Robert Longo: The Capitol Project

Curated by Kelly Taxter

March 24 to August 25, 2013

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Longo

Robert Longo: The Capitol Project

The American artist Robert Longo was one of three guitarists who played their instruments “tuned discordantly to the same key” for the first live performance of Rhys Chatham’s Out of Tune Guitar (1978). Fellow musician Kim Gordon describes how Chatham’s approach breaks from the structural tenets of classical composition by dirtying its system. He sets it up to fail with musicians who can’t possibly play with each other so are forced to deviate, to play to and against rhythmic discordancies and “varying tensions.” In her essay, “Trash Drugs and Male Bonding,” she writes:

Out of Tune Guitar operates by a strange gravity devoid of an authorial center; rather than following a score or structure players circle each other and never sync. The drummer’s beat is an intermittent grounding device, which reins in as well as lets loose the guitarists’ tangential and divergent lines, allowing for a flux and flow around a surreptitious logic. The push and pull between the individual and the group creates the piece, which holds together by a constant yet unpredictable current. Longo’s participation in this work is

Rhys has set the basic structure on something which is impure, a guitar out of tune. To achieve a perfection or purity of form in music is impossible because there is nothing pure about music except a style that is part of the tradition of classical music and made modern by “new music” composers such as LaMonte Young, Phil Glass and Steve Reich. Once you include the musicians as individuals a certain amount of control is given up and the music can then be allowed to be impure and potentially more exciting. It becomes more like rock music, which often relies on a particular grouping of people setting up varying tensions.

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Study for Hollywood Sign, 2012Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

echoed in his drawing practice, which similarly revolves around an elusive but powerful center and employs a cacophony of information that disarms the artist’s control. He culls, collides, and rearranges mediated images from multiple sources into composites, which he then translates by hand into virtuosically executed charcoal drawings on paper. The Capitol Project juxtaposes an immense multi-panel drawing of the US Capitol Building against eighty-one intimate and immediate studies. Longo’s artworks represent diverse fragments, contained within as well as sprung from a restlessly circulated and widely shared image-archive; surrogated archetypes of war, revolt, beauty, love, sex, power, religion, politics, culture, transgression, and subjugation. The exchange between and amongst these artworks elicits an associative play of symbols. Longo’s sieve-like subjects are unstable containers where meaning gathers, but just as quickly drifts away; meaning is fugitive, it skips and drags from piece to piece, person to person, one to several, none to all.

Upon entering the Museum visitors are engulfed by two groups of studies, which hang closely together across the opposing walls of the Leir Atrium. The Essentials (2000–08) cover the west wall with The Mysteries (2009–13) on the east. A non-linear, grand narrative that hinges on the confluence of becoming and extinction, the artist refers to The Essentials as his creation myth, complete with a libidinal universe and its Godhead: the galaxy, sleeping children, sharks, roses, waves, bombs, and the interior of Sigmund Freud’s apartment one day before he fled the Nazis. Study for Chair in Sunlight, 1938 (2000) depicts a curtained window, through which filtered light washes across an armchair. Beneath the right arm of the chair a small pillow sits on the carpeted ground, and under the left a cliff of darkness extends back into a house whose recesses can only be imagined. It appears in a line with Study for Shark 5 (2008), where the gaping jaws of a great white protrude from the depths of the blackest ocean. A monster wave hangs nearby, Study for Spanish Blood (2002), its swollen, frothy crest set to violently drop. Study for Damien (2006) counters this suspended ferocity; the countenance of a sleeping child’s luminescent head floats in darkness, an orb that seemingly morphs into the adjacent image of Study for Moon (2004). The top half of the satellite glows pearly white, and gives way to absolute nothingness below; an implied void reiterated in Study for French Bomb Test XL (2004), preternatural nuclear plumes that hover above the islands of the Bikini Atoll.

A moment of color appears in Study for Ophelia #8 (2002). A blood-red rose in peak bloom, it manifests all of the competing tensions that pulse throughout these works, between wonder and fear, birth and death, fight or flight, darkness and light. The Mysteries palpably releases the tensions; Longo created his universe and here relinquishes control. Icons of politics, pop culture and sports, symbols of Americana, impossible landscapes, tools for aggression, and objects of desire are represented in these drawings of a populace left to roam, replicate, and self destruct. A trio of works whose relationship is ostensibly irreconcilable hang in proximity: Study of Steve Jobs (2012), the mogul’s face spot-lit as his darkened right hand reaches outwards, palm upturned; Study for Mecca (2010), the height of Hajj seen in an overhead view, the pitch black cubic ka‘ba swarmed by figures drawn of inarticulate dots; and Study for Hollywood Sign (2012), the spine of white block letters stretch across a desert hill, demarcating the land of dreams. These three works allude to belief systems with very different origins, yet each depend upon a shared communion around ideals and idols, hopes for communal salvation that propel the repetitious churning out of celebrities, rituals, and rites.

