19_LONGO_HORIZONTAL:Layout :46 Seite 1 ROBERT LONGO

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5 ROBERT LONGO GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC.PARIS 21 MARCH 23 APRIL 2011

6 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, x 762 CM 6

8 DETAIL UNTITLED (ST. PETER S) DÉTAIL SANS TITRE (SAINT-PIERRE) 8

10 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, x CM 10

12 DETAIL UNTITLED (WAILING WALL) DÉTAIL SANS TITRE (MUR DES LAMENTATIONS) 12

14 UNTITLED (MECCA) 2010, CHARCOAL ON MOUNTED PAPER, 9 PANELS, 166 x 252 INCHES SANS TITRE (LA MECQUE) 2010, FUSAIN SUR PAPIER MONTÉ, 9 PANNEAUX, x CM 14

16 DETAIL UNTITLED (MECCA) DÉTAIL SANS TITRE (LA MECQUE) 16

18 FIDELITY TO THE IMAGE: ROBERT LONGO S GOD MACHINES 1 Jonathan T. D. Neil 01. To have fidelity to the image. This is how Robert Longo recently described the way he thought about making the kind of art that he does. It s a statement that requires greater attention now that this trilogy of works, what I understand as the 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, have manifested 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 between the two critical terms, fidelity and image, might be. Notice too that it is fidelity to the image and not fidelity to an image. The latter is more apposite to the worship of icons, for which the indefinite article is key, because the image, in this case, is merely a meaning-bearing token (picture) of a certain meaning-securing type (Jesus or Mary or the Saints). The definite designation of the image, however, means that it is the token in which Longo is interested or rather, to which he is committed, for this is the sense in which to have fidelity makes sense. But what does 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 the assessment of Longo s art since the 1980s. What we might call the vulgar understanding of the simulacrum describes it as a copy without original, which is similar to a token without a type. But where the former relationship is governed by the logic of resemblance, the latter is governed by the logic of abstraction. Copies are meant to look like their originals. Tokens are meant to instance their types. Yet what is salient about tokens is that they are concrete particulars, 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 is to 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, belongs 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, their heat, 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 the image 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, would qualify as simulacra. For Lucretius then there are things that are images and things that emit them, each being 18

19 equally real and essential to the nature of things, 3 because each composed of atoms and neither standing in a position of primacy to the other. Lucretius s physics of the image thus offered a reversal of Platonism, where simulacra appear as mere shadows that distract us from the true light of Ideas. 4 In Plato s cave, these simulacra are the first false idols. Not so with Lucretius, for whom it is exactly this lopsided valuation, this thumb on the scale that ups the ontological value of abstractions over appearances, which sets in motion a whole complex of its own falsities, belief in the Gods chief among them. The ontological status of the image thus determines the kind of faith (true or false) that one can have in it, and so 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 update assessments that understand Longo s work as engaged with simulations of a reality long felt to be lost to its instrumentalized mediations and their ideological masters. 5 There can be little doubt that Longo s God Machines step into a rhetorical territory anxious over a reality similarly thought to have been cast adrift by forces social, economic, environmental upon which it is increasingly difficult to gain purchase. It is a territory dominated in equal measure by religious fervor fed by anxieties over an increasingly secularized, technologized, and capitalized world. Like all religions and related spiritual dispositions, the Abrahamic religions are technologies of the self, but they are also some of the earliest 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 analogue of some singular time or place at which point some photograph was snapped, some single image captured. Longo s God Machines can only be conceived as iconic assemblages of myriad such images, now readily available from any number of digital resources from which the artist pulls. In this the pictures exceed any sense that they are merely photo-based. Other photographic paradigms won t do either: Longo s works can be conceived of neither as analog superpositions 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 cannot be averaged or collaged because even in their difference there is no distinguishing between them at the level of the visual. Like Lucretius s atoms (the minimum thinkable) they are there: the multiple perspectives, the different times of day, the changing frames, the people posing or moving through, the contingencies of atmosphere (floaters), the accidents of exposure (flares). Though they may lie below the threshold of vision, none of these elements, these atoms of imagery (the minimum sensible), lie below the surface of the picture, because they simply are that surface; they compose its reality the way cells compose a body. Indeed, Roland Barthes, in invocation of the Mandylion, will compare the photographic image to a skin. And like that acheiropoieton, the God Machines authorship belongs as much to these images 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. If this is important, the fact that these are charcoal drawings on mounted paper, then it is on the order of its analogy with the atomic, with making palpable, or sensible, the atomist or particulate nature of the image and its reality. The sense of the sublime that attends the experience of much of Longo s work issues from the confrontation with this reality, specifically the work s demonstration of a control that is exerted over the unruliness, the dirtiness, the

