 Thank you, thank you so much for coming. Delighted to welcome you all here tonight. I'm Sara Softness and the Assistant Curator of Special Projects here at the museum. I had the great fortune of organizing the Brooklyn Museum's presentation of proof, Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, and Robert Longo together with its originators, Kate Fowle, at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and Robert Longo himself. The show obviously debuted at the Garage Museum, and it's on view here through January 7th, and tonight the galleries will be open until 10pm. So if you haven't seen it yet, I do encourage you to go upstairs and see it after this, or if you want to see it again after the insights we've gathered tonight. I'm really, really excited to introduce Hal Foster and Robert Longo, who maybe need no introduction, but I will attempt it anyway. Hal Foster, an eminent art historian, theorist and critic, comprehensive affiliations and achievements, I shall not detail, but perhaps suffices to say he is the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Art and Archaeology Professor at Princeton University, his co-editor of October Magazine and, of course, an author. I think if any of us have taken modern or contemporary art history in the last few decades, we are likely aware of his brilliant and incisive and sensitive writing. In 2012, he contributed an essay to an overview of Longo's recent work called Charcoal, and his most recent book in 2015 is Bad New Day's Art Criticism Emergency. Robert Longo is, of course, our beloved Brooklyn-born artist in a powerhouse in the art world since the 1980s. He's consistently an indicator of the complexities and apocracies of American identity and politics. He's worked in a range of mediums, including drawing, painting, performance, sculpture, film, you name it. He's had an immensely busy year since Proof opened in Moscow last fall. He's presented new bodies of work in New York and London, some of which are in view upstairs. Of course, these works found great acclaim, and he opened a show in Finland, a project at Hunter College, and, of course, Proof right here. He's prolific. He's endlessly inventive and curious, and he's the kind of technical master whose work just kind of knocks you on your ass. So, after the conversation, we're going to have a short Q&A. You'll see microphones in either aisle. And I want to extend my gratitude to both of them for being here, so please help me welcome them to the stage. Helen, Robert, thank you. Robert, tell us about the idea for the show, how it came together, why these three artists in one space. I've known Kate Fowle about ten years, and she always wanted to do some project with me, and she went off to be this chief curator at the garage in Moscow, which is this amazing Rem Koolhouse building built in Gorky Park, and she had the ability to do shows there that were quite extraordinary. So she came to me and she said she had this idea she wanted to do a show of me, Goya and Eisenstein. I know I talked so much to her about art, and I talked quite a bit about Goya and Eisenstein. They had huge influences on me, but I have to admit that when she proposed this idea of putting me in the same lineup with Goya and Eisenstein, I was a bit like, what do I do, run the projectors, or hang the prints, or what exactly do I do? These are like fucking giants in history, but she pointed out the fact that I had talked about this idea about artists being witnesses of the time that they lived in, and that not documentarians, but people responding to the time they lived in. She used these examples of how Eisenstein spanned basically two centuries, so did Goya, so do I. So she drew up a lot of similarities, and she's part of this generation of curators. I think she's responsible for creating a lot of these young, crazy curators out there right now, but she brought me into this project as a co-curator eventually. So when we tried to figure out how to do the show in Moscow, how do we get Goya's paintings and how do we get those really credible paintings, which will never be lent, and then I realized one night that I knew Eisenstein's drawings quite well, and I said, we all draw, why don't we do a black and white show where we do the prints of Goya and we show the films of Eisenstein, and how that all broke, what happened is that at that point my brain kicked in and I figured out how to do the Eisenstein, how to do Goya, and Kate, when I was about to say, okay, now I tell you what I want to showcase, and no, no, I pick your work. So Kate, so Kate figured out what work I wanted to do, so I had this idea of how to do Eisenstein and how to do Goya. So how did you select the work? Well, which, my work, or? Well, you just said that Kate selected your work, but how did you select the Eisenstein and the Goya? Well, the Eisenstein, at first we thought, like, at first we thought it'd be really cool to have Eisenstein in theaters, with orchestras, and stuff like that, and then I remembered, I worked for two structural filmmakers, Paul Sherrits and Hollis Frampton, and I saw a lot of structuralist films, and I remember, I think it was Ken Jacobs or one of those guys, they showed a film with an anamorphic projector where they could show pictures that frame at a time, and I remember playing when I played football, we had a projector where you could see things that frame at a time. I thought, I want to use this one of these days. So why don't we slow, we show all of Eisenstein's films together, slow them down to like a frame, you know, like every five seconds or something like that, so we could really see the pictures and the compositions, and show them all together so we would kind of like amp up the idea of the montage, and then through Kate's incredible team of people there, they found this film that I never knew about called Romance and Sentimental, which was Eisenstein's audition film for Hollywood. Stalin had sent Eisenstein to Hollywood to learn about sound, he hated it, and so I had this idea about slowing the film down, and we needed to talk to, I needed to talk to somebody who knew Eisenstein well enough to get permission to do this, so I met this guy named Naum Kleinman, we went to Eisenstein's apartment, where you're not allowed, the