Art history is also subject to this recycling and reverence. After FK, Mahoning, 1956 (2012), as its title would suggest, a reproduction of Franz Kline’s Mahoning (1956), hangs at the edge of the arrangement. Kline’s most well-known works, of black lines cut across

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Study for Hollywood Sign, 2012Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

worked-over white surfaces, were—while emblematic of Abstract Expressionism—anything but documents of spontaneous action. Each piece was preceded by a series of small studies, and an overhead projection of a chair inspired the artist to abstract the enlarged crossings of legs and supports into his graphic paintings. Longo’s process shares similarities with Kline’s methods; yet more germane is his engagement with the recursive impulse—the insertion of this study circumscribes Longo around Kline and Kline around Longo, a diachronous weave that similarly nets together so many and various subjects. Also important here is the play between representation and abstraction. Longo has often described himself as an abstract artist working representationally, for whom black and white elicits a slippage from reality and the freedom to redefine known quantities.

Proceeding upstairs to the Museum’s South Gallery, Capitol (2013) hangs alone on the longest wall, its placement and dimension reminiscent of a cinema screen. The drawing’s compositional perspective suggests an optical zooming in; the building appears to be moving forward towards the center of the room. This durational effect is further emphasized by the minimal yet dramatic illumination of the artwork, a real-world parallel to the chiaroscuro of the pictorial space. Varying opacities of black create clouded sky and landscape, which blanket and surround the building executed in tonal grays and chalky whites. A differently shaped molding adorns the top of each window, with snippets of tapestry unique to each opening barely visible through glinting glass. The windows are both the most dynamic and mysterious element, wild variations within an otherwise full-frontal, rigid, and predictable architectural structure. This deviation and opacity lends itself to allegory; how a veiled legislative process eliminates personal agency within the political

Study of Capitol (full frame), 2012Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

complex, supposedly built to protect individual’s rights. A paradox physically echoed in the building’s divisive layout, which has the Senate chambers sequestered in the north wing and House of Representatives in the south. Longo’s picture shows a flag limply flying atop the Senate’s wing, signaling that the chamber is in session—and perhaps their impetuousness led by which way the wind blows. Like the building itself, Capitol is watched as well as seen. A drawing, a screen, a surface, it projects meaning but is also projected upon, a spectacular event preceded by the atomized storyboard of studies. The dialogue between those eighty-one works and Capitol is sparked by the starkly contrasting scales and installations, and speaks to the play of dualities pervading Longo’s many bodies of work. The flow of information between one and many, and the exchange between intensely private and universally relevant experiences, represents the central axis around which Longo’s particular investigation of “pictures of pictures” pivots and breaks open.

Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith were the five artists featured in Douglas Crimp’s exhibition Pictures, held at Artist’s Space in 1977. Crimp’s articulation of a significant turn in the uses and meanings of appropriation represents an art historical watershed; yet Longo’s habitual association with the Pictures Generation delimits a more expansive view of his practice. Appropriative strategies are as embedded as they are ever-evolving in the collective tool-kit for analyzing and manipulating culture, employed and adopted by all manner of creative and commercial agents. Several years ago, a friend of the artist’s teenage son asked if the idea for his iconic Men in the Cities (1980–87) series came from the iPod ads of all-black, illustrated figures dancing in isolated fields of solid color. Initially shocked at this confusion of past and present,

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Study of Capitol (full frame), 2012Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

art and advertising, Longo realized the mix-up was in fact indicative of his artworks’ success. While this anecdote is a striking (and not so shocking) example of the dissolute boundary between commerce and art, and proves the nascent investigations of Pictures prophetic, Longo embraces its emancipatory message. His authorship is no longer (if it ever was in the first place) a contingency of the artwork, an image which now circulates within a cultural nexus that belies the specific context for the series. By letting go, he tacitly acknowledges that he owns neither the images he chooses nor the artworks that he makes; that these works spring from, as much as they reside within, everyone.

