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Lust of the Eye “I believe in the power of art…” On a brutally cold, snowy winter evening back in February, after having battled the howling traffic of Canal Street, Chinatown and the crowded sidewalks of downtown New York City, I finally arrived at the immense, airy space of Robert Longo’s studio. A haven of solitude in the midst of the din, its walls were filled with preparatory sketches, photographs and huge drawings of roses and atomic bomb mushroom clouds in various states of completion. Large chunks of charcoal and tattered rags used for wiping it away were scattered about on tabletops. Charcoal dust covered the floors and stained the hands of the artist himself, who was in black from head to toe, from his coal black wavy hair to his black clothes and boots. The only notes of color in the room were the glowering scarlet that radiated from the drawings of roses on the walls and the green of Longo’s intense eyes that gazed out from behind a thick fringe of black eyelashes. Chopin etudes were playing in the background, in marked contrast to the last time I was here, when the music was Reggae Dub and the drawings on the walls were monstrous waves. Robert Longo is a study in contrasts, a combination of hipster street beat and sophisticated, articulate wit who lays claim only to being a "temporal expert" on whatever subject he is currently (thoroughly) researching for his art. Our conversation about his work was a rambling free association, a riff on his art, his past, his wife and kids, his influences, his source material and the times. It ranged from the ceramic mushroom sculpture on his mother’s kitchen table that he loathed as a child, to the sculpted clay bomb study on a pedestal in his studio that day. And it veered off into the relationship of bombs to the creation of cities, mankind’s destruction and re-creation of nature, the dual nightmares of war and genetic tampering, and his work’s replication of primal fear; all of which are subtexts that run like electrical currents throughout "Lust of the Eye." What follows will be a deconstructed narrative that loosely reconstructs our conversation, ricocheting between his thoughts (as quoted) and my own in a manner that I hope will introduce not only the artist but also the man. Longo’s oeuvre stems from sheer, unbridled passion harnessed to an exploration of the powers that fuel it. The politics of power — physical, psychological, corporate, sacred and profane — and the pulse beat of fear that power elicits, are his recurrent themes. The fear factor is a dark undercurrent of crucial importance in the work that taps survival instincts and leaves a residual imprint in the viewer’s subconscious. Sometimes Longo has portrayed power overtly, and sometimes with exquisite subtlety. In "Lust of the Eye," he does both. This cycle of drawings combined with a solitary floor sculpture focuses on the relationship and allusions that flow between its two main images — atomic bombs and roses — and their relationship to the one catalyst around which they pivot — oil. The roses are antagonistic, confrontational and highly erotic images that were drawn specifically "in an aggressive, mechanical, manneristic style;" while the bombs were drawn "in a romantic, atmospheric landscape style;" the exact opposite of what one might expect. For Longo, the juxtaposition of these two images and opposing styles "trap the schism between man-made nature and real nature." Unlike the drawings, which assault the eye with their monumentality and color, Longo’s sparely elegant floor sculpture, "Oil and Roses," whispers in silent testimony, with its legions of rose heads floating like a raft of hope, surrounded by a sea of unctuous black oil. That the lustrous petals of these cultivated beauties will quickly wither, but the oil, over which heinous wars are fought, will remain indefinitely, is one of Longo’s more poignant collations. No matter how disturbing the subject, Longo’s imagery of disasters suspended on the brink bait the viewer into looking with their accessibility and seductive beauty — they prey upon the lust of the eye to want to look and devour. His roiling atomic mushroom clouds, for example, are familiar images, full of shimmering light and ominous shadows; images the eye savors for their sheer beauty, but whose ultimate impact detonates in the viewer’s mind. Once ensnared, their aftereffects linger like radiation with the knowledge of the charred wasteland they leave behind. The dichotomy between the visual poetics of the drawing and the unconscionable beauty of the clouds, versus the horrific reality of what they depict, creates the sort of tension for which Longo is known. He has an unerring knack for capturing suspended moments that hold the viewer in their thrall. These peak moments are endemic to his work. "One of my