20 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 maintaining so many organized zones of unsullied white paper (Longo s work is at its best, at its most sublime, when this contrast is pushed to its limits), correlates to those moments when, for example, one apprehends or grasps the concept of infinity, or when one witnesses the inhuman force of a fifty-foot wave, but from the safety of the bluffs, and so remains in full possession of one s autonomous and self-legislating faculties, at once beautiful and terrible, which then stand as equal to the experience itself. Any subscription to these works shear size cannot account for such an experience on its own, particularly when we consider that their scale is in fact quite small; like most photographs, the God Machines are diminutions of the actual places they picture. Yet the pictures are undeniably large. They tend at once to envelope their observers and to distance them according to pictures own internal structures. Recourse to a cinematic language would not be inappropriate here, insofar as Untitled (Mecca) appears as an aerial establishing shot, Untitled (Wailing Wall) as a medium shot, and Untitled (St. Peter s) as a wide angle point of view. But the integrity of this visual language begins to 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 only as the pictures most apparent liberties. It is important to stress again that these are not liberties that Longo has taken; they are freedoms that appertain to 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 place or personage, to some prior moment in time, securing a connection between that past and the present moment in which they endure; and they point at us, they interpolate us or sometimes prick us (Barthes again), forging an attachment 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 choose us only if we are somehow already open to being chosen or are already potentially subject to such a choice. One s fidelity to images then marks a commitment which is not imposed so much as it is claimed against the linearity of historical time. The possibility of such a claim is secured by the image understood as anachronic, a concept that art historians Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood have recently offered not only as a means to capture a central conceptual paradox at work during the late medieval and early Renaissance period, when it held that a material sample of the past could somehow be both an especially powerful testimony to a distant world and at the same time an ersatz for another, now absent artifact, but also to challenge the linear and causal temporality that shapes and dominates most histories of visual artifacts today. In this Nagel and Wood stand their anachronic challenge in line 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 works it is finally pictured there. Each of these sites became more or less fixed in its current state between the sixteenth 20

21 and seventeenth centuries. By fixed I mean not just in the sense of appearance Michelangelo s crossing and Maderno s nave for St. Peter s were finished by the first decades of the seventeenth century; the Ka ba stands today largely as it was rebuilt in 1629 after having been damaged in a flood 8 but perhaps more importantly in the sense of historically fixed, as when the Western Wall s significance as a place of worship grew substantially in the first half 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 of transformations without fear of compromising their claim to origins. Though once the modern age settles into a conception of its present as no longer conjoined with but rather as somehow radically distinct from its past, these sites 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, collapses or suspends the distinction between original and copy. 9 And it is just this hesitation, this uncertainty, that underwrites the very possibility of fidelity to the image. To put this in more secular terms, consider how David Hume frames 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 one can even begin to understand the possibility that a promise might be broken or not carried through. 10 Between the promise and its fulfillment lies the hesitation of fidelity, a choice between acting on one s commitments carrying through 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 possible worlds. 12 Robert Longo s God Machines figure this overlap, this contingency against the background of a hardening or fixing of the image. Even the paradox of the title, God Machines, opens onto this contingency: regardless of what Pascal may have thought, one cannot be compelled to believe, automatically as it were, just as one does not, following Lucretius, believe in reality one simply lives it. Fidelity then emanates from one s self; it is itself an image, a simulacrum that issues into the world. 1 The author wishes to thank Robert Longo for the opportunity to offer his thoughts, however quickly marshaled, on this current body of work, and he would like to dedicate this essay to the artists who work with Robert to make that work what it is. Theirs is a true fidelity to the image. 2 To be clear, when I refer to Longo s God Machines, I will be speaking of just this trilogy of works and no others. 3 Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things], trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Cambridge: Hackett, 2001), Book IV. 4 See Gilles Deleuze, The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy, in The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 5 See Hal Foster s, The Art of Spectacle, Art in America (April, 1983). 6 On the photograph as emanation and skin and acheiropoietos, see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 31 & 33. Emphasis in the original. 8 See Francis E. Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Holy Land (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 9 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 18 & 371n.26. The authors adopt the concept of hesitation from Josef Vogl. See the latter s Über das Zaudern (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2007). 10 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, eds. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). 11 In this context, we must be careful not to confuse this promise with the promises of religion as such, whose commitments to origins to the exclusion of the contingencies of history produces only an empty fidelity. See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2007). 12 Maaike Lauweart, Interview with Josef Vogl, Maaike Lauweart (blog), accessed March, 2, 2011, interview-with-joseph-vogl-english.

Dawn M. Phillips The real challenge for an aesthetics of photography

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