government doesn't allow you to go there, it's like we had to meet there secretly, and Moscow was like, I felt like I was in the born identity or something like that, one of those weird streets, apartment buildings, and we go in this apartment where it's all his stuff, and there's a drawing on the hanging on the wall, it's like this cartoon of Mickey Mouse, and it's signed to my dear friend Sergei, I signed Walt Disney, it was like, and then from this guy Naum Kleinman, we found out that Eisenstein had wanted to make a movie about Goya, and he told us about all this stuff that got Eisenstein's relationship to Goya, and then I finally said to him, like look, I need someone to give me the blessing to do this to Eisenstein's films, to slow them down to one frame, to 100%, and what do you think of this idea, and this 90 year old man who spoke great English just beamed, and this is great, Eisenstein would love it, it was really great, so I got the blessing for that. Now, how do we deal with Goya? There was, we looked in the museums in Russia for paintings, and we found this one, the Pushkin and Moscow had a Goya painting, so we went to meet the director of the Pushkin Museum, and we asked the woman in this, we went, one day the museum was closed in this grand room, we asked, can we borrow this painting, and she says, we don't have a Goya painting, and I said, but, so case assistant takes out her phone, and shows her the picture, she says, yes, you do, and she says, no, we don't have a Goya painting, she storms out of the room, and the assistant director explains to us, yes, we do have a Goya painting, but we really don't have a Goya painting, because we took it from the Nazis, and the Nazis had stolen it from a Jewish family. So hence, we do have one, but we don't have, so at that point we realized getting any Goya real paintings were impossible, so then we started getting etchings, and the idea about getting the etchings was, I found the etchings incredibly profound and powerful, but I don't know if you all know, you've gone to see shows of etchings, we've seen hundreds of etchings, and your eyes kind of glass over, and kind of get bored out of your mind, why don't we make a really intensive edit of these almost cinematic edits of these images, where they kind of act as connectors between Eisenstein's work and my work, so that's how we chose the Goya, so we chose them all four series, and what's extraordinary, the ones that are here in Brooklyn, the Capricios are actually artist proofs, which meant that Goya actually had his hands on them, which I found quite moving, so anyway, that's how the show kind of came together. Okay, what about your work in particular? Maybe we could go to the slides of the Longo rooms, and tell us about how you hung those rooms, and why those works together, why you and Kate decided on them. The first room she tried to set up was kind of the premises of the show, like the politics, the war, the environment, and art in the front room, she tried to set up that thing. In that sense, from there, the kind of show kind of became... Specified, though. The name is kind of the war, the icebergs is nature, the protest is the pussy hat drawing, and the abstract expressionist painting is the art aspect. I think that's the essence of the show. War, climate, political protest, art. I think that... Is that it? We need Kate to be here. I'm not a fucking curator. That's kind of like what it was, but she kind of set that up, and I said, okay, but I kind of understood what she was doing for sure, and that became the kind of... We had different variations of it in Moscow for sure, but this is how we tried to set it up this way. So what about the next room? The next room had... From that point on, I started dealing with it more formally rather than dealing with that kind of structure. So I was eager to try to figure out how to take these images and have them function in a way that you could see them from a distance and at the same time you had the chance to get up close to look at them, so that was part of it. So this room here had the refugee raft, it had the Charlie Hebdo bullet, it had the X-ray of Venus in it, and it had the blurry image of the raft of Medusa. I'm going to bear down on the images in a moment, but just a few general questions. Why all the black? What is black to you, materially, symbolically, effectively? And what do you insist on black? I mean, you've done charcoal drawings now for a long time, almost only. No, no, there's a whole... There's flashes of color, but you've really insisted. But then you also say that the drawings are not black and white. I think there was a moment that I had with... My kids have always been quite great observations and things, and I realized through them... I was looking at old life magazines, which is how I grew up, because I basically couldn't read, and I started to remember very specifically how the front cover of the magazine would be in color, inside the pictures of the circus would be in color, the pictures of the White House would be in color, but then also you would come to pictures of Vietnam or come to pictures of the earthquake in Mexico, and they would always be in black and white. And I started thinking that maybe... I thought of black and white maybe as the truth in that sense, and I also think that black and white is quite abstract. And black... I don't know when I started wearing all black, it just seemed to be the easiest thing to wear. I just... I don't know how you all do it when you go in a closet and figure out what you're gonna wear. To me, it's like how black my clothes... My clothes vary from black to blackish and grayish black and black and black. But anyway... I mean, it's black... their drawings aren't black and white, they have different tones. If you see in the studio, you can see all the different values of the black and white. But I think... When I was in college, I was also very close to Visual Studio Workshop, it was like the Academy of Modern Photography. So I saw a lot of black and white photography, for sure. And that really had a big impact on me, for sure. But I mean, I remember so distinctly black and white photographs shaping my life. And I remember I had this interesting conversation with Kiefer. I was asking Kiefer about