The eyes become black sockets, an effect perhaps best captured in Longo’s smoky medium. The refugee boat photo, pulled from a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders/MSF) flyer, is as evocative in its subject matter as in its portrayal: here, Longo’s charcoal shadows the eyes of the raft riders’ faces, some of which are visible to us as they look over their shoulders.
Destroyer magazine photos cracked#
These ones-that had a group of high school students on a gallery visit crowding for a better view-were given ample space to shine: the three-panel refugee boat downstairs, and a pair of dialoguing works upstairs: one of a darkened American flag, the other, positioned on the opposite wall, of a cracked iPhone screen taken in close-up. The exhibit’s pièces de résistance, however, were not necessarily those that engaged with archaic art. Venus seems to have lost agency, and all this at the fault of a technological maneuver that Titian, himself, could not likely have dreamed of-and that Longo, in an exercise of his own agency, has used to reconfigure the artist’s intentions. Two hidden figures, one apparently male, the other female, both adults, emerge in the shadows behind Titian’s finished Venus, and Longo appears to have chosen to emphasize their presence as voyeurs, darkening and thickening the contours that define their faces and groping hands, while fading out the now-vulnerable Venus. By blowing up a copy of Titian’s painting and revealing the layers of lacquered-over sketches behind the visible picture, Longo provides himself with a ghostly template for his charcoal translation-and, unsurprisingly, the rendering of the x-ray in black and white only augments this quality of ghostliness. His fascination with x-rays of famous works of art, as he noted in an interview with Kaleidoscope, stems from his engagement with Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production, and embodies his consistent insertion of himself as an artist into the realm of critical theory. The answer to this question may be best attempted from the starting point of one of the seemingly very apolitical works of the show, Longo’s study of an x-ray of Titian’s Venus with a Mirror (1555). But colors, in an image, function in an analogous way to words in prose. In his case, nuances of color rather than words. The process of translating the (usually color) images to black and white charcoal entails important choices about what aspects of the image will be emphasized in the new form like a linguistic translator, Longo bears the burden of deciding what nuances he will maintain, how he will maintain them, and what facets of the image he will choose to emphasize. The photos of which Longo works all contain messages of some sort-some overtly political, some more ambiguous. Viewing Longo’s work shows the extent to which curating it, let alone creating it, must have been an intellectual exercise. It is clear, from Longo’s latest work-particularly the massive charcoal pieces he has finished since giving that interview-that his later work has much in common with the poststructuralist tendencies of Benjamin and Barthes, (both of whom wrote a fair amount on photography as a medium and practice) than it does with any particular artistic movement to which critics have linked Longo, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. “We are trying to deny death, to look it in the face and say I’m not scared,” he said, speaking on behalf of artists like Hanne Darboven, but also discussing influence from thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. When Musée’s Steve Miller interviewed multimedia artist Robert Longo back in March of 2016, Longo talked a lot about death.
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