calendario eventi  :: 

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5/5/2008

Robert Longo

Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid

Robert Longo:
Behind the Closed Eyes of a Sleeping Universe

Richard Milazzo

There was already in Robert Longo’s show of The Planet Drawings at Metro Pictures in New York in November 2006 foreshadowing evidence of future work. There were, across from each other, in the first gallery, two color photographs of children sleeping; and, on the walls perpendicular to them, two large vertical Starfields, which seemed to have nothing to do with them (Fig. 1. Image on page 5). Except that the artist made it virtually physically impossible to view the children without also seeing the reflection of the stars in the glass framing the children. Through the subtle work of installation, he conjured subliminal values, both for the Starfields and the sleeping children.
Longo explained recently, during a studio visit — all the quotes below are from this same conversation, April 2, 2008 — that he got the idea of doing these children, and later, the drawings of the sleeping heads of children, from a German fairy tale, “Der kleine Häwelmann” by Theodor Storm. Longo was reading the story to his youngest child, Joseph — who was depicted in one of the color photographs; in the other, is Juliette, Jon Kessler’s daughter —, about a boy who couldn’t fall asleep. He tries to put himself to sleep by talking to the stars, and then to the moon; suddenly the moon begins to talk back and tells him to hold up his bedsheet like a sail so that he can travel to the stars and visit the planets. Before long, he falls asleep.
What intrigued Longo about the story was the collapsing or folding of the subconscious into deep cosmic space. It is the distance human beings seem to be able to travel so easily that captures Longo’s imagination. It was also that children — his son, who, at twelve years old, was on the cusp of manhood — make you relive your own life, or, at least, compel you to re-examine it, perhaps more closely the second time around. Being a parent with young sons during a time of senseless war also tends to make you look at things more closely, particularly the world, both internally and externally. It was no accident that Longo borrowed a line from the Koran — “The Outward and Visible Signs of an Inward and Invisible Grace” — to entitle the exhibition at Metro.
There were also other factors which led to The Sleeping Children series. It was not so much that the history of art and literature is littered with depictions of sleeping figures — think of Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781), Keats’s sonnet, “To Sleep” (1819), Courbet’s Sleep (1866), or Warhol’s eight-hour film in real time, Sleep (1963), to mention obvious examples —, but that as a passive act it becomes symbolic of a culture in general — and America, in particular — which has fallen ‘asleep,’ in the sense that it has lost its ability to function critically, to effectively criticize itself and its government’s actions. But we are going too fast here. Longo says simply, during this part of the exchange, that the sleeping figures in the photographs looked somehow unreal, and also like astronauts — Joseph, he says, looked embattled, “like he was getting ready to fight,” and Juliette “looked more like Shakespeare’s Ophelia,” who was about to sink deeper still into the sleeping pool of the unconscious. Longo remembered also Joseph Beuys’s observation about the bed: “it is an incredible vehicle — you’re born in it, you make love in it, and, if you’re lucky, you die in it. You also have to believe,” Longo adds, “that children represent hope.” So much so that before calling them The Sleeping Children, he wanted to give them the title The Beginning of the World, based on the title of one of Brancusi’s sculptures.
About The Sleeping Children, Longo explains that he “wanted to see if the photographs were a mistake, so after the show of The Planet Drawings at Metro, I began to draw heads.” To me the heads of The Sleeping Children seem, at least in a general way, like a subconscious but also a logical extension of several previous bodies of work. The human head as a kind of ‘vessel,’ on an individual basis, containing the subconscious, speaks most directly or to The Freud Drawings, executed at the beginning of the millennium (1999-2002). Much as The Wave Series (Monsters) of the same period tried to marshal the uncontrollable physical forces of the natural world, The Freud Drawings wanted somehow to objectify the libidinal forces of the psychical world. Given that the latter (psychological) forces are as ‘natural’ as the former (physical) ones, it can be argued that they find both their individual and collective manifestation in the sleeping heads of the children. Even if the idea of ‘waves’ (as subconscious activity) is expressed relatively placidly and abstractly in the case of the sleeping psyche, much as the forces of the psyche were embodied as ‘empty’ interiors in The Freud Drawings.