how... all this work I've seen of your work... I mean, this must be like what... you grew up in this round of stuff. This wrecked car... wreckage of buildings. You said, yeah, I used to play in it also. And then I started realizing... because I was having this hard time with the plexiglass in my work, with the glass, and I started realizing I grew up with black and white television. So all the images that I saw in my life were behind glass. So there's a connection to what I saw as a kid to what I make now, for sure, is a definite connection to one. You see a connection between black or black and white and the documentary. Or a relation to history, somehow. So these drawings are the scale of history paintings. I mean, there's a way in which the refugee raft... you have it opposite the blurred raft of Medusa. So what's the... is that part of the... I mean, that's clearly part of the impact. You know, so the black is somehow an immersive space for you. It's a screen. It's about your memories of life photographs. I mean, what else... why the scale, I guess? I mean, it's not only history paintings, it's cinema. I think there's the distance that creates... the abstraction that it creates, the distance it creates in the image. The black and whiteness. I don't get it, because at that scale you seem to be immersed in the drawing. You feel distance. You feel distance from what exactly? From the source images? Or do you think that you have to be... the drawings ask you to be quite close and allow you to be far away at the same time? Essentially, I use a guideline to make them that there's a distance where the works have to evoke a kind of photographic realism. But once you cross that boundary, they should break down and reveal their making in that sense. And the other thing is I also use this kind of paper that has just enough subtle grain to it that evokes what you think is a photograph. So I'm trying to steal... I'm starting to cheat. I mean, also the fact that they are drawings is the fact that people come to see these exhibitions and they think they're photographs. And when you tell them they're charcoal drawings, they go, oh, they look much closer. It's the idea of having people actually look more than they normally do. But what you're asking me about is that... I don't actually know if I have the right answer for it because to me it always seems to be natural to translate everything in black and white to me. Although it's not black and white. You talk about the molecular dimension of the drawings. You talk about the charcoal as dust. But you also talk about drawing as very bodily. You process the image. Let me just read one quote from the conversation with Kate because I think this is important to a few things you've already said. You say there's a sincere attempt to slow down the image to provoke the viewer to consume its full power. I want to reveal what these images reveal about the world right now. Can you say more about this desire to slow down? I mean, that's clearly part of the drawing, maybe part of the scale, too. Why do you want to slow down the image and to provoke the viewer to consume its full power? Ironically, we emerged with the pictures generation as an idea of appropriation and things like that. And we were making pictures of pictures and trying to look at the world of images. But the irony is that now the world that we're living in is this incredible image storm of images at how the amount of images that exist in the world now is overwhelming, and I keep on thinking, how do you slow these things down? I mean, the irony is for me, even to say that, where I remember making rock videos, where I make rock videos with 800 edits and imitating, like, structural film, but the idea that I want to slow things, I want to take these highly aggressive images, make them out of this incredibly primitive medium of dust, charcoal, and make them basically slow them down so you actually have the chance. Because I think my images... Have the chance to do what? They have a chance to actually see them, because I think my... I realized recently that I try to get... To see them so that you can work through them? Or to feel the impact? No, the viewer. Yeah. Well, I think by that fact that they're made is a really critical aspect, rather than being snapped. That labor that's involved in making the drawing is really important to me. The fact that people can imagine how long it takes, which is really important to me, that the process is the fact that these images aren't made in a split second is really important to me. I also realized that after within the images, a level of... I don't want to say cliche, but there's a kind of precision that the images require now more than ever before that I'm trying to get at. It's hard to explain that. I know how they're supposed to be, so I alter them so much to get them to where I want them. And the precision is important. Why? To ground them in the... To get them... To make them proof... They're like weapons. You want to get them to be able to go where they actually penetrate. Okay, let me stop you right there, because the condition as you describe it is that there are too many images. And that was the first principle of at least some artists in the pictures generation. Too many images, and we've become insensitive. But at the same time you say, your counter seems to be that you want to make them weapons, and there is aggressivity in the work, in the show. Why seek the iconic? Why seek the powerful in the images? Why make them even more intense than they are? I mean, is that just a response to this condition where this kind of general anesthesia to too many images? Or do you feel that you have to battle with other images that are out there and somehow seize them and take some of the force to take them where else? There's an urgency in what I see, what I see in the world. And the work that I'm doing is like, maybe I'm ripping these chunks of things out and I'm shoving them in your face and saying, fucking look at this. There is a sense of urgency, absolutely, in the work. There is a sense of urgency to saying, look at these images and look at the world that you live in. Don't let them pass by you for a split second in the newspaper and then you forget about them. The idea that when was the last