ROBERT LONGO - Jonathan T D Neil

ROBERT LONGO

19_LONGO_HORIZONTAL:Layout 1 21.03.11 11:46 Seite 1

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GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC.PARIS 21 MARCH – 23 APRIL 2011

ROBERT LONGO


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UNTITLED (ST. PETER’S) 2011, CHARCOAL ON MOUNTED PAPER, 8 PANELS, 156 x 300 INCHES

SANS TITRE (SAINT-PIERRE) 2011, FUSAIN SUR PAPIER MONTÉ, 8 PANNEAUX, 396.2 x 762 CM



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DETAIL UNTITLED (ST. PETER’S)

DÉTAIL SANS TITRE (SAINT-PIERRE)



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UNTITLED (WAILING WALL) 2011, CHARCOAL ON MOUNTED PAPER, 5 PANELS, 120 x 325 INCHES

SANS TITRE (MUR DES LAMENTATIONS) 2011, FUSAIN SUR PAPIER MONTÉ, 5 PANNEAUX, 304.8 x 825.5 CM



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DETAIL UNTITLED (WAILING WALL)

DÉTAIL SANS TITRE (MUR DES LAMENTATIONS)



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UNTITLED (MECCA) 2010, CHARCOAL ON MOUNTED PAPER, 9 PANELS, 166 x 252 INCHES

SANS TITRE (LA MECQUE) 2010, FUSAIN SUR PAPIER MONTÉ, 9 PANNEAUX, 421.6 x 640.1 CM



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DETAIL UNTITLED (MECCA)

DÉTAIL SANS TITRE (LA MECQUE)



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01.

“To have fidelity to the image.” This is how Robert Longo recently described the way he thought about making the kindof art that he does. It’s a statement that requires greater attention now that this trilogy of works, what I understand asthe God Machines proper, take as their subject the holiest sites – St. Peter’s in Rome, the Western Wall in Jerusalem,the Ka’ba in Mecca – of the globe’s three dominant monotheistic religions, all of which, at one time or another, havemanifested iconoclastic policies toward some kind of imagery and demanded utter fidelity toward another.2

But what does it mean “to have fidelity to the image”? It is not at all self-evident what the relationship betweenthe two critical terms, “fidelity” and “image,” might be. Notice too that it is “fidelity to the image” and not “fidelityto an image.” The latter is more apposite to the worship of icons, for which the indefinite article is key, because theimage, in this case, is merely a meaning-bearing token (picture) of a certain meaning-securing type (Jesus or Maryor the Saints). The definite designation of “the” image, however, means that it is the token in which Longo is inter-ested – or rather, to which he is committed, for this is the sense in which “to have fidelity” makes sense. But whatdoes it mean to be committed to a token?

In one sense, it means a commitment to the simulacrum, another critical term that has been central to theassessment of Longo’s art since the 1980s. What we might call the vulgar understanding of the simulacrum describesit as a “copy without original,” which is similar to a “token without a type.” But where the former relationship is governedby the logic of resemblance, the latter is governed by the logic of abstraction. Copies are meant to look like theiroriginals. Tokens are meant to instance their types. Yet what is salient about tokens is that they are concrete partic-ulars, whereas types are abstract generalizations. For example, we are each of us tokens of a type of genus, homo,and species, sapiens. Homo sapiens is an abstraction of taxonomy; you and I are not. So to be committed to a token isto be committed to a concrete particular rather than to the abstract type it instances.

The first understanding of the simulacrum as a concrete particular, that is as a token rather than a copy, be-longs to Lucretius, the Epicurean poet of the first century BCE, who described simulacra as composed of thin “films”of invisible particles that “emanate” from things to make them sensible. As examples he offers their scent, theirheat, and their appearance. Lucretius’s commitment to atomism ensured that such “images” – eidola in Greek;simulacra in Latin – were granted status just as real as the things that “emitted” them, an understanding of theimage which mooted any distinction between a copy and its original. Even images that are “spontaneously produced”or “self-created,” such as our dreams, or the happenstance appearance of “giants” in the clouds of the sky, wouldqualify as simulacra. For Lucretius then there are things that are images and things that emit them, each being

FIDELITY TO THE IMAGE: ROBERT LONGO’S GOD MACHINES1

Jonathan T. D. Neil


equally real and essential to “the nature of things,”3 because each composed of atoms and neither standing in aposition of primacy to the other.

Lucretius’s “physics” of the image thus offered a “reversal” of Platonism, where simulacra appear as mere shadowsthat distract us from the true light of Ideas.4 In Plato’s cave, these simulacra are the first false idols. Not so with Lu-cretius, for whom it is exactly this lopsided valuation, this thumb on the scale that ups the ontological value of ab-stractions over appearances, which sets in motion a whole complex of its own falsities, belief in the Gods chief amongthem. The ontological status of the image thus determines the kind of faith (true or false) that one can have in it, andso stands at the heart of the matter of fidelity.