We can also see the human head in the mushroom ‘head’ of the bombs — the most destructive expression of the human psyche — and in the form of the rose — one of nature’s most ‘ideal’ or ‘creative’ entities, qualities which we conventionally and anthropomorphically attribute to nature. The bombs, also known as the Lust of the Eye or The Sickness of Reason series (2002), and the roses, entitled The Ophelia Series (2003), were, in fact, first shown in this gallery, Soledad Lorenzo, in 2003. So it is more than fortuitous that the first full exhibition of The Sleeping Children should be shown here, as well, along with several of the planets — Untitled (Half Eclipse) (2007), Untitled (Last Moon) (2007), Untitled (Saturn) (2008), Untitled (Little Earth) (2008) — a Starfield (2008), and three smaller drawings based on Pollock, Brancusi and Goya (all 2008). However, while the heads relate ideationally to the bombs and the roses, physically they resemble most the planets — which brings us back again, for a moment, to the Metro show of planets in 2006.
In that show, there were, on the walls opposite the two Starfields, in the first gallery, two small drawings: one based on the exterior panel of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1504) (2006) (Fig. 2. Image on page 7) — which, because it includes the atmosphere, is spherical, and looks like a planet — and the other, a drawing based on Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm: November 30, 1950 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Clearly, the Pollock drips were related to the waves, but what were it and the Bosch drawing doing in the The Planets exhibition? While the Starfields were a logical development of the planet idea, and the Bosch drawing could be physically seen as related to the planets, as well, it seemed like there was more to it than that, especially since the two photographs of the sleeping children were positioned in between the two drawings and the two Starfields. Might the Bosch and Pollock drawings have encapsulated the complementary ideas of harmonious and chaotic psychical activity embodied in the sleeping children? On the surface, the sleeping psyche seemed at rest, but below, much like the waves, the deeper regions of the psyche were in tumult. And also, while the Bosch referenced the outside, external or visible world as a kind of perfectly encased glass snowball, the Pollock pointed to the invisible or internal world as discontinuous or disruptive. The sleeping children seemed to imply and represent the synthesis of both realms, there being nothing more graceful than sleep and nothing more signic than the outward world, unless it is the invisible world of the psyche, crawling, or shall I say, populated, with electric impulses darting this way and that, if not with signs or signals per se. The Starfields, according to Longo, also represented “the breaking up of the planets,” or their infinite multiplicity. They were, in their general aspect, at least as discontinuous or disruptive as the Pollock. Not to mention the fact Longo had actually used several Pollocks as underdrawings for the Starfields — “but after a while, you just start making them up — the Pollocks and the starfields.”
In the present exhibition, entitled “Intimate Immensity,” Longo has coupled the planets, and, in particular, a large Starfield with another drawing of a Pollock, this one based on the famous painting, One: Number 31, 1950, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a work which has never failed to move the artist. And taking the place of the drawing of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights is his drawing of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse I (1909-1911), based on a beautiful marble sculpture that would encompass the tranquility which stands in obvious contrast or in complementary relation to the dispersive energy of the Pollock painting. The Brancusi sculpture is of a woman’s head lying placidly but abstractly on a pedestal, disengaged from the rest of her invisible body. It is as if Brancusi had to compress her whole physical being into her head, or her head had been made to psychically encompass her whole body. Rodin had done this in the reverse direction, in a work he entitled Psyche, the bronze cast of a rather classical torso of a headless woman. In any case, the image of this head lying on its side possesses a lightness that recapitulates the immateriality of the psyche and of consciousness itself — which, I’m sure, is what Longo is after. Whereas the Pollock presses the point of the painting’s materiality, but in the most abstract way — which, in its own way, asserts the most distant reality or realities of the cosmos, if we see it related in that way. Some, for example, may see the Pollock as a bowl of metaphysical spaghetti. “The last time I went to see the Pollock, I realized I must also do stars. It’s funny: in the creation myth, light comes from darkness, but in my art, darkness comes from light. All the white in the drawing is the white of the paper.” Perhaps it is only human consciousness — hence, Longo’s depiction of the human head — that can somehow synthetically encompass the mirror-like realities of the cosmos and the psyche and the distance that both connects and separates them.
