The Force of Robert Longo’s Epic Blacks An interview with the artist

By Dian Parker

There are many black colors, black within black within black. Couple black with disturbing images like mass shootings or police riots, and black drops down even deeper. A black hole of images. Then take the black and the violent image, and draw it with layer after layer of charcoal, blown to a monumental size where you become aware that this is not a photograph but a work of art. You slow down and then stop, stunned. You are now seeing texture, line, negative space, and the sheer artistry in making these pictures. Pictures that we stare at every day online. You begin to realize these images are alive. These images have consequences. Archetypal images: an atomic bomb, crashing waves, a shark’s mouth, an old-growth tree, a rubber raft of refugees on the open sea—these are Robert Longo’s subjects.

I was honored to meet with Longo in his Soho studio, where he has worked for the past 40 years. Upon entering, Alex, one of his assistants, warns me that anything I set down will be covered in charcoal. Fresh white lilies are placed in vases throughout the studio, a sharp contrast to two huge gray tarps tented over projectors used for composing the images. Black dust covers every surface. On the walls are large works in process, all on paper. Long views—masses of refugees with umbrellas and close-ups—the head of a whale, its eye small yet seeing. As we talk, Longo takes an eraser and tweaks the eye.

In 1970, upon seeing the now iconic image of the Kent State shooting, he realized that he went to high school with the student lying dead on the ground killed by police. Longo was 17. “I became completely motivated,” he tells Observer. A few years later, he became known as one of the Pictures Generation that challenged mass media imagery with their art: Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons and Cindy Sherman, his partner for a number of years who remains his close friend. He made the series Men in the Cities, 1979-83, a sequence of graphite drawings of men and women, smartly dressed, displaying psychotic contortions. Recently, he reenacted these photographs using Nicole Kidman for a feature in W Magazine.

In between solo and group exhibitions, he directed the cyberpunk movie Johnny Mnemonic with Keanu Reeves, written by William Gibson. This was 1992. Longo says that he never wanted to work in Hollywood again. “After that, I was lost. Had no money. My wife at the time said, ‘Go and draw.’” The result was 366 drawings, one a day—it was a leap year—collectively titled Magellan, that “ironically became the vocabulary of everything that comes after.”

Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, Longo grew up on television and movies. After seeing his classmate dead, shot by the cops, “The light went on.” He came to realize that the images we are inundated with every day have weight, but you need to take them in differently. “Drawing is the basis for everything. It’s about looking. My work is for the viewer to reflect on these images. There are consequences of images on the psyche.”

At the Milwaukee Art Museum through February 23 is the exhibition, “Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History,” featuring thirty-three drawings, three sculptures and two videos—work curated by Margaret Andera that represents the past ten years of his career. Longo describes it as “the last decade’s successive shocks to the American enterprise, beginning with Ferguson to the present,” then adds, “Margaret got the work, the emotional state and the psychic toll it can take on you. She is the closest to how my work should be presented. I’m very happy with it.”