In describing Monsters (2000–07), drawings of enormous waves and world-famous surf breaks, Longo points out that while the size of a wave is affected by wind and other atmospheric conditions, its shape is determined by the seabed beneath the ocean’s surface. The Monsters imply the presence of a libidinal sub-current, a potent latency that swells to the surface on an epic scale. The waves are ciphers, like all of Longo’s subjects, forms meaningless in themselves yet derivative of something powerful and hidden. Capitol, The Essentials, The Mysteries, are all drawn from the infinite database available in the post-digital age, which has, paradoxically, created a deposit of infinitely repetitious data— a shared archive whose images rhythmically gather critical mass, swell, and then explode, drift, circulate, and replicate. Longo translates the incessant chatter of media into a sustained mediation; he searches for what shapes the swell by reining in the profusion of so many surfaces. The Capitol Project proposes that the eighty-two artworks which comprise the exhibition have always already existed. Longo is an observant chooser, who lifts and presents from the collective image-unconscious, a powerful yet quietly evolving archive that exposes the shared desires, fears, hopes, and losses that give shape to the world we live in.

Kelly Taxter, curator

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Kim Gordon, “Trash Drugs and Male Bonding,” ed. Miriam Katzeff, Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan, Real Life Magazine, Selected Writings and Projects 1979–1994 (New York: Primary Information, 2006), p.46.

Rhys Chatham, The Out of Tune Guitar, musicians: Jules Baptiste, Rhys Chatham, Robert Longo, Wharton Tiers; performance at Tier 3, New York. 1978.

Gordon, “Trash Drugs and Male Bonding,” p. 46.

Robert Longo, The Freud Cycle. 2000.

“Pictures of pictures” colloquially refers to Douglas Crimp’s seminal essay ‘Pictures,” which attempts to define the postmodern image by discussing how artists were using pre-existing photographs as source material for their “original” artwork. See Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October No. 8, Spring 1979, pp. 75–88.

Pictures, curated by Douglas Crimp at Artist’s Space, New York, September 24 to October 29, 1977.

Douglas Eklund, “The Jump, Appropriation and its Discontents,” The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), pp. 119–199. In this essay from the catalogue for his comprehensive and revelatory exhibition on the Pictures Generation of artists, Eklund writes at length on the art of Jack Goldstein, a close friend and contemporary of Longo. Correspondence between Paul McMahon and James Welling shares evidence that Goldstein’s film The Jump instigated a turning of the appropriative tables. The commercial film and television production facility that Goldstein employed to facilitate the realization of his artwork, had lifted the artist’s techniques, amounting to a theft of Goldstein’s artistic images. Eklund writes: “What Goldstein did was to hijack and repurpose this language of spectacle culture into a meditation on the relationship between the fear of arbitrariness and randomness that the artist seeks to control, a meta-examination of how ever-advancing visual technologies are always, at bottom, about providing even more pleasurable, yet narcotizing, scenarios for putting the knowledge of death at bay. That the artist can never escape the culture that ultimately consumes him...was neatly proved for Goldstein before The Jump was even finished. Reporting on activities in New York in a November 1977 letter to James Welling, Paul McMahon announced that Optical House, the special-effects shop where the rotoscoping of the Riefenstahl footage was done, had ‘copied Jack’s ‘Diver’ effect onto a pole vaulter for ABC Olympic coverage for big bucks.’ Real life had made the point of Jack Goldstein’s The Jump.”

The Men in the Cities (1979-1982) series was initially inspired by the final scene of The American Soldier (1970), a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In that scene a character is shot and his body falls slowly, elegantly to the ground. Longo grabbed and copied a still of that graceful death for one of the first drawings in the series. Subsequent images originated with the artist himself. He invited his nineteen-year-old neighbor and friends like Cindy Sherman, Glenn Branca, and Gretchen Bender up to the roof of his South Street apartment and photographed them. They wore their own clothes, and Longo threw tennis balls, rocks, “whatever would cause them to jerk violently.” He wanted them to jump and move around as if they were being “shot or electrocuted or dancing to (their) favorite music.” Quotations from Cindy Sherman and Richard Price, Robert Longo, Men in the Cities (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2009), a catalogue that accompanied an exhibition of the photographs that inspired the drawings.

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The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum advances creative thinking by connecting today’s artists with individuals and communities in unexpected and stimulating ways.

Board of Trustees

Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; Annadurai Amirthalingam, Treasurer/Secretary; Richard Anderson; William Burback; Chris Doyle; Mark L. Goldstein; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Gregory Peterson; Peter Robbins; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine

Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org

Exhibition support provided by Lori and Janusz Ordover, Kirsten and Andy Pitts, and Stuart and Cynthia Smith

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