That these sleeping heads are isolated and stripped of all non-idealizing details and are made to come out at us out of the void like the planets is undeniable. They are no more or no less real than the planets, which for most of us exist only hypothetically as a composite image made up by a battery of scientists. In this case, The Sleeping Children are generated by a battery of studio assistants, overseen in a ‘godly’ fashion by one of the master artists of our time. They are as mute, and yet, as articulated, as the silent music of the spheres. Unlike the waves which crashed, the bombs which exploded, the roses which bloomed, and the starfields which seem entropically to be coming apart, the heads, like the planets, simply float in abstract space, disembodied and yet evocative, expressive and yet fully contained, sleeping and yet, perhaps, dreaming our world or worlds or a new world (into or out of existence): “they exist only at the very moment of their being.”
Longo’s world of sleeping children is a visionary world without eyes. If Lust of the Eye gave us a world of roses and bombs — a world of wounds or wounded eyes like roses that had seen too much, then The Sleeping Children give us a world of children whose eyes are closed perhaps because Longo “is not sure if I want them to awaken to this world,” to this world of atomic bombs, the possibility of nuclear terrorism, and ‘roses’ that have become inescapable metaphors for irreparable psychic wounds. Is it any wonder that artists and writers have often turned to sleep as a sanctuary, as refuge from “trouble and tumult,” from horror and fear, and even from nature’s own “gusty blast[s].” In what they choose to have their figures see and not see, Longo’s vision is not unlike Christina Rossetti’s: “Sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over, / Sleeping at last, the struggle and horror past, / Cold and white, out of sight of friend and of lover, / Sleeping at last. // No more a tired heart downcast or overcast, / No more pangs that wring or shifting fears that hover, / Sleeping at last in a dreamless sleep locked fast. // Fast asleep. Singing birds in their leafy cover / Cannot wake her, nor shake her the gutsy blast. / Under the purple thyme and the purple clover / Sleeping at last.”
Longo, in fact, informs me that the title for the Roses and Bombs — the ‘bloom and doom’ — show, “Lust of the Eye,” was biblical, and that he found it in a book entitled War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges: “The seductiveness of violence, the fascination with the grotesque…the Bible calls it the ‘lust of the eye,’ the God-like empowerment over human lives and the drug of war combine, like the ecstasy of erotic love, to let our senses command our bodies…” Surely it is for this reason — because we have, in Longo’s words, “become addicted to looking at horrible things” and to expecting only the worse in ourselves — that he has closed their eyes. Perhaps it is only in the void of this inward darkness that his Sleeping Children proffer us hope. If the roses were his show of eyes wide open, then is it any wonder that the first ones were “cropped tightly; then they started receding into the darkness, until they finally appeared to be engulfed in the blackness, by the void.” Like one of his children dreaming us into or out of our world, Longo explains that the roses came to him “in a dream about Ophelia disappearing into the water.” These lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson came to my mind: “Now sleeps the crimson petal [. . .] // Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves / A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me. // Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, / And slips into the bosom of the lake. / So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip / Into my bosom and be lost in me.” In a sculpture lying flat on the ground, entitled Oil and Roses (2003), a steel grid filled with roses is circumscribed by a larger steel grid filled with petroleum. Who says politics and art do not sweet bedfellows make? Having said that, he also remembers that the first rose he ever drew was for his wife.