mass shooting, you forget how many people die. I mean, the idea that you're so anesthetized, how do you get the, by slowing down, they slow down with a sense of urgency for sure, in that sense, that you want to say, look at this, really, really look at this and think about it. Couldn't we argue just that we're already assaulted by images and that we need a different relation, that we don't need more iconic images? You might need less. You actually really believe in these images and maybe we need to believe less. I mean, in the Colonial American Gallery, you or they have put, you know, your American flag and your Obama portrait. I mean, you really believe in the iconicity and the power of these images. Yeah, I do. I guess I do. I mean, because I think the fact is, I, yeah, I guess I do. I believe in them because I think there is power. Why? There is power that you can see in these images. What do you want to do with that power? You say, and this is again, directly opposite to what we used to say back in the day. You say, I mean, most of you know that one of the first principles of postmodern art, pictures art in particular, was to use reproduction to shatter the aura of the work. And in your conversation with Kate, you say you want to reclaim aura. Yeah. Why? Well, the X-rays are clearly, X-rays are clearly about seeing in the invisible, which is something that, it's a whole other aspect of things because I think so much of the world is about believing in things that are invisible. But the thing about these iconic images, I think the fact is that the ownership of those images while we own those images is not just, I don't know, these are the images that exist. What do you mean? There's like a commons of images and we have to swipe over them? No, I think they're images that exist in the world that are images that belong to us and that we should acknowledge them and try to understand them in that sense because I think the problem is that we don't see, we don't see anymore. We just see this enormous amount of images and we don't pay attention to these images. And what those images mean. I get that. I get that you want to slow them down so they will see, but why do you want to pump up the power? Why would that be the response to a world of traumatic images? Why I want to make them louder? Yeah. Because I don't think people are hearing. Okay. I definitely don't think, I definitely don't think people are hearing. I think they can see it and they see it and they just get anesthetized. I think the anesthetizing quality of images at this point now is even more so much more so than when we first started off. In the beginning, I thought the pictures, we was clearly this issue of being anesthetized. When I did Magellan, this 366 drawings, I realized just doing a drawing a day was about how do I make a drawing become an image, become accountable. It's like painlessly, quietly these images is entering us and we have no idea what the fuck they're doing to us. It's that idea that TV delivers people, the Sarah piece is a really great example. How do you, I mean the remote control is one of the greatest things because I could change the TV when the co-commercials came on. But I want to be able to actually, I want to be able to attack the images that are in my face every day and somehow take them on in a more participatory way, in that sense. World friends, so I can be mean, right? Of course. And you can be mean back. Another question on, I can say, you say at one point in this conversation that all the images are surrogates of ancient archetypes. Why are you interested in the archetypal? I mean you mentioned Jung and a collective unconscious. Are you okay with that idea? Because with Jung it's, it's a racial unconscious, it's a ethnic unconscious. When I started, right before I did Magellan, I tried to read Jung and then I got, and then I read about Jung and then I said, this guy's crazy, forget it. But this idea of, there must be, over the centuries and thousands of years that we've been dealing with images, is that there must be, like there are stories that, the stories that are told over and over again, the same stories told. There must be these kind of, like, benchmarks, there must be these images that are like myths or things that, there must be these kind of images that Mage could have a more profound level of meaning than simply a kind of disjointed collage or prestige or something. Right. So I mean you actually make the images out of, I mean they're composite for the most part. So what images in particular tap into this archetypal resource for you? I mean what, when you come to a gesture or come to an image, when do you feel that you've achieved it? I mean, like the Ferguson image, the St. Louis ram, who holds up his hand. Yeah. I mean, you know, in relation to the, the Ferguson shooting, is that an archetypal image? Totally. Give us some more examples from the show. Well, I mean, example, the raptor Medusa is like Noah's Ark. It's like, it goes by, there are these connections that go back. The raptor Medusa is connected to the, to the Medusa's raft. You know, there are all these connections at that time. Can you have it both ways? Can you have that, that raft of refugees be documentary in the way that you say you want the black to be like Life Magazine when you were a kid? And make people feel the plight of the refugees and at the same time dehistoricize it and see it as the raft of Medusa, the raft of any survivor or non-survivor. Can you have it be both? I don't think that's what I'm trying to do. I think that's, it's like, I think those archetypal images are in us and that somehow there are ways to access maybe something more in us. So there are no new gestures? All powerful gestures in the present somehow evoke that kind of history of gestures? I think, yeah, the idea that there's no such thing as new ideas, for sure. But in that sense, like, how do you, how do you present an image in a way, how do you tell the same story, like Caravaggio painted, had to, he'd moved to, not New York, he moved to Rome, he wants to make big work, but he has to work for the church. How do you make new meaning but out of the same stories over and over again? The way that you do it is you hire prostitutes, play Mary Magdalen, you have people