ROBERT LONGO with Amanda Gluibizzi In Conversation
This fall, the polymathic artist Robert Longo will see four different solo exhibitions open within a month of each other. At Vienna’s storied Albertina Museum, an institution known for its collection of works on paper and for its drawings in particular, Longo will install a selection of his massive charcoal-on-paper images, building a retrospective of this aspect of his oeuvre. Meanwhile, in London, Thaddaeus Ropac and Pace galleries will simultaneously display Searchers, exhibitions of both large and small-scale charcoals, a video presented at minute and monumental projections, and new Longo “Combines”—25-foot-long works, each of which incorporate drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and photography—titled Untitled (Pilgrim) and Untitled (Hunter). And later in the fall, he will open Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History at the Milwaukee Art Museum, an overview of the last ten years of his artistic production. Longo and I spoke in his studio in August 2024 before he traveled to Europe, in a conversation that ranged from his current shows to his beginnings as an artist, from how he finds and uses images gleaned from the internet to his desire to make work that is immediate—that “happens every time you see it.” This interview is drawn and edited from our exchange.
Amanda Gluibizzi (Rail): Tell us about your upcoming museum shows and Searchers, at Thaddaeus Ropac and Pace in London, which will see you returning to your “Combine” format.
Robert Longo: Every one of my “Combines” has a photograph, sculpture, a painting, a video, and a drawing. It’s all based on Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger’s book. With the “Combines,” the pieces are going backwards into my practice: they have all these different mediums in them, which is interesting, because in the studio, with the drawings, I have complete control. Each “Combine” has only one drawing in it, but the other components were fabricated outside the studio, which was insane. Originally, my “Combines” were built on the idea of montage. You’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, right?
Rail: Yes.
Longo: You know the scene where the monkey throws the bone in the air, and it turns into a spaceship? If you just took those two frames out of the film, what would that look like? We’d see the bone and the spaceship; they were either a juxtaposition of images on top of each other or in sequence. I was very interested in Sergei Eisenstein and the whole idea of montage, how you don’t see merely one image at a time. And when you’re looking at an artwork, you’re also seeing the other viewers, the space in which it is installed, and its surroundings: there’s always something in relationship.
There is no narrative, but there’s an underlying structure that these new “Combines” are based upon, like the idea of the body. The “Combines” being shown at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac are each composed of a head, a chest, a gut, genitals, and legs. And then installed on the wall opposite each “Combine” is a large-scale drawing: a wisteria at Ropac, a peony at Pace—very beautiful flowers that look quite aggressive. Each gallery also has a very small drawing of a hero, Alexei Navalny at Pace and Mahsa Amini at Ropac, based on images from the protests following their deaths. In the lower level of Pace there is going to be a film that’s a year’s project—which we started on July 4—where we pick international images off the internet and we turn them black and white, and we run them at 100 frames per second. The film is programmed to randomly pause for two seconds. At Pace, the film will encompass the entire wall, and meanwhile at Ropac the same video will be shown on a tiny monitor measuring seven inches.
