From Our Archives: Robert Longo
Robert Longo. Untitled (Crown of Thorns), 2012.
This interview was featured in Issue No. 14 - Science and Technology.
Steve Miller: What’s it like to draw the Cosmos? Not many people have the balls to draw the Cosmos.
Robert Longo: I realize I am interested in an ability to see these inaccessible objects. It goes back to death. I have this fantasy that when I die, and my soul is floating out there, I’ll get to see the Earth. I’ll get to see the Moon, the stars. Then, I said why the fuck wait? I’ll do it myself. I want to make the stuff I can’t see. For the past several years, I have been thinking about how, as artists, we are blind. We can’t see how other people see our work. It’s the same thing that drives us: to make things that we can’t see. The only real way we can see them is by making them. It’s really very hard to explain to someone the compulsion, and the desire, and the obsession to make work that is driven by this desire to make things that we can’t see. I remember the experience of producing the first Earth that I made. It felt as if I was out in space looking at this glass ball. It made me go back to Hieronymus Bosch’s doors of The Garden of Earthly Delights. When you close the doors of The Garden of Earthly Delights there is, painted on the back of the doors, an image of a glass ball that has a flat Earth in it, which I think is amazing. For one of the big star fields that I created, I first project- ed a Jackson Pollock painting over the paper’s surface. I then sketched the basic structure of the Pollock painting, and then projected a nebula on top of that. I basically made Jackson’s nebula. I kept thinking of this idea of intelligent design: trying to play God in a way.
Robert Longo. Untitled (Jackson’s Nebula), 2006.
Steve: This issue is about science, and I think that the reason that I really got into thinking about you for this was because of the bomb series from 2003 that you titled The Sickness Of Reason.
Robert: Science is interesting because we want to be- lieve in it. We used to believe that science and technology would save us. Now we’re starting to think it’s going to kill us. The difference between our generation and the generation of my kids is that we dealt with nuclear or atomic threats, while they are dealing with bio-genetic fear. It’s re- ally radically different, the idea of redesigning us, where the interface between man and machine collides. My bomb series, Sickness of Reason is inspired by Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. Actually, one of the bombs that I made looks a lot like Goya’s painting The Colossus. I always thought that looked like an atomic bomb. I try to make art as if I am tuning an old radio: if I turn the knob too much one way or another, I lose it — it’s really important that I find this balance between something that’s highly personal, and at the same time socially relevant. And if I can find that balance, it makes sense for me to investigate it. Each series leads me to the next. Before the drawings of bombs, I was making wave drawings. Then 9/11 happened, and I started incorporating the smoke from 9/11 into the drawings. Someone sent me an image of the tow- ers falling down, and when I printed the image, it came out of the printer upside-down. I thought, “The image of the buildings beneath the cloud of smoke looks like a bomb! Holy shit!”
I remember showing the atomic bomb test images to my kids. I asked my son who was 8 years old at the time, “So, what do you think this is?” And he answered, “I think it’s a hurricane.” He thought they were nature. All of a sudden, I had this idea of man trying to be nature; an arrow pointed to go in that direction. I dropped my work on the waves, and the bombs happened. The Russian test bomb was a really great image. It was such a dirty, nasty-looking bomb. It looked like they blew it up in a fucking coffee can. With my work, I ended up beautifying certain images. The bombs led me to roses. Waves, bombs, and roses have a similarity in those early series because they all exist at a moment of being. It’s almost like they’re orgasmic. I mean, they’re all at the moments of becoming. I started to understand that with the waves, the shape of a wave is not necessarily dictated by how strong the wind is. It’s dictated by what’s deep underneath it. It’s like psychoanalysis. Ironically, before the wave drawings, I was working on the Freud Cycle drawings. Julian Barnes wrote an essay about the idea of the artist turning catastrophe into art in Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, which is really interesting. In the summer of 2004, I was invited to the Aspen Institute for Physics for the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. They wanted to show a group of seven bombs with the drawing I did of Einstein’s desk. The institute showed these drawings in an octagonal room, a room in which they then hosted a conference about nuclear proliferation, with military people, scientists, and politicians. I thought that was very ironic.
Robert Longo. Opposite: Untitled (Russian Bomb / Semipalatinsk), 2003.
Steve: I’m looking at your tools. You have a brush, the eraser to dig. It’s like an archeological excavation.
Robert: I graduated with a sculpture degree. In my mind I am a sculptor, not a painter. These drawings are truly sculptural. The process of these drawings is the opposite of traditional painting. Traditional painting works from dark to light. I work from a white surface. The white in the drawings is always the raw, virgin paper. I never add white to the drawings. The drawings get built up with so many layers of charcoal and dust and powder and stick. The way the drawing comes to life is by erasing, carving the image out of it. You have to realize the depth in which you can go; if you fuck the paper up, you can never get it back. They’re like mineshaft disasters where you can never get back to white. We make different kinds of erasers. When we made those abstract expressionist paintings we made erasers to imitate the grain of the canvas for the Barnett Newman piece. I’m dealing with a minor, forgotten medium that I found in the crack of high art. I basically had to re-invent drawing. We have invented techniques with the powder, and we’ve learned, what I call, different colors of charcoal. Painting to me, I realize, is a form of architecture. You really have to build a painting. Great masters, how they deal with paintings, how they seam together wet and dry blows my mind. My drawings take a long time, but great paintings take fucking forever.
