Robert Longo's Courage

Robert Longo, Untitled, from the series Men in the Cities, 1980

This week I am posting excerpts from Longo’s Logos, an essay from 1990.  It begins with the thought that the “institutional critique” offered by so many artists is an empty charade, a kind of scam, because critiques of that sort get art-world traction only by incorporating the values of the institutions they pretend to call into question: art history, art criticism, the art market.  To put it another way: artists praised for their seemingly courageous attacks on the establishment are taken seriously only if they covertly play along with the targets of their attacks.  Nothing bores me more than a phony radical, and so I was glad to see that one artist, Robert Longo, refused to play the radical game. 

These excerpts begin with a couple of paragraphs introducing the idea that, once an artist is recognized, he or she becomes an art-world institution.       

I believe that art as we know it—art as construed by the institutions of the art world—is capable of representing in an effective way only one institution, that of the artist’s public self. Moreover, I believe that the chore of representing that sort of self has supplied Western art with its chief purpose for over two centuries. I am not saying that all art since the late 1700s is inherently expressionist; nor, when I talk of the artist’s self, do I mean some ineluctably inward source of pure creativity or original genius. On the contrary, I mean something thoroughly outward: an institution similar in many ways to the entity known as a corporation: a nonperson that bears a person’s name but for the sake of clarity must never be confused with that person.

We ought to take it as axiomatic that every artist who has come to our attention is, for all practical purposes, an institutional figure. When an artist achieves institutional status, his or her self aggrandizes its scale and takes on the impersonality of an emblem. This institutional version of the self still displays personal traits, but they are now formulized, even conceptualized. In this incarnation, the artist finds that he or she can deal with a museum or gallery as one institution to another—that is, from a position that permits at least the illusion of equality. I find that the artists best at exploiting their institutional status are usually the least likely to acknowledge it.

In the rest of this essay (online at artforum.com), I make the case that Robert Longo is the sole exception to this rule of non-acknowledgment.  The essay concludes as follows:

Longo acknowledges his institutional status with amazing frankness. His large works require many collaborators; by listing their names on gallery walls, in formats that recall movie credits, he invites us to see him as an art-world equivalent to a Hollywood director or maybe producer. He is the impresario of performance works on an operatic scale. He has directed music videos for commercial broadcast and a mini feature movie called Arena Brains, 1987. Elaborating his public image with an extravagance that carries him beyond the art world, Longo makes it easy to see him and, by extension, artists in general as counterparts to those who generate self-images in the realms of entertainment, advertising, and politics. He makes it difficult to deny that the successful artist must be a public figure, an institution enmeshed with other institutions. He makes it impossible to see any artist, but especially him himself, as transcending the limits of institutional status. Despite Marcel Duchamp’s deflationary ironies, we still expect that ascent to a realm of aesthetic purity; and we still grant an otherworldly sort of authority to artists who create the illusion of achieving that upward redemption.  Longo is important because he is the only member of his generation who uses all the resources of his art to block the transcendental ascent and thus risk his authority as an artist.

Robert Longo, All You Zombies: Truth Before God, 1986. The Whitney Museum of American Art

This is remarkably courageous. Sometimes, in fact, Longo seems foolhardy, the immoderacy of his work suggesting a correspondingly overweening personality. But not even his most grandiose adventures—his struggles to make a Hollywood movie, or to crank up the slickness of his performance art to the level of Miami Vice—exhausts his surplus of self-consciousness. Always he preserves his irony, his understanding that claims to truth, even his own, are exercises in rhetoric. Generating instability and doubt, his extravagance is a thoroughly deliberate form of skepticism. Longo has assumed the public posture of an anti-institution. By advertising his institutional power instead of suppressing it, he has undermined institutional assumptions more successfully than the run of artists who pantomime confrontation with the art-world establishment. He has chosen to survive by giving institutional clout to unaccountability. Where is Longo in his art? Most artists provide the delusory comfort of a plausible answer to questions like that. Longo doesn’t. Joker and the hideous, ludicrous statue at the center of All You Zombies: Truth before God, 1986, are at once Longo’s self-representations and his denials that the self, public or private, can be adequately represented.