with dirty feet. How do you do these things within that? I mean, the refugee raft was the, that piece, there that piece had so much to do with the fact that I wanted to put you in the water with these people. I wanted you to sit there and feel like you're drowning with these people. I wanted you to be in that situation. But we're not, we're not at all. But at the same time, I think, I'm hoping that when you're standing in front of it, it evokes that feeling, you know, and it makes you think about what you can do about it. But at the same time, there is like, within those compositions and pictures there, I can get little things in it that, like, I spent an enormous amount of time on the light, on this one guy, on his backpack, on his life preserver that was really important to me, that I wanted to, like, give it a bit of hope in it somehow. But in that sense, the formal aspect of the works, I mean, there is a really basic idea that all these images are based out of just a really visceral desire of, on my own, to own these images, to possess them. Whoa. That's what people... I want to, okay, I really want to ask you about your change relation to this idea of appropriation and how it's changed in our own time since our moment in the 1980s when we emerged. But let me, let me get there. And just to stick with, you know, the intensity of these images, we talked, you talked about how they're archetypal. It also seems to me that many are almost apocalyptic. And I mean, you talk again in the catalogue about a world in which technology has gone. Can I wonder if there's any way in which you feel seduced by catastrophe? And there's a line that's often associated with Frederick Jameson, but it's, no one knows really what the source is, that it is easier for us now to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. And I wonder if you abet this syndrome at all. And then the catastrophism of your images. What's interesting is when I was doing the atomic bombs, I was reading some Chris Hedges stuff. And Chris Hedges was talking about how he'd been this war correspondent. And he found himself being addicted to going to war. And he started talking about the lusts of the eye and how, talking about the Bible and how he became seduced by the stuff. And I started thinking about that. And at the same time, I remember reading a bunch of stuff about the raft of the Medusa and the idea of how do you turn disaster into art. It became another issue. But it is, the time that we live in right now is not easy times that we're living in. So that somehow you want to reflect that somehow. For sure. But the thing is, I also grew, as an artist, we grew up in the age of Reagan, which is like early, he said, let's make America great again before Trump did. So we were put in that condition. Well, that's another thing I want to ask you about. Your sense that we're roughly the same age. We were born into a condition of disappointment. And that's what you said. And I think you relate it to Goya and Eisenstein in the sense that Goya is born before the Enlightenment was appointed to the court the same year as the French Revolution but sees the invasion of Spain and then the restoration of the monarchy. And he sees the ideals of the Enlightenment and the revolution undone. Eisenstein is fired by the revolution but then has to work under Stalin. I mean, you're a kid of the 1960s. I never knew that a friend of yours was shot at Kent State when I read the catalog. But then we come of age in the 70s and 80s, as you say, under Reagan. So talk about that condition of disappointment. There was a topos in postmodern art too that somehow this was an art that was belated. It was melancholy. All it could do is pour over images as ruins. So if it was disappointment then, what is it now? Revenge. The movie. No, it's like, yeah. The irony about how one's life is shaped by images is like it's a... Because I wasn't... Because I didn't read, my life was so dictated. What do you mean you didn't read? I was dyslexic. I had a really hard... I didn't read my first book till I was 30. So reading to me is still... I mean, I like to read. I try to read and I actually read very slowly. But I mean, I wasn't... My education and most of my education wasn't based upon a... What's that noise? Sorry. But it wasn't based upon... It wasn't based upon the written word. It was written... My language was pictures always in that sense. It was really important. But the thing is also, what was interesting with dealing with Kate and talking about it, I never acknowledged this connection to the image that was in Kent State. It was like that came back basically because of the whole thing with Goya. I went to school with this kid. He wasn't my best friend. I knew him vaguely, but I realized how much that affected me at that point. And then when I was in high school, I remember organizing political protests and stuff like that. But I never realized how much that image affected me in that sense in that way. I just have two more quick questions before we open up to others. And they have to do with this question of appropriation then and now. Back in the day, early work in appropriation and pictures art seemed that the point was to, as you say, make pictures of pictures to undo the reality of the image, to question representation, to derealize the image. Now it seems that you use the fictive because these are composites. You really put them together. You pump up the power. Now it seems as if you want to realize the image to make it real, to make the real real again. Can you just talk about how your relation to the image and its relation to the real has changed and what it might be? What's interesting is that in relationship a lot of us were making work and we were making work and it had not been, it wasn't intellectually tracked. Doug came along, Doug Grimm came along and basically gave us this incredible gift of trying to explain to us what we were doing. You know what I mean? You understand what I'm saying? There were others too, but anyway. Well, you came along too. And then there was like Robert. And Craig and things. The thing is that to have that moment when the pictures are open to have somebody actually write and kind of give us an idea of what he thought we were doing was this incredible