02.

Longo’s images are real in the way that Lucretius’s simulacra are real. To speak of them in this sense is to updateassessments that understand Longo’s work as engaged with simulations of a reality long felt to be lost to its instru-mentalized mediations and their ideological masters.5 There can be little doubt that Longo’s God Machines step into arhetorical territory anxious over a reality similarly thought to have been cast adrift by forces – social, economic, envi-ronmental – upon which it is increasingly difficult to gain purchase. It is a territory dominated in equal measure byreligious fervor fed by anxieties over an increasingly secularized, technologized, and capitalized world. Like all religionsand related spiritual dispositions, the Abrahamic religions are technologies of the self, but they are also some of theearliest and most distributive technologies of the social, which may account for their attraction in times of unrest.

It remains true of the God Machines that they cannot claim to index reality. They do not offer a causal visual analogueof some singular time or place at which point some photograph was snapped, some single image captured. Longo’sGod Machines can only be conceived as iconic assemblages of myriad such images, now readily available from anynumber of digital resources from which the artist pulls. In this the pictures exceed any sense that they are merelyphoto-based. Other photographic paradigms won’t do either: Longo’s works can be conceived of neither as analog su-perpositions – in the manner, say, of Francis Galton’s criminal “types” – nor as digital composites – in the manner, say,of Jeff Wall’s photographic “paintings.” Rather, the God Machines figure an ever growing population of images that can-not be averaged or collaged because even in their difference there is no distinguishing between them at the level ofthe visual. Like Lucretius’s atoms (the minimum thinkable) they are there: the multiple perspectives, the different timesof day, the changing frames, the people posing or moving through, the contingencies of atmosphere (floaters), theaccidents of exposure (flares). Though they may lie below the threshold of vision, none of these elements, these atomsof imagery (the minimum sensible), lie below the surface of the picture, because they simply are that surface; they com-pose its reality the way cells compose a body. Indeed, Roland Barthes, in invocation of the Mandylion, will compare thephotographic image to a “skin.” And like that acheiropoieton, the God Machines’ authorship belongs as much to theseimages as to the sources from which they “emanate” and the hands that fix their appearance.6

This photographic comparison is necessary even if it appears to sidestep the question of material or medium. Ifthis is important, the fact that these are charcoal drawings on mounted paper, then it is on the order of its analogywith the atomic, with making palpable, or sensible, the atomist or particulate nature of the image and its reality. Thesense of the sublime that attends the experience of much of Longo’s work issues from the confrontation with thisreality, specifically the work’s demonstration of a control that is exerted over the unruliness, the dirtiness, the


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fundamental excessiveness of charcoal, a material that must be recognized as insistent upon its own dissolution,its own tendency toward decoherence, disintegration, atomization. In Kantian terms, countering this insistence,impressing upon the viewer the achievement of control in the face of, for instance, the seeming impossibility of main-taining so many organized zones of unsullied white paper (Longo’s work is at its best, at its most sublime, when thiscontrast is pushed to its limits), correlates to those moments when, for example, one apprehends or grasps the conceptof infinity, or when one witnesses the inhuman force of a fifty-foot wave, but from the safety of the bluffs, and soremains in full possession of one’s autonomous and self-legislating faculties, at once beautiful and terrible, whichthen stand as equal to the experience itself.

Any subscription to these works’ shear size cannot account for such an experience on its own, particularly whenwe consider that their scale is in fact quite small; like most photographs, the God Machines are diminutions of theactual places they picture. Yet the pictures are undeniably large. They tend at once to envelope their observers andto “distance” them according to pictures’ own internal structures. Recourse to a cinematic language would not beinappropriate here, insofar as Untitled (Mecca) appears as an aerial establishing shot, Untitled (Wailing Wall) as amedium shot, and Untitled (St. Peter’s) as a wide angle point of view. But the integrity of this visual language beginsto ramify under the pressure of the image as aggregate, as assemblage. The perspectivally distorted piers of St. Peter’s,the electrified distant landscape of Mecca, the exaggerated growth of the caper bushes in Wailing Wall stand onlyas the pictures’ most apparent “liberties.”

It is important to stress again that these are not liberties that Longo has taken; they are freedoms that appertainto the reality of the image itself.

03.

At times, photographs function in the way that religious icons do, and vice versa. They both point to some prior placeor personage, to some prior moment in time, securing a connection between that past and the present moment inwhich they endure; and they point at us, they interpolate us or sometimes “prick” us (Barthes again), forging anattachment between us and the image, one on the order of a promise, as if to say “this will have been.”