Steve: Your work for me is really about a conceptual practice. Even though there is imagery, the approach is conceptual. Compared to the Abstract Expressionist painting you worked from, your drawing is not a “reproduction.” It’s of equal value, in terms of the experience for the viewer. Was this a part of your intellectual thought process or sensibility?
Robert: I think, for me, the ‘Picture’ sensibility was there at the beginning, but it’s definitely not there anymore. For me, Abstract Expressionism is a force in my life like the ocean. In a weird way, my drawings based on Abstract Expressionist paintings from my 2014 exhibition Gang of Cosmos, were definitely labors of love. Regarding authorship, I thought maybe I was revisiting the Abstract Expressionist works to redeliver the authorship back to the artists who made those paintings. If you are successful enough to create an archetypal image in culture, you eventually lose authorship. So ‘Jackson Pollock’ could be the style of painting that somebody does their bathroom in. The authorship is lost in that work. By doing these drawings I was reinstating the artist’s authorship. The time it takes to make a brush stroke versus the time it takes to paint a brush stroke is radically different. Black and White photography is very arbitrary. So I worked from color photographs, and deliberately tried to do a translation into black and white with as much sincerity as possible. In the Joan Mitchell painting I realized there was black and red next to each other, and in the black and white photograph they looked exactly the same. So how do I translate that to give it some soul? Each painting required a different kind of strategy. For instance, what was really interesting, with the Pollock, is we toned the whole paper grey, and then we projected the painting onto it, and then we drew the black first. Once you draw the black first you realize there is clearly a plan involved with Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30). It was basically divided into three sections. The next thing we did was the green and the gold, with different values of powder. The last thing we did was the white, with erasing. It was this really weird deconstruction of the painting to make it come alive. What was also amazing was with this idea of fractals: you could tell how tall Pollock was and how much he weighed by his gestures. It was really quite amazing taking these things apart. In the studio, each drawing looked like a forensic site. We got permission from all of the artists’ estates. We got into the museums to see all the paintings. We took about 100 photographs for every painting. So every drawing was surrounded by hundreds of photographs that we were working from to reconstruct this drawing.
Robert Longo. After Pollock (Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1951), 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.
Steve: So obviously there is subjectivity in the translation, but the subjectivity is like a technical virtuosity. How are you making these decisions? All intuitively?
Robert: Yeah. Very much so. Ironically, now that you bring that up, if art is subjectivity then science is objectivity. The choices I made were somewhat on the fly, but were highly educated ones. They were planned. My work also has the scale of Abstract Expressionism. I’m definitely a child of the Abstract Expressionists. That scale. My generation of artists, the ‘Pictures Generation’ for lack of a better name, I think we wanted to compete with the mediums that shaped us. That’s why I wanted to make a movie. The one big difference between cinema and an artwork is, how many times have I looked at The Raft of the Medusa in the Louvre versus how many times have I watched The Godfather? Art has this incredible democracy that exists within it that is not dependent on the narrative structure of film. When they first invented film they thought it was useless. Then writers thought, ‘This is going to put us out of business, so we better usurp it, and put it into a narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and an end.’ With an artwork, the viewer makes his own story. You can look at an artwork narratively, however you want to look at it. That’s why I don’t like time-based art. I find it really bor- ing. I hate going to movies where I miss the beginning of a movie. I don’t want to walk into a gallery wondering, ‘When does this start?’ I like the democracy that exists within art.
Robert Longo. Untitled (Freud’s Desk and Chair, Study Room 1938), 2000.
Steve: I think you have a rather scientific mind because of the research that goes into your work. What I perceive when I look at a lot of your work, is that it’s through the lens of science. Then when I look at these x-ray drawings I’m insanely jealous because it’s such a great idea. We’re talking about rendering something visible that’s invisible. What’s that experience for you as an artist?
Robert: The first drawings I made that were based on x-rays, were based on x-rays of Rembrandt’s paintings of Jesus. I think God is about believing in the invisible, and x-rays are about seeing the invisible. When I began this series, I re-read texts by writers such as Walter Benjamin, who describes the loss of the aura. I thought that this series of works based on x-rays was a way of reclaiming the aura. I also love this idea of seeing things that you can’t see. Bathsheba at her bath is a really good example. She’s been asked by King David to come over to his house while her husband is away fighting for King David, because he wants to fuck her. She gets pregnant. King David calls her husband back, but he doesn’t want to sleep with her because he feels bad for his troops, so he sleeps out on the street. King David freaks out, sends her husband back to the front. Her husband dies, and David takes Bathsheba as a concubine. In the finished painting she has such incredible, tender, poignant resignation in her face. But in the underpainting, the look that she has is more like, ‘Hmmm, this could be kind of interesting. I get to do the chief’. When I saw that x-ray I was like holy shit, this is a completely different story. The interesting thing is that there are stories behind making this work, then there are the stories that people perceive from it. I find that really interesting. The Raft of the Medusa is another perfect example; the aristocrats cut the rope on the raft and let them float, and these fifteen survivors, out of the 150 on the raft, go back to Paris and tell everyone that these loyalists fucking just let them drift. There was almost a revolution because of this. Many viewers don’t know this story of The Raft of the Medusa, but they imagine their own story. It’s really interesting in that sense.
For the full version of Robert Longo’s interview, check out Issue No. 14 - Science and Technology.