gift. I've talked to other artists. I get that, but that's not the question. I didn't necessarily know what I was doing at that point for sure. The difference is then I didn't know what I was doing. Now I know what I'm doing. That's the difference. I mean, do you agree that we've gone from a moment when the point seemed to be to question representation to a point now where you, when it needs to make representation work again so it can do battle in the world of fake news and alternative facts? I mean to make people see, as you say, to slow them down, to connect the thing is these pictures are not, they're no longer pictures of pictures. They're pictures, period, in that sense. They're still made of pictures of pictures of pictures of pictures. Okay, last question for me. So you were called an appropriation artist and many of you, many of us use that term with real glory almost. Now appropriation has a whole other valence. It's expropriation. To put it crudely before anyone else does, what right do you have to the image of the refugees and how do you feel about this extraordinary image? I think it is an extraordinary image. It's in a private European collection. So talk to us about those problems, those contradictions. One of the aspects is, at the point of the fact that I bought the rights of the photograph from the photographer. I had this really interesting exchange with him about the photo taken in the photograph. We did, when we finally sold the piece, at one point there was a debate as to who was it. People were arguing. I never thought I would sell this piece first of all. And then there was a museum in Dubai that wanted to buy it and I got really freaked out. I kept thinking, you can't sell it to the people in Dubai. That's why there's people in the fucking rafts anyway. But anyway, this German museum, who is an incredible museum, bought the piece and the idea was that part of the money that we got from this thing went to the refugee causes. So we allocated part of the funds for selling the piece that went to those things. The thing is that this is the world that I live in and I can't go there to work with them. I can actually make these images, make you really look at these images a little bit more and maybe feel more for them. And at the same time, maybe there is a financial aspect. Like when I made the drawings of the cops in Ferguson, part of that money, the galleries, when we sold the work, part of that money actually went to the legal funds and things like that. So somehow we want to actually financially make some of that have some effect of it for sure. Whether I have the right to these images, I'm very, when we did the show here in Brooklyn, we were very super sensitive about things, about not having certain pieces and we discussed with a lot of people whether I had the right to do these certain images. And like the football players, football player was a perfect example of it. And to me the football player was an example of something where I thought it was this incredibly heroic image that historically, and I found this moment when these guys did it, it was as important as when the guys, Tommy Brown and John Carlos had the black gloves in the 68 Olympics, I thought it was that kind of moment. I actually think that the question who has the right to any image is a really dangerous one. Especially given your idea of the commons of images, how important that is maybe as a public space. I get that there have to be all kinds of different ways to parse it, but when we really become identitarian about images, but maybe this is a moment to open it up to all of you. You know there's that kind of damning phrase when someone says you have a good grasp of the obvious, but in a way you kind of do, or that's your description, but in kind of the way you're talking about these obvious things, however you interpret them, but could you just talk about your process? Like how do you go about making an image like these? I originally would respond to images I have found in the world. Now I basically have an idea of images that I wanted to use and I seek them out on the internet, which is really great. But sometimes it's like, for instance, the cops from Ferguson was a response to an image that I saw in the newspaper where I first saw it and I kind of freaked out. I thought this was like Ukraine or something, or Baghdad. Then I remember seeing McDonald's up in the background. I thought, fuck this is United States. Then I bought three different photographs from photographers of that point and started to read up about the militarization of the police and all the equipment they had. And the actual process of the drawings are the paper mounted onto the honeycomb aluminum two layers of paper so that to restore drawings is much easier to take paper from paper. The panels are quite expensive, so we do a lot of studies. I have really great assistants, I really great. If I were to make the drawings myself, there would be three drawings in the show. And I'm not so much interested in... I want the drawings all feel like they're done by one hand for sure, but I have assistants and because I'm not... I'm interested in images, but I'm not... I want them to have a certain quality for sure, but the thing is that the process really is kind of very labor-intensive. And it's a very perverse... I've taken the medium of drawing, which is like when I started off, when I started off at the beginning, it's like my friends are doing photographs, videos, some of them, very few of them are painting, but I was trying to make sculpture and I ran out of money and I had some paper and I started drawing. And drawing is something that I've always done. So I've taken this medium, which is basically always in the basement of museums and considered kind of intimate and taken it to my own, and taken it to a point of like... I don't want to say obscenity, but where do you see charcoal drawings as big? I like the idea that they're big drawings. And now I've actually gotten to the point where we make our own charcoal, the grime, the charcoal is applied in all these different ways with brushes. And the process of drawing is very much... Even though the drawings, they seem to aspire, their main goals is to be painting, their scale and stuff like that, they're still done