While the story Longo tells about the German fairytale helps to establish, in a very personal way, common ground for the planets, starfields and sleeping children, there are also, within the development of his own history, grounds for the current work. Longo says: “I have always tried to understand the workings of the universe, but always through the work of art.” We see this most clearly in the Starfields, which, in their own way, formally reiterate Pollock; but there is also the matter of Longo’s ongoing interest in things scientific and celestial, but always rendered through the machinations of the work of art. He explains that when “you are rendering an image, it passes through every molecule of your body, until you own or possess it or it takes possession of you. This is what you are constantly navigating” — whether it is the angle or pitch of the bodies in the Men in the Cities, the nature of the juxtapositions and superimpositions in the Combines, the furl of The Black Flags, the gestural codes involved in the manipulation of the Guns or Bodyhammers, the way the Waves break, the edits of the apartment rooms in The Freud Drawings, the ‘bloom’ of a bomb or rose or the position or motion of a planet — “it all boils down to how you navigate these moments, that’s the root of where it all comes from.” In a weird way, and Longo would never put it this way, at least not with these words, but it comes down to how we touch each other — with bullets and bombs or with roses and kisses. And there are certainly plenty of all of these things in Longo’s work, but in extremely objectified forms — “intimate immensities,” is what he calls them here —, much as what alludes to science in his work is always rendered through the agency or agon of art.
As I’ve said, we see instances of Longo’s interest in the wider worlds of science and the universe, in the so-called objective world, well before The Planets and Starfields. We see a destructive Pollockesque manifestation of energy, akin to that released by the bombs in the later years, in the black and white image of urban rubble behind the bronze figure fleeing the scene in Now Everybody (for R.W. Fassbinder) (1982-83). Although the scene represents Beirut during the war, it is comprised of composite images of natural and manmade disasters. We see a natural instance of such destruction, and comparable creative energy, in the highway that has been upended and destroyed by an earthquake in Ornamental Love (1983) (Fig. 3. Image on page 9), juxtaposed to two other panels — one of a man and woman kissing in red and black tones, and the other, a bronze bouquet of roses in relief with a gold patina, which anticipate in every way the red roses (emerging from the shadows) of 2003. Here, it is as if the act of kissing — the emotion of love — were so intense that it could cause the earth to move — or is it that the lovers feel the earth moving and coming apart as they merge? A similar intensity is expressed by the two lovers kissing in Strong in Love (1983) (Fig. 4. Image on page 9), their hair and the back of their heads become raging wolves in their moment of passion — all rendered in monochromatic tones of black and yellow. The heads kissing, both in Ornamental Love and Strong in Love, are formally reminiscent of the planetary eclipses (Untitled [Half Eclipse]) and of several of The Sleeping Children, who themselves resemble eclipses (Study for Hector [2007] and Untitled [Diane] [2007]). But, in Longo, the emotion is always somehow strictly contained, whether through a savvy manipulation of cultural codes or an inherent interest in the objective world as an inescapable reality. It is as if whatever classical expression of emotion remains has been extruded abstractly from the real world.
There is, of course, the missile silo in Sword of the Pig (1983), which is evocative of the Starfields, if only in a manmade sense, in that it is not too hard to imagine the skies filled with the streaming lights of missiles attacking overhead at night (which is when American forces like to attack). Longo related to me the strange story of having found himself late at night in the woods somewhere in Texas in the 1970s, when he was only seventeen years old, holding a box of frogs and lizards and other creatures in his hand. As he put holes in the box to enable them to breathe, he felt simultaneously the sensation that he was filling the skies with stars. It was a kind of out-of-body experience that would, many years later, project the points of light in the Starfields as Sleeping Children! Longo says: “Why bother to construct images — reality is already so fucking weird!” We have only to recall the opening salvos of the “Shock and Awe” campaign in Iraq, which the television cameras equipped with night vision brought to us in abstract tones of green and black.
In fact, when he says that The Sleeping Children look like astronauts, this is not unrelated to the actual figure of an astronaut he painted in the combine, Rock for Light, in 1983. In Heads Will Roll (Fig. 5. Image on page 10), Longo actually gives us, albeit abstractly, what looks like the rusted remains of a derelict satellite flying over a desolate gray stretch of rooftops in relief. An image of David Byrne from the Talking Heads has replaced the astronaut in this work — as he floats, in a ghostly manner, like the satellite, over the rooftops. The Planets and Starfields should hardly come as a surprise in the light of Longo’s development. But, instead of ‘talking’ (or singing), Longo’s ‘heads’ seem to sleep or kiss (the pain away — which is what a parent will often do to a child when it bruises itself superficially).