By flaunting the artifice of his success, the success of his artifice, Longo reproaches the tendency to take emblems of institutional power as signs of institutional legitimacy. The violence of his reproach recalls the times in this country and abroad when the problem of legitimizing and emblematizing new institutions was fresh. On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress of the United States published the Declaration of Independence and called for an official seal of the republic. So arguable were the notions of legitimate representation that no design found approval until 1782. Similarly, the declaration of the French Republic in 1792 prompted long, subtle debates about the emblem of republican sovereignty (Marianne or Hercules?), and the discussion’s turns had direct links to political events. It’s true that even then some were annoyed by the necessity of taking a serious view of power’s self-representations. A writer of the time remarked that “the people should become accustomed to see in a statue only stone and in an image only canvas and colors.” Our weariness with the politics, the uses, of representation has steadily increased in the last two centuries. Today a corporation can change its name and overhaul its repertory of emblems in a matter of months and meet no resistance, suffer no skepticism. Emblems are not so troublesome, so ambiguous, when few are willing to give form an emblematic reading.

To see in an image only canvas and colors: this radical solution to the problems of representing institutions has an echo in the literalism that entranced the New York art world during the 1960s. There is a variant on literalism in the tendency to elide power and its representations, as if, for example, the public image of an artist were simply that artist, wholly and innocently manifest. Looking at art, we sometimes commit a similar error by taking the expression of a self as the presence of that self. During the 1980s, appropriationist artists attacked Schnabelesque claims to the power of absolutely true self-expression. Yet with the traditional elegance of its images and its safely stylish allusions, much appropriation art makes a covert claim to the originality and authenticity that it denies to self-expressive artists. And appropriationism’s argumentative works, critiques in the form of paintings and photographs, have themselves become representations of art-world power. It is tempting to acquiesce to appropriationism’s claims to truth, if for no better reason than to suppress any doubts we may have about these images. In suppressing doubt, however, we choose, willfully, to accept an exercise of power as a revelation of truth. Longo’s agitated, anti-institutional presence recommends that we not do that.

Robert Longo, Black Flag, 1990

Recently Longo made a series of large charcoal drawings of the American flag. Like the figures in Men in the Cities, Longo’s flags are frozen in twisted configurations. Like them, too, the flags are ambiguous: do they flap in the wind or do they lie crumpled on the ground? Men in the Cities displayed the harsh blacks and whites of film noir stills, and Longo has likewise rendered the flag’s red, white, and blue in shades of black. Is it soiled? Charred? Its darkness may be nocturnal. If so, the artist gives us no reliable clues about the night enveloping the flag. It is certain only that these drawings enlarge the scale of the puzzles posed by Men in the Cities.

Those were images of individuals schematized, given the look of logos, by a corporate or class uniform. Longo seemed to feel a detached sympathy with their contortions, which he varied obsessively. At the very least, he raised the possibility that an artist in the ’80s—himself, in particular—has some resemblance to an institutional functionary. Now, he wraps himself not in a flag but in the aura of doubt generated by a role that every American is assigned but few take the trouble to play, that of citizen. What is it to be a member of the American republic? The Men in the Cities at least enjoyed the certainties, such as they are, that a professional persona supplies. But citizenship transcends professionalism, defining itself on a plane so elevated and so littered with damaged clichés that meaning evaporates as soon as it is promulgated. With American culture thoroughly professionalized, American citizenship is an empty notion.

I don’t think this is the emptiness Jasper Johns embraced with his paintings of the American flag. With careening recklessness, Longo’s flags signal his willingness to play—and to parody, with brutal self-consciousness—a role that he and the art world have conspired to impose upon him, that of the decade’s archetypal young American. The crumpled flags celebrate the vacuity of this role. Their residual stars and stripes signal that, vacuous or not, the role still exercises power. On the subject of power and the inscrutability of its effects, the near illegibility of these images supports almost any argument we would like to make, and yet one point emerges clearly from the darkness that the flags generate. By defining Longo’s institutional self in terms of citizenship, not of some professional activity, these images claim for that self an outrageously grand scale. The claim to grandeur is ironic, but not entirely so, for the flags force us to see Longo’s public persona against the backdrop of history—not the specialized chronicle of ’80s styles and art-world maneuvers, not art history in general, but history itself. Longo’s sense of himself as an American changes his citizenship from a matter of happenstance that must be accommodated to the burden of a fate that challenges us to live it consciously.