like a drawing because they're opposites of traditional paintings. Like traditional painting, you work from dark to light. The white in all the drawings is the white of the paper. So I work the opposite way. And the drawing is also... My background and my degree is in sculpture, so the final stages of the drawing is carving, where you kind of carve the image out of the drawing. So anyway, I hope that explains what... Yeah, well the raft is made of a bunch of different photographs. One was taken by this guy Will Rose of the guys in the boat, and then we added water, like water photographs we've taken. We just added it into it because I knew... I made a little doodle of how I wanted it to be, and then we had to build a picture of it from that point on, for sure. So there is kind of like... There isn't an intervention on my part. Well no, I know how I want the picture to be for sure. Yes, sir? So it sounds like you both agree on Young's idea of the collective unconscious. But the full question, and then tell me if you disagree, but that's sort of what it sounded like. And I was wondering if you do agree with that, if one can be aware in their experience that these are collective images, or if you can't ever see that, and that's something that only an objective outsider is aware of. No, I mean, I found this idea interesting, the idea of collective unconscious, and I gave up on it, and then I did a series of Magellan, and then I started to do these big charcoal drawings. The irony is that after I finished like seven series or so, I stopped, I hit a brick wall, and then one night I had this crazy cousin who thinks that she's a born-again Christian, but she was also star-track-free, she also thinks Jesus is ever matter of space, but anyway, she thought that I had done Genesis, and which brought me back to the idea of if possible, are there images of the collective unconscious. The thing is, I think there are profound images that are in us, that are locked somewhere in us, and that somehow I want to try to access them for sure. I mean, the idea of collective unconscious, I don't necessarily know if I want to have my images, my collective unconscious connected to Nazis in that sense, and that's a whole other thing. Now, what do you have to say? Yeah, I think that there are images that are externally effective, that are iconic, that are the psychic intensity, but I think it's entirely cultural and historical. It's not wired into us as tribes. I mean, that's where the Jungian inflection of this idea is really problematic, but it's really hard to get away from that understanding. There's a great art historian, Abbey Warburg, who's obsessed with why it is that certain images recur across time and why they seem to have this mnemonic power from antiquity through to the present. So it's a real riddle for art historians too. So I don't deny that they're iconic mnemonic images. I just think you have to be very cautious about how you see them as active in us and in us collectively. Okay, thank you. He read the book. Abbey Warburg is actually really interesting. I started to look at him. I thought he was really kind of interesting in how he tried to do that. It was hard for me. I wanted to see the images he was actually working with. I never got those. Do they actually exist someplace? Yeah, I mean, like Magellan, like your piece, he had a whole atlas. I mean, he had all these posters, blackboards, hung with velvet where he would hang up different images that seemed connected from classical nips to women golfers of his time. And he would see the same gesture, the same motion. And for him, they were almost engrams of our kind of emotive power. There is a connection. I just don't think that it's hardwired. Hi. I had a question. Robert, you speak about constructing your images from different photographs and different elements. And when you look, or not photographs, but the images, but when you look at the images, they all remain largely within the realm of the sensible or the rational. You know, they all cohere as they could be real images. So I'm curious to ask, why do you remain within the realm of the rational or the sensible or the documentary? Why don't you make images with all this power that you can make these images that look like documentary photographs? Why don't you make images of utopias or things you want to see or things that you would alter to it? Here's a plant. It's a really good question. I think the images I make are already pretty absurd to begin with. I mean, in that sense, they're made out of rage, for sure, in that sense. And that line of cops is much bigger than the line of cops that were there, for sure. So there is a construction of how within the images, for sure, that I deal with, for sure. I mean, I want them to trick you into thinking you're actually seeing real things, for sure. I mean, that's why I like the fact that the paper has a grain to them that maybe you're actually not quite sure there are drawings or are they photographs, for sure. I mean, I want them to be more real than photographs, for sure, in that sense. And the fact that I always find it entertaining when people find out that there are drawings and how much they stop and look at them, for sure. I also find it interesting that I saw this film about the Herzog film Cave of Dreams, where it was with all these charcoal drawings on the wall, and I thought, wow, this is my ancestry. I go back, I'm like a modern-day caveman in that sense. I like that. Not charcoal. Simon, do you mean why are the images dystopian rather than utopian? In a sense, or why are they still... You know, you talk about these are images that you see every day, and then there are recreations of those images that you see every day. Does it... Is there some other mechanism of... You have this power of creating these documentary images, right? They're not documentary images. No, but they read almost like that. You almost have an x-ray, which is supposed to be truth. And so you have this power to make truth. So I'm just curious, you know, what do you do with that power? Maybe I'm trying to get you to look at them a little more. In that sense, it's like, I think... I just don't think people look very closely, period, in that sense. You could see a picture of a raft of refugees in