heroes when I was a student was Robert Smithson,” Longo stated with regard to this, “and these are so anti-Smithson, never changing. They are about catching the millisecond, and making it last forever." The interior dialog in Lust unfolds on this millisecond, on the balance between nature’s power to create as well as destroy man; and on man’s ever increasing power to create nature and by so doing, destroy it. This “dance of boom and bloom,” as Longo refers to his theme of man butting heads with nature, is part three of his trilogy of works that began with “The Freud Drawings,” 1999-02, followed by part two, the "Monsters” wave drawings, 2002. This trilogy of disparate images encompassed three years and three discrete bodies of thematically united work. "This whole thing about man making nature became really interesting to me," Longo mused. "What drives man’s incredible desire to become nature? Why are we trying to procreate without fucking, even though fucking is the most important thing in our culture? We’re trying to make artificial intelligence when our own collective intelligence needs reworking. An example of this is nuclear weapons… are we basically trying to make the weather? These actions so terminate the environment. An act of destruction on God’s scale… we’re creating new creatures, like frogs with 18 legs and 14 eyes… “For me there are many connections between the bombs, roses, Freuds and waves… Aside from man becoming nature, the waves were about nature becoming man. They‘re so animate, so much about power, and feelings we all understand about being overpowered, somebody rising up and taking over. The bombs are the opposite. We are creating things that could make us obsolete. Which is a frightening thing." That Longo taps into primal fear is a given; it is omnipresent in all of his work. But the way he does it raises an interesting point. Rather than address the instinctual fears with which we are genetically programmed for physical survival in the wild, he taps into the queasy underbelly of those fears with the things that threaten us now by harnessing the psychic predators we create ourselves. Longo preys on our need to scare ourselves to death. We wait with sizzling anticipation on long movie and amusement park lines for it, as if we are feeding a subconscious hunger to experience a visceral fright rush of survival; as if in some complex psychological way fear allows us to experience being alive. Contemporary urban life divorces us from natural experience. Fear today resides more in what we implant in the mind rather than in what routinely threatens the body. Since being eaten alive by a wild thing is no longer likely in the civilized world, but acute survival instincts still exist in our subconscious, we create chimerical life-threatening experiences in media related formats. We can then enjoy being terrified from the safety of our armchairs… or an art gallery. Longo’s cinematically sized images of atomic death clouds are aimed at this phenomenon, as was the feature length action film he directed of corporate greed, “Johnny Mnemonic,” in 1994. His own childhood fears were informed by Alfred Hitchcock’s "Psycho," in which the cinematography forced the viewer to identify with the prey as she was being stalked; and by "On the Beach," in which our entire species wiped itself out in a nuclear holocaust. It is not incidental that his trilogy examines these threats, those that emanate from the human psyche’s murderous impulses when its rage and greed for alpha power is unleashed without restraint against our own species. “The real weapons of mass destruction being used today,” Longo stated ironically (surrounded as he is by drawings of bombs), “are MacDonalds, MTV, SUVS, video games, television, Nike, the internet, etc.” Things that insinuate their subliminal messages into the brain via entertainment and the creation of a consumption oriented cultural memory that is primarily aimed at channeling the expression of violence, sexuality and survival impulses. Primal fears, an insidious collective culture and the predatory nature of our own psyches are only a few of the sources from which Longo’s imagery derives, and I questioned him about others. "Inspiration for the work always comes from the world," he said. "I don’t find images, they find me. It just happens… I stumbled on the bombs. I remember showing my kids a picture of Nagasaki, and I asked them what it was. They thought it was a weather effect! "They are living with the real threat of nuclear war more than I ever did. I remember in grade school being under the desk during air raid drills… So I started reading everything I could find about it.” Longo reached into a pile of source materials on his desk and pulled out a book. He opened it to some well-worn pages that bore traces of his charcoal fingerprints, and began to recite statistics. “These