Robert Longo: “Cavemen used to draw with my technique. What do Goya, Eisenstein and Longo have in common: the artist’s guide to the exhibition at Garage
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 attractive. Perhaps this effect is achieved due to black and white pictures, which the author carefully writes out using charcoal.
Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York. When talking about himself, the artist never forgets to mention that he loves cinema, comics, magazines and has a weakness for television, which have a significant influence on his work. Robert Longo draws most of the themes for his paintings from what he has seen and read previously. 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 the outlines that come out from under the hand. There is a certain power in this.
Major exhibitions of Robert Longo's paintings are held at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, as well as at the Museum contemporary art in Chicago.
Robert is famous wide audience as a director cult film"Johnny Mnemonic" based on the story by the father of cyberpunk, William Gibson. But he is also an excellent artist - and opens two exhibitions in the capital at once. The “Evidence” project at Garage is dedicated to the work of three authors - Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein and Longo himself, who, as co-curator, ties together this multi-layered story. And the Triumph gallery will show works by artists from his studio.
GUSKOV: Robert, the Garage will feature Eisenstein, Goya, and your works. How did you put it all together?
LONGO (laughs): Well, that’s why museums exist, to show different things together. (Seriously.) In fact, the idea for the exhibition came from Kate Fowle, she is the curator. She knew that these two authors greatly influenced me as an artist. Kate and I talked about them more than once, she understood what was happening, and two years ago she offered me this story.
GUSKOV: What do you all have in common?
LONGO: First of all, we are all witnesses of the time in which we live or lived, and this is very important.
GUSKOV: Are you an equal participant in this story with Eisenstein and Goya?
LONGO: No, Kate gave me the opportunity to influence the exhibition. Usually artists are not included in the project much: curators simply take your works and tell you what to do. And then I came to Russia twice, studied archives and museum collections.
GUSKOV: What do you think about “Garage”?
LONGO (admiringly): This is very unusual place. I wish there was something like this in the States. What Kate Fowle and Dasha are doing in the Garage (Zhukova. — Interview), simply amazing. As for the exhibition, Eisenstein and Goya and I have one important common feature- graphic arts. Eisenstein makes her incredibly beautiful. Kate helped me get to RGALI, where his works are kept. They are very similar to storyboards, but, in principle, they are independent works.
“UNTITLED (PENTECOST)”, 2016.
GUSKOV: Eisenstein's graphics, like Goya's, are rather gloomy.
LONGO: Yes, mostly black and white. Gloominess is also a common characteristic for the three of us. That is, of course, there are other colors in Goya’s paintings, but here we are talking about his etchings. In general, it is very difficult to beg his work for an exhibition. We searched by different museums, but one of Kate's assistants found out that the Museum modern history Russia holds a complete selection of Goya's etchings, which was donated to the Soviet government in 1937 in honor of the anniversary of the revolution. The most wonderful thing is that it was last edition, made from original author's boards. They look so fresh as if they were made yesterday.
GUSKOV: By the way, cinema is also part of your creativity. Did Eisenstein influence you so much that you decided to make films?
LONGO: Absolutely right. I first saw his films when I was in my twenties and they blew my mind. But as an American, it was difficult for me to grasp the political implications. We didn’t really understand how it worked back then. Soviet propaganda. But putting that aspect aside, the films themselves are simply amazing.
GUSKOV: Like Eisenstein, didn’t everything go smoothly with your cinema?
LONGO: Yeah. I certainly didn't have to deal with Stalin when I made Johnny Mnemonic, but all those Hollywood assholes spoiled my blood. They tried their best to ruin the film.
GUSKOV: Damn producers!
LONGO: Can you imagine?! When I started working on the film, my friend Keanu Reeves, who starred in it, was not yet so famous. But then Speed came out and he became a superstar. And now the movie is ready, and the producers decide to make it a “summer blockbuster.” (Indignantly.) Launch it on the same weekend as the next "Batman" or " Toughie" What can I say, my budget was 25 million dollars, and these films had a hundred each. Naturally, Johnny Mnemonic was a box office failure. Moreover, than more money pump up to make a blockbuster, the worse the result. They, of course, could have fired me without any problems, but I stayed and tried to keep about 60 percent of the original idea. And yes, (pauses) I wanted the film to be in black and white.
GUSKOV: You wanted to make experimental cinema, but you were prevented. Are your hands free at the exhibition?