the New York Times, and then you go on, you look at the next page, pictures of Kim Kardashian with the fuck... I mean, I want to make images that make you look longer at things and try to absorb them on a deeper level, for sure. You know, the thing is, I don't necessarily want to be political with the world, for sure, I just feel like I'm kind of compelled to make these images. It's like I don't necessarily really wake up in the morning and go, I really want to make a drawing of people in a raft, you know, in that sense, I feel like I have to make them, for sure. It's like... it's basically my job. I don't know, does that answer it? A kind of... Also, I don't know what Utopia is anymore. We talk about technology also, we used to think technology was going to save us, now we think it's going to kill us, so what the fuck's the difference? Hi, I have a question about the Eisenstein installation, I think I'd like to call it, if you're comfortable in responding to that, since it's really his work. But, you know, I walked in and of course it was visually struck by the beauty of it, and I was discussing it with a friend of mine who's an art historian, and I discussed it in detail, and he came back with... he responded at Douglas Gordon. And I guess the question is, Eisenstein's claim to fame, so to speak, was his use of montage, the collision of images, and in this very beautiful seven-screen pavilion, we're seeing the images slowed down to 1% their original speed, as the didactic says, which sort of negates the whole sense of what montage is, because montage is based on timing and collision of image, which is based on time, and you had mentioned Ken Jacobs and Sherrits as possible reference points. But when I was looking at the piece, I wasn't seeing films, I was seeing pictures. So if you could care to respond to that, because again, we're not seeing 24 frames a second as Eisenstein did when he made his collisions. Well, you see, I also want to point out something that's really interesting, if you look at all seven pictures, the three films on the left-hand side, the pictures seem to change faster than the pictures on the right. That's because the pictures on the left-hand side are silent films, and they're 18 frames per second, so there's less information changing. The thing is also, by putting them next to each other, all seven pictures, it is one gigantic montage. And Eisenstein used to talk about montage based upon the idea that individual pictures were like the Japanese or Chinese pictograms. So within those images were images within those images that then he would then connect to other images to create a cinematic language. So therefore, it was kind of the idea of taking... But at the same time, I was so impressed with his images, his composition. I mean, to see the incredible precision that he put to every image that blew me away because he was highly influenced by D.W. Griffiths for sure, which is ironic, but the other thing is also with these films, you're dealing with films that were tools of propaganda, and we stripped off the sound, we stripped off the text out of it for sure, but yeah, I think they're just incredibly beautiful images for sure. Yeah, I mean, I just... I think it's a really important sense. Just one brief follow-up question. When you put the whole piece together, did you ever look at the films at a different frame rate to see if you wanted them moving a little faster? Yeah, well, what was interesting is these are high... To get Eisenstein's films in Russia was really hard. They're kind of kept by the secret society, like outside of Moscow, and somehow they managed to get these direct transfers from the negatives, which is really great. So we tried various speeds, and this one seemed to be the most, dare I say, poetic way to do... It gave you enough time to see the images. At the same time, you thought they weren't going to change, and then they would change. What I feel really sad about is that you don't see the Eisenstein drawings, which were absolutely fantastic, because in Russia you could actually watch the Eisenstein drawings while you could look at the films at the same time. But the Russians wouldn't send them to the United States, because again, that problem goes on. Fine. As you were talking about your process, really I was struck by the kind of the storyboarding of the process that it feels like in terms of constructing these images, almost like it's not the documentary of the image, but almost the emotional imprint that's left behind after the processing of all of the images is what gets constructed, sort of what we walk away feeling like. And I was wondering if, because as your process is, you're going deep down into the grain of the paper, but as you put all these up, and you started to experience the intersection, the fabric that gets woven between all of the work, if you had any other kinds of experiences that you started to step back and get further back from it with all the other work that was up? What's ironic is that little glass box in the room that you walk you through, I do this thing called frame studies where I make, in my notebook, I make frames, all different size frames, I just make these really abstract renderings of compositions, how do you divide a frame? And I use these very abstract frame studies as kind of like basis for building pictures on it. So then when I find a picture that I like, that I want to use, I look through these frame studies and then I can figure out how, so it's really pretty visceral and intuitive how the structures are. They're basically marks, like just messy marks of how a picture can be composed for sure. I find it interesting that seeing this exhibition, I've come back to see it a couple of times now, I'm interested in the fact that the show becomes a bit of a film in itself, like how the frames follow each other for sure. You want to hope that your art will teach you shit, but the problem for me is I just see my mistakes, I go, well, I could have done that better or this could be different. I'm very proud of the work on the show for sure, but there are things I think I could have done better, I could change for sure. But otherwise, I hope that answers your question. Well, if not, thanks, Robert, and people can go see the show. Thank you.