Robert Longo wants you to pay attention. The acclaimed artist has always questioned media images in our daily lives. Just look to his famous 1980s series Men in the Cities – businesspeople writhing and recoiling, counter to conventional white-collar rigidness.
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Now, in the social media era, we’re swarmed by images that hold less and less staying power. Longo’s exhibition “The Acceleration of History,” on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum through Feb. 23, argues that seeing more doesn’t mean understanding more.
Colossal charcoal drawings on paper make up the bulk of the exhibition, inspired by contemporary issues from the last decade – protests, thinning icebergs. Longo’s hyper-realistic depictions look like photographs from afar; it’s only up close that the technical prowess is revealed, along with a slight uncanniness.
That’s because the drawings aren’t reproductions of photos, exactly, but a blend of elements that reflect Longo’s perspective on the subject matter – brooding storms above a crumbling Supreme Court, for example. By taking away the idea of objectivity, he makes you think about your own response to the image more closely.
And charcoal drawing is time-consuming, sometimes taking Longo up to a year to finish a piece (and that’s with the help of assistants). In using the medium, he compels the viewer to spend time with an image like he did. So, we grapple with a turbulent scene of migrants on a raft in a storm in a way that we don’t when scrolling on the phone.
That’s Longo’s ultimate point: to slow down and sit in a moment to truly feel it. It’s perhaps most effectively made in one of the exhibition’s two sculptural works, a large glowing sphere held by industrial beams (Death Star 2018).
The sphere’s made up of bullets, each one representing a gun death in America in 2018. The weight of it is palpable and haunting, and it takes up the whole corridor. To keep moving, you have to get closer.
