Sub-Rural #44, Robert Longo in Milwaukee

Applying a dialectic of scale and form to images from familiar, often sensational, mass media outlets, “Robert Longo, The Acceleration of History’ at the Milwaukee Art Museum deflects content to a complicated field of visual studies jurisdictions. The artist confronts America’s popular, but narrow, comprehension of crises and decodes them in forceful images that dwell in darkness and trauma. The leitmotif for his Neitzchean act of drawing is cinema, whereby patrons stroll through massive approximations of black & white film stills that strain the contemplative and the critical.

Longo organizes a ten-year hierarchy of visual histories that inundate the news cycle, ones that that seem uncannily suspended in the present. His silent, heavyweight reconstructions parody the serial pressure, chronic tension, and negativity of mass media headlines. The status of hyperreality with which the artist helped advance in the post-Pop era has been naturalized with time and shuffled from popular to academic menus. Our desire to “click on” various themes of power in “The Destroyer Cycle” and Hungry Ghosts” series, from which this exhibition derives, is gripping in its facade of interactivity and multiplicity.

A key subtext is the artist’s staggering productivity and a shared affection for danger as sacrament. Though moderately ideological, the exhibition comes down on neither principled advocacy or forfeiture, as ritual images float above the surface of values and origins. Instead, Longo parodies the tabloid panic determined by reader analytics and relies on remnants of high modernism to infiltrate the spaces between entertainment and politics.

Longo exploits formal aesthetics by speaking to his artist peers, seeking the probable causes of social and historical dilemmas lost in algorithmic spin cycles. By providing each picture powerful graphic equivalencies he displays the highest degree of grammatical continuity so the show’s feel for adversity is incredibly coherent. A historically risky piece “Untitled (After Pollock, Convergence, 1952), 2020” is a rare counterpoint as it sheds the photographic distance and perfection of figures, landscapes, and architecture. One can’t dismiss the immediate impact of medium and content substitution, which freezes the classic Ab Ex composition in carbon and raises a question of an accompanying “Accelerated” show of de Koonings, Klines, and Stllls.

The “Pollock,” a technological study of improvisation by a radical mid-century patriarch, cannily subverts the pain/pleasure logic of the other works. Though somewhat indulgent, it’s replication from the 20^th century canon may remind Boomers how few early monographs of major artists had color plates and required the reader to imagine the absent form between picture and text. Pollock remains hero, creator, and victim, fitting conceptually into the doctrinal proportion of dissenters, athletes, and soldiers throughout the show.

Longo tidies up the inconvenient clutter of semiotics in this ten-year survey with an epic media commentary and verification that “sign” remains firmly entrenched where it always was, securely over the “signified.” Meaning here is clearly the artist’s voice, as opposed to a shared vision, not so symbolic of the culture at large but the consciousness of the Auteur.

Longo prosecutes the arc of suffering in sync with the public’s obsession with the spectacular and tragic. It has a long history. Visualizing power and sacrifice in lives of the saints was a device the church designed for the less fortunate to enforce faith. Today sensationalism is also about encouraging trust but in a profane communion of entertainment that’s only vaguely intellectual and compassionate. Longo’s work is an investigation of the paradoxical relationship between corporate license and the autonomy of studio art, the ritual of art labor that transcends mercantilism, and the madness of being hostage to historical narratives.

History is a narrative construct designed to affirm members of the public it describes. The culture inherits the account as well as the descriptive system, which if not beautiful is harmonic. Modernism did its best to debunk narratives because, like representational art, they are illusionary and were most faithful to values of the ruling class. The complexity and ownership of representational images has been updated by Longo. Older historical narratives still exist but they’re argumentative. The artist’s monumental “Death in Venice” production style acknowledges loss but with only a subtle perfume of decay. “The Acceleration of History” can be construed to be a protest or victory over impending darkness, but since history is fiction, a celebration or critique is conditional.

Modernism replaced faith with a parable of progress. Ironically, a fiction of Contemporaneity has become a tolerance for regression in the menace of dystopic regimes. In Milwaukee, Longo pushes the pause button and reduces the velocity of co-conspiracies in authoritative public images. The artist is an unaffiliated curator of an expanded field of signs and his charcoals are credible and strategic. In  fragmented and sequential logic they slip discretely into abstraction – form begetting form – which stabilizes countless fault lines in the myth of American exceptionalism.