Robert Longo: ‘Montage Is a Way of Living’ The artist reflects on John Berger’s influence and embracing ambiguity
By Tom Morton
Emerging in late 1970s New York as a key figure in the Pictures Generation, the American artist Robert Longo is celebrated for an expansive, multi-disciplinary oeuvre that interrogates what he has termed the ‘image storm’ that engulfs our daily lives. Perhaps best known within the art world for his monumental, hyper-realistic charcoal drawings, which depict striking, often politically charged imagery gleaned from sources ranging from news reports to the art of the past, Longo has also reached a broad audience through his work as the director of the celebrated music video for New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle (1986), and the cyberpunk action film Johnny Mnemonic (1995), recently re-released in black and white. Tom Morton caught up with him as he prepared for a two-part solo exhibition in London at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac and between his retrospective at the Albertina Museum in Vienna and a survey at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Tom Morton Can you tell me about your two London shows?
Robert Longo Since the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been putzing around. I have a studio in my house in East Hampton and one in California. I experiment, and nobody ever sees what I’m doing. I’d visit this little store that sells shitty old used paperback books, where I found a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972). I remembered this book’s importance to us in the late 1970s, when the whole thing with the Pictures Generation happened. I was thumbing through it, then I went back and watched the television series Berger made on the same subject. I thought, maybe this is a new beginning, a chance to combine Berger’s ideas with those of the filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Eisenstein. I had always been interested in montage. I view these London exhibitions like walking through a gigantic, epic movie. When I first started to produce my original ‘Combines’ (1981–89), I was trying to make frozen movies. These shows in London contain new ‘Combines’.
TM How do these new monumental, five-panel multimedia wall pieces relate to your previous work?
RL I exploded with the ‘Men in the Cities’ (1977–83) series in the late 1970s and early ’80s. They became so successful that they entered the culture in a way that caused me to lose authorship. They became iPod ads, fashion ads. I intended viewers to see ‘Men in the Cities’ as a series of images. I always wanted them to be like a guitar chord in a Sex Pistols song – an abstract symbol. Afterwards, I forced images from different sources together and made these ‘Combines’. Between 1981 and 1989, I made about 25. And then, the end of the 1980s happened, and, I guess, Jeff Koons happened. I got forgotten for a while. I was one of the artists blamed for the ’80’s.
After making Johnny Mnemonic I returned to the studio. I was lost. I had three sons, and I started realizing they were watching television all the time and how much shit they were seeing. I realized I should mediate this phantom empire of images. Pick one image daily to make that image accountable or atone. I did the ‘Magellan’ (1996) series, which contained 366 drawings – one for each day of 1996, a leap year. Now, I think the charcoal drawings have kind of run their course for me, although I’ll probably continue to make them because the world keeps delivering images to me that I have to contend with. So, I wanted to go backwards to go forward. I went back to the ‘Combines’.