In Lenny Bleeds: Comet in a Bomber (1986) (Fig. 6. Image on page 10), we see the image of another head, this one upturned, and the three-dimensional residue of what looks like a satellite that has gone haywire, not to mention an abstract sphere with a city growing wildly in relief, with metallic wings or weeds for buildings, among other elements — even as the silhouetted figure of Lenny Bruce is performing with his back to us (his viewing audience) on a stage that is exploding in a boundless flood of lights that looks like a kind of starfield. There is another actual (three-dimensional) satellite in Machines in Love (1986) (Fig. 7. Image on page 11), this one, bright red, superimposed over the image of another couple in polished aluminum kissing. With so many figures kissing in Longo’s past work, is there any wonder that there would be so many babies in the later work? But, in the early work, especially the Combines, much of the ‘kissing’ is also formal in nature, in terms of the way the artist ‘juxtaposes’ panels, materials and images; in the later work, the figures are isolated in the space — whether they are the flags, the guns, the waves, the bombs, the roses, the planets, or the children — and still later, the sharks. It is only in the Starfields — which we experience, in the end, as an all-over whole, in the tradition of Abstract Expressionism — that there is any sense of multiplicity. But it is a multiplicity that we project as a single thing, state or reality that is ultimately beyond our reach or comprehension. Much as there is no real way of knowing what reality lies behind the closed eyes of Longo’s Sleeping Children. Even in his most aggressive analytical, or rather, psychoanalytical work, that of The Freud Drawings, the rooms are ultimately empty, except for the figurines on the library shelves, tables and desk — the analyst par excellent having been driven from his lair by the Nazis, something we sense as the posthumous reality of the picture. A posthumous reality that we may also associate as a possibility in relation to the closed eyes of The Sleeping Children.
There were at least three other Combines, all from 1988, which alluded to the possibility of The Planets and Starfields. Hum: Making Ourselves (1988) (Fig. 8. Image on page 11) looks like a high-tech face — a humming rather than a sleeping child? — with its every feature (color-coded plastic tubing) plugged into what looks like a ‘starfield’ of energy sources, accompanied by two planetary spheres or ‘moons’ in polished aluminum in the bottom panel. Here, both the title and process as content (the hypothetical hum) actually reference self-generation or birth — in a world that has been denuded of all humanity. Although The Sleeping Children embody more closely our features as human beings, they, too, have been stripped of their living humanity — namely, their imperfections, and even their individuality, no matter how different they look one from the other. Death as ultimate prospect seems to have stolen their ulterior features. All that remains is the specter of their interplanetary perfection. It is almost as if Longo does not believe they will, or should, awaken from the cosmic bubble which protects them from the adulterated realities of the real world down below, and so he has frozen them in space or stored them in the invisible formaldehyde of some new utopic world, which, in the end, surrounds them with a deathly aura stranger than death itself.
Perhaps it is for this reason that in a show which includes drawings of the “last” moon in eclipse, a “little” earth and Saturn — a planet whose influence has been described by astrologers as exerting a malign force over human affairs —, Longo includes a drawing based on Goya’s Black Painting, Saturn Devouring His Son (1819), a grisly image of a giant father-like figure literally devouring his child. This, to show that despite what appears to be the unapproachable perfection of our distant solar system, there is in its very midst, at its very heart, a brutal shark-like reality, a primordial or bestial force, that would devour all that gets in its way. Who is to say that the horrible deafening roar of the planets breathing is dissimilar from the sound of teeth tearing through flesh. What morality or ethic or religious impulse does the wind, an earthquake, a wave, the motion of the stars, or, for that matter, the life of a rose or a mirror possess? None whatsoever. If such forces also course through the human species, as part of nature, beyond its conscious or symbolic control, then we need not wonder what visions lurk behind the closed eyes of Longo’s Sleeping Children.
Even more bleak and prophetic is The Fire Next Time (for G.B.) (1988) (Fig. 9. Image on page 12). Along a vast black expanse of space, there intervenes from above (or below) a pyramidal form comprised of red shards of glass. The tip of a massive star, the abstract vaginal form of a goddess, the landscape of an inhospitable alien planet, a starfield collapsing into a void of unimaginable proportions, the first glimmer of a sleeping child awakening to our world? Here, always reading backwards (our prerogative, even as louche postmodernists), we are in the realm, I think, of Saturn’s jaws devouring our children’s flesh.