LONGO: Certainly. My idea is that artists record time like reporters. But there's a problem here. For example, my friend has five thousand pictures on his iPhone, and this volume is hard to comprehend. Imagine: you enter a hall where Eisenstein’s films are being shown in slow motion. The cinema is no longer perceived as a single whole, but you can see how perfect each frame is. The same with Goya - he has more than 200 etchings. The audience's eyes would glaze over from so many, so we selected a few dozen that most closely matched the sentiments of me and Eisenstein. It’s the same with my works: Kate made a strict selection.
GUSKOV: A Mass culture had a strong influence on you?
LONGO: Yes. I'm 63 years old and part of the first generation to grow up with television. On top of that, I had dyslexia; I only started reading after I was thirty. Now I read a lot, but then I looked more at pictures. This is what made me who I am. In my school years Protests against the Vietnam War began. One guy I studied with died at the University of Kent in 1970, where soldiers shot students. I still remember the photo in the newspaper. My wife, the German actress Barbara Sukowa, was very scared to discover how stuck these images were in my head.
GUSKOV: How did you come to graphics?
LONGO: It is important to me that work, months of work, have been put into my works, and not just pressing a button. People don't immediately understand that this is not a photo.
GUSKOV: For Eisenstein, his drawings, like his films, were a way of therapy to cope with neuroses and phobias, and curb desires. And for you?
LONGO: I think yes. Among some peoples and tribes, shamans do similar things. I understand it this way: a person goes crazy, locks himself in his home and begins to create objects. And then he goes out and shows art to people who also suffer, and they feel better. Through art, artists heal themselves, and the byproduct is helping others. This of course sounds stupid (laughs), but it seems to me that we are modern healers.
GUSKOV: Or preachers.
LONGO: And art is my religion, I believe in it. At least people are not killed in his name.
Robert Longo, b. January 7, 1953, New York) - American artist, lives and works in New York.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 - cinema, television, magazines and comic books, which greatly shaped his artistic style.
In the late 1970s, Longo performed experimental punk music in New York rock clubs in the project "Menthol Wars" (Robert Longo's Menthol Wars). He is a co-founder of the avant-garde group X-Patsys (together with his wife Barbara Zukova, Jon Kessler, Knox Chandler, Sean Conley, Jonathan Kane and Anthony Coleman).
During the 1980s, Longo directed several music videos, including R.E.M.'s "The One I Love." , Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order and Peace Sells by Megadeth .
In 1992, the artist directed one of the episodes of the series “Tales from the Crypt” entitled “This’ll Kill Ya”. The most famous of director's works Longo - 1995 film
Robert Longo is sometimes called the creator of death. This New York artist covers topics in his works that other artists try to avoid.
Coal, a nuclear explosion and... sharks
Debris charcoal pencil and graphite Longo creates masterpieces that make you feel horrified - three-dimensional images of terrible tornadoes, hurricanes, nuclear explosions. But these are not the artist’s works that are recognized as the most frightening and realistic.
Robert Longo draws sharks with charcoal.
Creepy monsters with open mouths, the powerful curves of shark bodies emerging from the blackness, foreshadowing the death of the jaw - all this fascinates and frightens.
Such terrifying paintings by the master are today in the most famous museum collections and private collections. For his works, Longo even received the legendary Goslar Kaiser Ring award - an alternative Oscar in modern art.
Robert Longo - artist of death
Robert Longo was born in Brooklyn in 1953. WITH early childhood the future "artist of death" was interested in art.
After Longo entered art academy in Texas, but abandoned it and entered the Buffalo College of Art, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts. The shark portraitist began his career with sculpture, but then became interested in painting.
The artist’s first exhibition took place in 1980, but did not bring him much fame. The next year was marked for the artist by the beginning of a new project and growing popularity.
In addition to his works of the apocalypse in the form of an atomic mushroom, the art master is also known for his directorial work “Johnny Mnemonic.”
The shark is the artist's best friend
Robert Longo calls sharks his best models. It was their images that became a sensation in 2007 at the exhibition "PERFECT GODS" - ideal Gods. Sharks, according to Longo, are great creations.
Fans of creativity very often ask the question: why does the author create such “deadly” paintings? Why not landscapes, not portraits? The artist answers briefly: “I paint reality.”
One famous psychiatrist once suggested that Longo had obsessive-compulsive disorder or “fearful thoughts syndrome.”
Robert Longo, according to the doctor, as a result of severe psychological trauma suffered in childhood, suffers from obsessive thoughts and fears of dying from the elements or from the teeth of a huge shark.
The artist resolutely rejected these assumptions, but confirmed that as a child he actually witnessed a big car accident, when a school bus collided with a car in Brooklyn.
In addition, Robert Longo does not deny that by nature he is a pessimist and “a terrible melancholic who loves to leaf through graphic comics or watch BBC News reports of tragic explosions.”