images are courtesy of the US government, which only recently released archival photographs of nuclear bomb tests (except for Nagasaki and Hiroshima), from 1944-62. The nukes range from the first atomic blasts to hydrogen thermonuclear bombs ranging in size from six megatons to hundreds… one cruise missile now is equal to eighty-one Nagasaki blasts… “Paul Virilio, in his book called "Pure War," points out how the bomb was invented because people had moved into the cities, thus the creation of a weapon to kill more efficiently in a concentrated area. But he also said something quite poignant, talking about terrorists in the atomic age. These bombs are absolute weapons. They kill absolutely. But how do you use these weapons against people who believe absolutely? It negates itself. You are using these weapons to kill people who wanna’ die…" The government’s identification of its test bombs (on which Longo based the name for each of his drawings) is striking. Rather than being assigned impersonal numbers, they are laden with psychological allusions to power. "The study over there that almost glows, is a bomb called Trinity,” he pointed out. “It was the very first test in New Mexico. Those over there are called Grable and Monroe…" Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe? The ultimate Sex Goddesses of their era whose power to bring men to their knees is mythical, in conjunction with “Trinity,” an allusion to the power of religion that can bring us all to our knees? All names coined by the US government for weapons so powerful they are capable of incinerating the world? This stuff is right up Longo’s alley. It is no wonder he felt compelled to draw these images. And what inspired the roses? As with the bombs, the obvious metaphors — romance, funerals, life, death, etc. — only skim the surface of Longo’s dialog. Apropos of this, the conversation drifted back to his early influences. “Barnet Newman said something really great. In the 80s, everyone was calling my “Men in the Cities” drawings figurative. And I thought, this isn’t figurative work, it’s abstract. Newman said that he and his friends thought that abstract painters were representational artists working abstractly. So I’m an abstract artist working representationally.” Longo’s luridly beautiful rose drawings are emblematic of this representational abstraction. Their first abstraction is color, the brilliant scarlet of blood and passion. It is a critical factor, manipulated and finely tuned and not at all bound by the literal. Longo experimented with ink and dye variations until he got it exactly right; a luminous, throbbing scarlet that seems to glow from within and pulsate like a heartbeat. It is mesmerizing. The roses are drawn onto this backdrop in deep, velvety charcoal, and confront the viewer in extreme, cropped close-up. Standing directly in front of them, with their spiraling petals, is dizzying. However, these are not lyrically pretty pictures of roses. Rather, they are highly erotic, manipulated images of the flower that has been most specifically manipulated into metaphoric service by man. What began in the innocence of nature has become a cultivated aberration that nature never intended, bred to man’s ideal of perfection. Longo thus tampers with their image, echoing our own predilection for genetic cloning. His flowers thus become aggressive, symbolic abstractions of human conceit; of the manipulated life cycle from birth to death, inclusive of everything that happens in between — love, romance, innocence and loss of innocence, sex, deception, memorials — everything to which the rose is now heir. The source photos from which they derive are just the opposite; rather than profound, they are stupefyingly prosaic. "They were taken from an ad in a Martha Stewart catalog for the Rose of the Month," he stated. "Of course, I bought roses to take photographs of them, but none of them looked anything like these perfectly groomed ones.” That they are taken from chronological sources echoes the way in which Longo drew the bombs chronologically from the first test blast to the last detonation. This in turn echoes calendar girl pin-ups, which in turn echoes the bomb’s nomenclature, which echoes the not so subtle eroticism in the work and its convoluted references to power. These interconnections between reverberating ideas are the radiation factor. Longo refers to the bombs and roses as "heads and bodies." Just as the Freuds represented the male and the Monsters represented the female, the bombs are clearly male and the roses female. He will tell you, tossing his head with a wry grin, that they are "just penises and vaginas;" and indeed, sexual organs seem to be there – in the roses, almost pornographically so, in the curves and phallic formation of unfurled petals peeking out from hidden orifices. Each image is carefully chosen and honed, its