Black Planet (for A.Z.) (1988) (Fig. 10. Image on page 12) summarizes in the most absolute terms Longo’s abiding interest in the all-encompassing nature and overriding power of the larger universe, even as it seems to spill or regurgitate its very guts onto our visual palette. At once expressive (convex), and yet curiously withholding, even as it pours its petroleum-like innards onto the floor, this work not only anticipates The Planet Drawings in an obvious way, it alludes more subtly to the subsequent Black Flags with their mournful, undulating political reality, a gunshot wound from the Bodyhammers, the dark subterranean reality of the Waves, the spilling of one’s guts in The Freud Drawings, the detonation of the bombs, and even, the exfoliation of the roses. It seems also to adumbrate the worst nightmares of The Sleeping Children, not only formally — it looks like the more rotund heads (Untitled [Andre] [2007], Untitled [Maria] [2007] and Study for James [2007]) — but theatrically. That is, in the case of Untitled (Cassandra) (2008), the mouth is exactly in the same position as the opening in the black steel sphere from which it spills out its black Neoprene viscera.



Lest we be accused of being too subtle in our tracking down of such precedents in Longo’s work, there is the explicit matter of the artist’s obsession, like Caravaggio’s, with the ‘beheaded’ figure, which, as a literal instance of Keats’s “negative capability” (or extreme aesthetic ‘detachment’), complements the heads that comprise the sole content of The Sleeping Children. Not that there are not a fair share of bodiless heads in the previous work, as well.
To begin with the ‘beheadings’: we see a number of them in the Men in the Cities; in particular, there are the two in Untitled (1980) (Fig. 11. Image on page 13) and the one in the Documenta 7 installation in Kassel, West Germany, in 1982. And there are figures implicitly without heads, “dancing or dying,” in Untitled (1981) and Untitled (1982). And quite a few in which the faces are averted, obfuscated or entirely effaced by hair flipped with abandon — their heads and faces having all presumably been consumed by their own inner drives or by the urban dance of ruthless competition.
Then there is the headless muscle-builder flexing his muscles in Sword of the Pig — his head having been replaced by the accentuation placed on his body not only as an instrument of strength but as a symbolic means of conflict, power, and the ultimate decapitation of civilization through nuclear warfare. It’s called leading by (the sword of) one’s dick. Then there are the kissing heads — in Ornamental Love and Strong in Love (Figs. 3 and 4) — which seem to disappear into, or become consumed by, their passion for each other. In Master Jazz (1982-83) and Master Mister (1983/2000), there is the screaming head of a black man emerging from a deep, dark space or void, expressing, perhaps, in a single paroxysm, all the frustrations of the racism he has experienced.
In Arena Brains (1985), the top half of a screaming head has been replaced — more like eradicated — by a color photograph of a plume of flames. In Death and Taxes (1986), a huge skull in carved wood has been bifurcated by an aggressive-looking abstract edifice in Cor-ten steel, which looks more like a weapon of war or a pair of cosmic scissors than a building, one that emerges from a sky-blue backdrop of dollar bills. And in End of the Season (1987), there are seven footballs in highly polished chromeplated cast bronze depending like decapitated heads from the outstretched arms of what looks like an upside down abstract steel crucifix against a black linoleum square mounted on wood. Whether there is or isn’t a possible allusion to Revelations in this work, there is no object or image here, among these works, that does not undergo some stress or torment, however abstract or seemingly removed from any specific human referent.