It is also known that the artist is terrified of large amounts of water and has an incomprehensible interest in photographs of people tortured after shark attacks. That’s why the sharks in Longo’s paintings look so realistic.
There is something in common between sharks, hurricanes and nuclear explosions, the artist assures. “All of these things are unexpected, all of them are amazingly beautiful, and all of them do not bode well.
And these words are full of truth.
Robert Longo Untitled (Guernica Redacted, Picasso’s Guernica, 1937), 2014 Charcoal on mounted paper 4 panels, 283.2x620.4 cm, overall Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London. Paris. Salzburg
Your project in Russia is closely related to archival work. What attracts you to archives?
Everything is simple here. I like the opportunity to immerse myself in the material and learn more about it than others. The archives of the Museum of Modern History were magnificent: these long corridors with hundreds of boxes - it was like being in a cemetery. You approach one of the boxes and ask the caretaker: “What’s here?” They answer you: “Chekhov.” Of course, I was most interested in the works of Eisenstein and Goya. The works of the second were a gift from the Spaniards to Russia in 1937.
I immediately remember your exhibition in 2014 in New York, where you redrew charcoal paintings of the great American abstract expressionists. Both now and then, these exhibitions, on the one hand, are group, but on the other, your personal ones.
IN Gang of Cosmos I researched post-war period, Very interesting period American history. I was fascinated by the difference between a brush stroke and a charcoal stroke. You could say I translated the works of Pollock, Newman, Mitchell into black and white. Of course, I took canonical works that are more than just works, since they have their own context around them, which interested me no less. Abstract expressionism appeared after the world destroyed itself and rebooted itself in euphoria. The country had hope then, but in 2014, perhaps, there was less hope.
In “Testimony” you, Goya and Eisenstein become co-authors of one exhibition.
This is Kate Fowle's idea, not mine. She came to me with this idea because these two artists have always fascinated me. I in no way put myself on the same level as them, they are a great inspiration, history. Interestingly, Eisenstein was very fond of Goya. And Goya at one time created storyboards, although cinema had not yet been invented. Goya and Eisenstein were engaged in surveying time. I feel that as an artist, I act as a reporter talking about modern life. Perhaps today it is easier to do this, because the artist does not depend as much on the state as Eisenstein, or as Goya on religion. But we focused primarily on the beauty of the image. For example, they excluded texts from films so as not to get hung up on the plots.
Has your sense of time changed over 55 years of creativity?
Historically, today is a more complex, frightening and exciting time than ever before. The same Trump is an idiot, a moron and a fascist who jeopardizes security the whole country, if elected. I'm not a political artist and I don't want to be one, but sometimes I have to.
Yes, for example, you have a painting of the Ferguson riots.
When I first saw photos from Ferguson in the newspapers, I didn't believe it was the USA. I thought maybe it was Afghanistan or Ukraine? But then I took a closer look at the police uniform and realized: this is happening right under my nose. It was a shock.
For me, dystopia has always been associated with the 1980s, which I missed. But according to films and books, it seems that it was then that the dark future in which we are beginning to live now was predicted.
Everything changed on September 11, 2001, it is now a completely different world. The world has become more global, but on the other hand, more fragmented. Do you know what the main problem USA? This is not a nation or a tribe, it is sport Team. And a sports team always wants to win. Our big problem is that we don't know how to live without constant victories. This can lead to disaster because the stakes are always high.
Coal is good for depicting a dystopian future.
Yes, but I always leave a degree of hope in my work. In the end, a work of art is always about the beauty that the artist sees in real world. I try to make people think when they look at my paintings. In a sense, my paintings are created to slightly freeze the endless conveyor of images that appear every second in the world. I try to slow it down, turning the photograph into a charcoal painting. And besides, everyone draws - here you are talking to me on the phone and probably scribbling something on a napkin - there is something basic and ancient in these lines, and I contrast this with photographs taken sometimes in a second - on a phone or a point-and-shoot camera. And then I spend months drawing one image.
You once said that you create paintings from dust because you use coal.
Yes, I love dust and dirt. And I like to realize that they painted like this cave people. That is, my technology is one of the oldest in the world. Prehistoric.
You love antiquity so much and at the same time you made the cyberpunk Johnny Mnemonic - something radically different from your main passion.
Well you noticed. The irony is that the Internet has become the same caves where people have fun in a primitive way.
Do you remember the time without the Internet? How it was?
Oh yes, that time. Interestingly, the Internet has allowed me to find images that in the old days would require me to subscribe to magazines or go to libraries. The Internet gave me the opportunity to get to any picture. It made me think about the volume of images that appear in the world every second.