the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow keeps a complete set of Goya's etchings. It was a gift from the USSR in 1937 as a token of gratitude for helping the Spaniards in the fight against Franco. The etchings are simply unique: the last copy was made from Goya's original plates and all of them - which is simply amazing - look like they were printed yesterday. At the exhibition, we tried to avoid the most famous works - I just think that people will peer into unfamiliar works a little longer. And we chose the ones that I think almost look like film or journalism.
I even have one Goya etching at home, I bought it a long time ago. And of those presented at the exhibition, I like the one with the bull the most. The work looks exactly like a frame from a movie - everything somehow cinematically works together, a bull with a tail and people whom it seems to crash into. When I look at this work, I always think about what happened before and what will happen after this moment. Just like in the movies.
Francisco Goya, "Amazing Stupidity"
Series "Proverbs", sheet 3
Here is another work that I really like - Goya's family stands in a row, as if the birds are sitting on a tree branch. I myself have three sons, and this engraving reminds me of the family, there is something beautiful and important in it.
When I paint, I really often think about what will happen next with the characters in my painting. I often do the framing exercise, like in the comics, by throwing in a lot of different sized rectangles and experimenting with the composition inside. And Eisenstein in this sense is an excellent example to follow, his compositions are impeccable: the picture is often built around the diagonal and such a structure creates psychological tension.
Sergei Eisenstein and Grigory Alexandrov, frame from the film "Battleship Potemkin"
I love all Eisenstein's films, and from Potemkin I remember first of all this beautiful scene with boats in the harbour. The water glitters, and this makes the frame incredibly beautiful. And my most, probably, favorite frame - in a large flag and screaming Lenin. Both of these shots are truly masterpieces.
Sergei Eisenstein, frame from the film "Sentimental Romance"
In the film "Sentimental Romance" there is an incredibly powerful shot: a woman is standing in an apartment by the window. It really looks like a painting.
It's also very interesting for me to see what happened when we put these films side by side - in the cinema you watch scene by scene, and here you see slow-motion images of different films located next to each other. This strange collage, it seems to me, makes it clear how Eisenstein's brain works. In his films, the cameras did not move behind the actors, they were static, and each time he offers us well-built concrete images. Eisenstein worked at the dawn of cinema, and each frame had to be imagined in advance - in fact, to see the future film image by image.
Cinema, painting and contemporary art are one and the same: the creation of pictures. The other day I was in the museum, looking for the "Black Square" and while walking through all these halls of images and paintings, I realized something important. The main strength of art is the burning desire of a human being to explain to you what it is that he sees. “This is how I see it,” the artist tells us. Do you understand what I mean? Sometimes it may seem to you that the crown of a tree resembles a face, and you immediately want to tell your friend about it, ask him: “Do you see what I see?” Making art is about trying to show people how you see the world. And at the heart of this is the desire to feel alive.
Robert Longo, untitled, 2016
(The plot is connected with the tragic events in Baltimore. - Note. ed.)
I chose this image to show not only what happened, but also to explain to you what I see and feel about this myself. At the same time, of course, it was necessary to create an image that the viewer would also want to consider. And I also think that you may not read the newspapers and not know what happened, but this is wrong - it is important to see everything.
I love the painting (1819 painting by Théodore Géricault, based on the shipwreck of a frigate off the coast of Senegal. - Note. ed.) - for me this is really an amazing work about a terrible catastrophe. Remember what it was? Of the 150 people on the raft, only 15 survived. I also try to show the beauty of disasters, and the bullet holes in my paintings are a perfect example.
I am far from politics, and ideally I would like to be able to live my life and just know that people do not suffer. But I do what I have to do - and show what I must.
I think both of these artists were in a similar situation. It is a pity that the deep ideas of Eisenstein's films have been distorted. This is similar to the situation with America: the idea of democracy, which is the basis of our country, has been constantly distorted. Goya also witnessed terrible events, and he wanted to make us look at things realistically, as if to stop what was happening. He talks about slowing down the world and perception. I think I also intentionally slow things down with my images. You can turn on the computer and quickly look through thousands of images on the Internet, but I want to create them in a way that stops time and allows you to look at things more carefully. To do this, in one work, I can combine several images, as in classical art, and this idea of \u200b\u200bconnecting the unconscious is incredibly important to me.
Robert Longo, untitled
January 5, 2015 (work - a tribute to the memory of the editors of Charlie Hebdo. - Note. ed.)
For me, this topic was extremely important, because I myself am an artist. Hebdo is a magazine where cartoonists, that is, artists, worked. What happened really shocked me: each of us could be among those people who were killed. This is not just an attack on Hebdo - it's an attack on all artists. What the terrorists wanted to say was: you shouldn't make pictures like that, so this threat actually concerns me as well.
I chose cracked glass as the basis of the image. First of all, it's beautiful - you'll want to look at it one way or another. But this is not the only reason: it reminded me of a jellyfish, some kind of organic creature. Hundreds of cracks radiate from the hole in the glass, like an echo of a terrible event that happened. The event is in the past, but its consequences continue. It's really scary.
Robert Longo, untitled
2015 (the work is dedicated to the catastrophe of September 11. - Note. ed.)
On September 11, I played basketball in one of the Brooklyn gyms, on the 10th floor of a tall building, and I could see everything perfectly from the window. And my studio is located near the scene of the tragedy, so I could not get there for a long time. In my studio there is a large picture created in honor of this terrible event - at first I just sketched a drawing on the wall of the studio, painted an airplane. The same plane that flew to the first tower, I drew it on the wall. Then I had to repaint the walls of the studio, and I was very worried that the drawing would disappear, so I made another one. Please note that all my drawings in the exhibition are covered with glass - and as a result, you see your reflections in them. Airplanes crash into reflections, and parts of some of my work are reflected in each other. There are certain angles in the exhibition where you can see a bullet hole in Jesus from a certain angle, and here you see a plane crashing into something.
For me, superimposing drawings on top of each other is not just a chronology of disasters, but rather an attempt to heal. Sometimes we take poison to get better and it is important to have the courage to live with open eyes, to be courageous to see some things. I myself am probably not a very manly person - all men like to think that they are brave, but most of them, I think, are cowards.
I am lucky that I have the opportunity to exhibit, and I use this opportunity to talk about what I consider important. No need to create something mysterious, complex, full of narcissism. Instead, it is better to address the issues that matter now. That's what I think about the real tasks of art.