But then there is the still more obvious matter of the actual children in Longo’s work that pre-existed The Sleeping Children. In Love Police: Engines in Us (the Doors) with the Golden Children (1983) (Fig. 12. Image on page 14), there are four children depicted — two Asians, one black, and a Caucasian — in various tones of black, white and gray against yellow backgrounds, two on either side of a relief of a pile of wrecked cars, above which lord a proud, if not arrogant, couple, also in relief, painted in red enamel. Prime examples of alpha (or omega?) male and female, with his arms folded he has turned away from his female counterpart who, with her head thrown back, is laughing hysterically. The ‘Children of the Cities’ (sic), in this work, are similarly bold, adapting various postures, either pitching a ball, dancing, or simply posing, but all staring defiantly at the viewer. These children’s eyes are distinctly open, not only aware but seemingly in control of their fate. Significantly older than The Sleeping Children of years later, the Golden Children, whether parented or not (by the two insouciant figures above and in between them), project a confident participation in the culture. They are active agents in a wrecked world of crashing machines and ever-accumulating junk, in which the sun (if we judge by the backgrounds) still shines. They could be the children of Nietzsche’s God-is-Dead-world: if the adversity you face doesn’t kill you, it can make you stronger. Whereas The Sleeping Children, although definitively rendered, seem like they are the passive objects of a dream-universe that is irreversibly withdrawing into eternal night. The sophisticated ‘machines’ of their minds and faces float like space trash that has been abandoned in the black void of the universe — soft and yet hollow, poignant somehow, and still hallowed even, and yet as irretrievable as lost ideals.
In We Want God (1983-84) (Fig. 13. Image on page 14), a baby’s head is actually depicted — or, at least, half of one — the other two panels, above and below, show a World War II scene in marble and the relief of a leafless tree carved in wood. Although his eye, indeed, his whole face, is obfuscated by strong shadows, the child stares directly at us, with the intelligence or consciousness, strangely, of an adult. Longo informs me that the painted image of this child is based on a sculpture by one of Hitler’s favorite sculptors, Arno Breker. Although his visible eye is open, and his features reflect an awareness that The Sleeping Children do not possess, he is clearly the dialectical victim of a manipulation, the tender if militant part of a machination, that is ultimately beyond his control. Even the way his plump head is tightly cropped or closely framed by the edge of the painting bespeaks the reality of being cornered into an unspeakable position. The onslaught of soldiers that seem to be rushing over a hill into the right side of the child’s brain, and the lowly isolated tree below, put us in mind of Giacometti’s figures or an endgame-scenario by Samuel Beckett.
Overall, We Want God is one of Longo’s bleakest combines, and dramatically anticipates the plump substance but harsh contours of The Sleeping Children. Although again, in both instances, Longo’s classical or disciplined sense of dramaturgy never allows the scene to become mawkish, sentimental, kitschy, or too theatrical. The juxtapositions in We Want God mitigate or cool down the over-heated imagery; whereas, in The Sleeping Children, the isolation of the figures against a rich black ground infuse the image with subtle subliminal values that are ultimately inexplicable in complexion. Freud argues (in The Interpretation of Dreams) that “the dream is the guardian of sleep, not its disturber” (the italics are his). And so we can only conclude that no matter how disturbing these children’s dreams may be, they are, nonetheless, dreaming, this, because they are sleeping, relentlessly, despite, or precisely because of, the reality that circulates around them absolutely, even if somewhat indistinctly. And because every dream — still according to Freud — is a wish-fulfillment, we can only speculate as to the nature or content of their dreams. Freud explains, rather inexplicably or tautologically, that “the dreams of little children are often simply fulfillments of wishes, and for this reason are, as compared with the dreams of adults, by no means interesting. They present no problem to be solved, but they are invaluable as affording proof that the dream, in its inmost essence, is the fulfillment of a wish.” I suspect that the inherent inarticulateness and defenselessness of the child (as victim in We Want Gold and purely as subject in The Sleeping Children) are the primary movers of such conclusions, and that Longo simply finds, once again, in such subjects or states the primal matter of the universe, which has become nothing more and nothing less than his working materials.
John Keats, who was himself only a young man of twenty-six when he died, wrote verses about sleep that characterize Longo well, as that “soft embalmer of the still midnight,” who, however, would not “save [us] from curious conscience.” It is also always best to leave to the poets the last word:

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embowered from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passéd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lord
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiléd wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul.

Los Angeles and New York City, Aril 2008

Galeria Soledad Lorenzo
C/ Orfila, 5 28010 Madrid

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