Not all photographs do this, but neither do all icons (or religious artifacts in general). These images can chooseus only if we are somehow already open to being chosen or are already potentially subject to such a choice. One’sfidelity to images then marks a commitment which is not imposed so much as it is claimed against the linearity ofhistorical time. The possibility of such a claim is secured by the image understood as “anachronic,” a concept thatart historians Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood have recently offered not only as a means to capture a centralconceptual paradox at work during the late medieval and early Renaissance period, when it held “that a materialsample of the past could somehow be both an especially powerful testimony to a distant world and at the same timean ersatz for another, now absent artifact,” but also to challenge the “linear and causal temporality” that shapesand dominates most histories of visual artifacts today. In this Nagel and Wood stand their “anachronic” challenge inline with other heterodox conceptual tools, such as Aby Warburg’s “nachleben” or Walter Benjamin’s “constellations,”which are inconceivable outside of the capacities and paradoxes of the photographic image.7

With the God Machines we can begin to see or sense this anachronic status of the image, because in these worksit is finally “pictured” there. Each of these sites became more or less fixed in its current state between the sixteenth


and seventeenth centuries. By “fixed” I mean not just in the sense of appearance – Michelangelo’s crossing andMaderno’s nave for St. Peter’s were finished by the first decades of the seventeenth century; the Ka’ba stands todaylargely as it was rebuilt in 1629 after having been damaged in a flood8 – but perhaps more importantly in the senseof historically “fixed,” as when the Western Wall’s significance as a place of worship grew substantially in the firsthalf of the sixteenth century when Jerusalem’s new Ottoman rulers introduced favorable policies toward its Jews.Prior to that time, the buildings and artifacts, the places as artifacts, could and indeed did undergo all manner oftransformations without fear of compromising their claim to “origins.” Though once the modern age settles into aconception of its present as no longer conjoined with but rather as somehow radically distinct from its past, thesesites harden into images of themselves, which now demand their different commitments, different fidelities.The temporal “hesitation” (Nagel and Wood again) of the anachronic, then, like the simulacrum for Lucretius, col-lapses or suspends the distinction between original and copy.9 And it is just this “hesitation,” this uncertainty, thatunderwrites the very possibility of fidelity to the image. To put this in more secular terms, consider how David Humeframes fidelity as a “promise” against the background of a set of shared social conventions and civic commitments.It is only in such a framework of mutual regards, of being seen to make and hold to such commitments, that onecan even begin to understand the possibility that a promise might be broken or not carried through.10 Between thepromise and its fulfillment lies the hesitation of fidelity, a choice between acting on one’s commitments – carryingthrough – or not.11

With hesitation, “ultimately, it is about a representation that responds to the contingency of world situations.Instead of representing [this] world plastically, hesitation provides multiple and overlapping sketches of all possibleworlds.”12 Robert Longo’s God Machines figure this overlap, this contingency against the background of a hardeningor fixing of the image. Even the paradox of the title, “God Machines,” opens onto this contingency: regardless of whatPascal may have thought, one cannot be compelled to believe, automatically as it were, just as one does not, followingLucretius, “believe” in reality – one simply lives it. Fidelity then emanates from one’s self; it is itself an image, asimulacrum that issues into the world.

1 The author wishes to thank Robert Longofor the opportunity to offer his thoughts,however quickly marshaled, on this currentbody of work, and he would like to dedicatethis essay to the artists who work withRobert to make that work what it is. Theirsis a true fidelity to the image.2 To be clear, when I refer to Longo’s God Ma-chines, I will be speaking of just this trilogyof works and no others.3 Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura [Onthe Nature of Things], trans. Martin FergusonSmith (Cambridge: Hackett, 2001), Book IV.4 See Gilles Deleuze, “The Simulacrum andAncient Philosophy,” in The Logic of Sense(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

5 See Hal Foster’s, “The Art of Spectacle,” Artin America (April, 1983).6 On the photograph as “emanation” and“skin” and “acheiropoietos,” see RolandBarthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard(New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 80-2.7 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood,Anachronic Renaissance (New York: ZoneBooks, 2010), 31 & 33. Emphasis in the original.8 See Francis E. Peters, Mecca: A Literary His-tory of the Holy Land (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994).9 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 18& 371n.26. The authors adopt the concept of“hesitation” from Josef Vogl. See the latter’sÜber das Zaudern (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2007).

10 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature:A Critical Edition, eds. David Fate Norton andMary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press,2007).11 In this context, we must be careful not toconfuse this promise with the promises ofreligion as such, whose commitments to ori-gins to the exclusion of the contingencies ofhistory produces only an empty fidelity. SeeAlain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. OliverFeltham (New York: Continuum, 2007).12 Maaike Lauweart, “Interview with JosefVogl,” Maaike Lauweart (blog), accessedMarch, 2, 2011, http://maaikelauwaert.wordpress.com/interview-with-joseph-vogl-english.


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ROBERT LONGO - Jonathan T D Neil