KEANU REEVES: So, Robert, hello!

ROBERT LONGO: Hey, brother. I haven’t talked to you in a while.

REEVES: I know. There’s a lot of water under that bridge.

LONGO: I keep on hearing friends of mine say, “I saw him walking around the street the other day.” I say, “I know. He’s shooting a movie here.”

REEVES: I was working in the city and I could never get away. It was depressing.

LONGO: That’s okay. I’ve been working in the city too. [laughs]

REEVES: Since this is a public conversation—for those of you out there who are not familiar with Robert Longo’s work, please pause and go look at it. Be astounded and inspired and come back. [Longo laughs] Okay, now you’ve checked out Robert Longo’s work. So you’ve got this show coming up; you’re doing new pieces that are a little different.

LONGO: You know, I read recently that Jackson Pollock used to have people like Robert Motherwell write his responses for interviews and stuff like that. I kept thinking, “Who should write mine?” I kept on thinking Louis C.K. or Katt Williams or something. [laughs] Because I’m so immersed in this project right now that it’s a mindfuck for me to talk about it. At Metro Pictures there’s going to be an exhibition of black-and-white, charcoal translations of paintings by 12 abstract expressionist painters, ranging from de Kooning and Pollock to Frankenthaler, Mitchell, and Kline.

REEVES: Fuck yeah.

LONGO: I’m going to show them without the glass, so you really will see the drawings. In a weird way, I keep thinking about McLuhan’s “medium is the message” or something like that. It’s a show about these paintings, but it’s also about drawing. And it’s a really bizarre process of translating them into black and white. What’s really wild is that I got the permission from all the estates to do these drawings.

REEVES: That’s a great nod, to have the respect of these estates. I know that you do that—I’ve seen other pieces where you’ve taken the works of the masters and done these translations.

LONGO: Those I usually just steal. [laughs]

REEVES: Yes, but the quality of the theft, the caliber of the artists you go for …

LONGO: I’m an image thief.

REEVES: Well, it isn’t exactly stolen, but I think that’s a cool nod.

LONGO: It’s bizarre doing this translation thing. I’ve been reading a lot and talking to curators and art historians—I even hired an art historian at one point to work with me. One of the interesting things I discovered is that in the late 19th century, painters actually had black-and-white copies made of their own paintings. They chose it even over photographs because they knew the photographic medium would distort their work. And this translation process becomes a highly subjective thing—turning reds and blues into black-and-whiteness. It’s really bizarre for me.

REEVES: You’re doing some weird archival reclamation process, a simulation reinterpretation.

LONGO: It’s also become a combination of archaeology and forensics. Like, how long does it take to make a brushstroke versus how long does it take to draw a brushstroke? It’s weird making a drawing of painting. I start to realize that charcoal is this incredibly fragile material. I’m making images of paintings out of dust.

REEVES: I know that you have a bunch of art history in that noggin of yours. As you’re trying to re-create these brushstrokes and gestures and curves and straight lines, does it communicate anything to you?

LONGO: Oh, totally. Sometimes it becomes channeling, like, for instance, Joan Mitchell’s painting is so violent. It’s like a knife fight. And you can tell how tall she was. You realize that she didn’t really reach the top of the painting so well, so most of the action is right in the middle. Or you can see that she’s right-handed because the strokes come from the right. You can feel how the strokes go because there’s a weight in the brushstroke where most of the paint starts and it tapers off. You can experience those aspects of it. It’s also weird because the drawing process is so very different than painting. And I’m sort of deconstructing the process of what marks came first, what came later. I’m basically trying to understand abstraction and going back to this point in American history, which is the post-World War II euphoria of leaving behind Europe and trying to be free. Every aspect of the image is interesting to me to dissect and understand.

REEVES: And what’s at the second gallery where you’ll be showing at the same time?

LONGO: That’s Petzel Gallery. It’s a very different show but there is a connection. At Metro Pictures, there will be a small history drawing based off a photograph done by this guy, Russell Rudzwick, who is, like, 72 years old and lives in Queens. He took a photograph of a horse called Black Jack that walked in the procession of JFK’s funeral. Black Jack had a military saddle with riding boots backwards in the stirrups. This image becomes a bridge between the two shows because the abstract expressionist paintings start in 1948 and the last painting is an Ad Reinhardt—a black-on-black painting from 1963. So that’s the connecting bridge. The Petzel show will have a huge, 17-foot-tall, black American flag sculpture that’s embedded in the floor. It looks like a sinking ship, and it’s made out of wood and wax. In another room will be a gigantic drawing of the Capitol, about 40 feet long. And in another will be a detailed drawing of Black Jack’s saddle … It’s very Americana, dare I say. It’s a bit like Moby-Dick, which is something I’ve been really interested in lately. It’s like the flag becomes the Pequod, the Capitol becomes the whale, and the saddle basically becomes the coffin that Ishmael floats on at the very end when the ship sinks.

REEVES: Call me Ishmael.

LONGO: It just hit me today that I’m doing all of this epic stuff at this point in my life. Like my God Machines show [2011, large-scale charcoal drawings of Mecca, St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Wailing Wall]. I’ve been dealing with these epic images, and I realized all of a sudden that I grew up in the age of epics. The movies that really had a huge influence on me were Spartacus or Ben-Hur or Cleopatra or Taras Bulba or The Ten Commandments. You can’t escape your roots.

REEVES: And now it’s not only drawings but also a sculpture.

LONGO: Well, my degree was in sculpture. I always think that drawing is a sculptural process. I always feel like I’m carving the image out rather than painting the image. I’m carving it out with erasers and tools like that. I’ve always had this fondness for sculpture.

REEVES: When was the last time you did a sculpture? I can’t remember.

LONGO: I did them in the ’80s and the ’90s. I think the last really big sculpture I did was that big bullet ball with, like, 18,000 copper and brass bullets on it [Death Star, 1993].

REEVES: That was probably two decades ago, wasn’t it?

LONGO: Yeah. It’s weird to start realizing how many different artists one has been … I’ve been an artist for, like, 37 years.

REEVES: That’s epic!

LONGO: I’m really lucky, man.



REEVES: The installation for two shows at once must be a lot of work.

LONGO: The great thing about doing a show in New York is that you can work until the night before. [laughs] Right now, we’ve just started the Pollock piece, which is totally insane because I figure I’ll finish it right before the show. It’s funny, I found out that Jackson Pollock named one of his dogs Ahab. It’s kind of perfect.

REEVES: The synchronicities keep coming.

LONGO: [laughs] I know.

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/robert-longo

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