Courtesy of Harold Meyerson
Robert Longo’s “Untitled (White House)” (2019) on display at the Palm Springs Art Museum
Like many of you, I needed a break over the holidays, so the week between Christmas and New Year’s found me in Palm Springs, a traditional hangout of people in flight from winter. On my last day there, my friend M and I visited the Palm Springs Art Museum, which, as M had assured me, actually boasted a first-rate permanent collection and terrific temporary exhibits. (As the winter and weekend haunt of the rich—present company excluded—Palm Springs has plenty of potential artwork donors, many of whom, apparently, have realized their potential.)
Topping even the museum’s Helen Frankenthaler show was a dimly lit giant room where three massive artworks by Robert Longo dominated three of the four walls. Longo has been winning acclaim for decades for his charcoal artworks, based, and riffed, on photographs. The three giant artworks were his takes on three prominent buildings—the Capitol, the White House, and the Supreme Court.
But these were our three branches of government under pressure, menacing in themselves and surrounded by landscapes and skies suitable for a filmed version of, say, Macbeth (now showing in a theater near you). A veritable Birnam Wood appears to be advancing on the White House. The Supreme Court is sundered down the middle. The columns on the buildings are darkened, all but warning us away. The statues glare like gargoyles.
I don’t know if Longo produced this work before or after January 6th of last year, but the fragility of our democracy—whether through the Trumpification of our institutions or the Trumpified climate threatening them, or both—has seldom been conveyed more breathtakingly and gut-punchingly.
In the apprehension that these artworks evoke, they seem to me a chilling representation of the empirically justified mood of the moment: dread.