veiled erotic content tying in with Longo’s penchant for the suspended moment. "There is that orgasmic moment of explosion,” he stated, “that moment that seems to somehow repeat itself continuously in my work from the "Men in the Cities" on… that peak, that trapping... The image is like sex when you come, or when you punch someone in the face or when you shoot a gun or see a flower open, its that moment… “…If it’s not that exactly, then it’s like the remnants of it. At one point I had this idea when I was visiting my son in Florida… the gravel road in front of his house was made from crushed seashells. And I was flashing on the idea of the bottom of the ocean being made of all these crushed animals and that this was sedimentation, right? So I started thinking that my work was like the sedimentation of adrenaline. Everything was like some kind of adrenaline rush. The works were what would remain of the adrenaline.” Sediment is material deposited by water, wind, or a glacier. Or, perhaps, an artist… For Longo, the rush is in the drawing of each layer of the work, rather than in the finished, sedimentary image. Being in his studio and seeing his process is like watching sedimentation in action. Charcoal is applied, wiped off, applied again, finessed with more wiping and subtle touches, then sprayed with fixative. This layer is then worked and reworked again and again, until the build-up of successive layers achieves a pictorially complex velvety depth, one that would be impossible to achieve in a single pass. For Longo, the development of the image is a fascinating, nearly cinematic experience, somewhat akin to the way photographs develop in chemical solutions in darkrooms. Photographs, either his own or those that ‘find him,’ are primary reference sources in his work. “Drawing from photos,” he stated, “is a way of reclaiming the images that haunt us. By drawing them, I make them become not just something I am looking at but something that becomes part of me, every molecule of my being… Art is not so much about emotions but more about experience… "It’s like when a photograph develops. I’m so fascinated with the image that I find myself orchestrating elements within the picture, amplifying them or decreasing them, customizing them, like in the tradition of Caravaggio. I’m not concerned with keeping true to the original. The original gives me the ground to work with. Take the shaft of the column of the bomb, for instance, that’s not the way it is, really." This hunger to own, to devour an image, is antithetical to post-modernism’s more conceptual approach to artmaking. In fact, Longo’s entire oeuvre has both absorbed the tenets of the latter and yet completely disregarded it at the same time. In the early 80s, his work struck an electrifying visual jolt to the jugular of Minimalism. Since then he has made work that stemmed from breaking through purely ideological restraints with unleashed artistic passion. “After seeing a lot of contemporary art recently,” Longo contemplated, “ I realize that I used to think that what I’m doing looked very traditional, but now I realize that it looks quite radical. “The issue of my work being deeply felt and labor intensive is important to me - time spent in the act of execution and believing in what I’m making is important. I believe in the power of art. I’ve often felt that artists were struck with the ‘Casandra’ curse, being able to see the future and not being able to do anything about it. I just hope that isn’t the case this time.” Living as we do in this precarious era, rife with terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and the continual threat of their imminent use, we are all struck to some degree with parallel, haunting fears. Addressing the theme of governmental use and misuse of power and its devastating results is one way in which artists do something about it. Picasso’s “Guernica” comes immediately to mind, of course, as do the works of Francisco Goya, whose gory images chronicling the atrocities of war Longo has recently revisited. “Goya saw these horrors first-hand,” Longo stated with regard to this, “and he recorded them from primary experience. My approach is more from a contemporary standpoint, a more cerebral aspect of experience. It’s more of a view of death at a distance.” This view is coerced by our media saturated culture. ‘Death at a distance’ is the visual lure that Longo has perfected to hook the unsuspecting viewer into confronting the dialog inherent in his issues. By pitting antagonistic power metaphors in cinematic scale against each other, such as he does with atomic mushroom clouds and cultivated roses, he involves us in a serpentine game of confrontations that can neither be escaped nor won. In “Lust of the Eye,” Longo’s belief in the power of art is evident. Joyce Korotkin |
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