Robert Longo
Seeing the Elephant: Untitled (First Day – Buford‘s Cavalry) Untitled (Third Day – The Center) Untitled (Engagement)
Untitled (First Day – Buford‘s Cavalry), Iris Print, 50,8 × 67,3 cm,
2002 Untitled (Third Day – The Center), Iris Print, 29,2 × 67,3 cm,
2002 Untitled (Engagement), Iris Print, 24,1 × 67,3 cm, 2002
The series of photographic works,
Seeing the Elephant,
by the multi-disciplinary artist Robert Longo is based upon documentary
photographs of re-enactments of the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Since the 1960s, this American war, which caused the greatest number of
casualties and took place on home ground, is one of the most popular
militaria remakes in the USA.
On historical anniversaries of particular battles, lavish performances
are organised in which several hundred, sometimes even up to 25,000
people take part. In these re-enactments the actors use their bodies as
a medium to reconstruct the past, and to experience history
individually and authentically. The title ‘Seeing the Elephant’ that
Longo selected refers precisely to this experience: this expression,
which dates from the Civil War, referred to young soldiers who went to
war for the first time and meant ‘to lose one’s innocence’.
Longo’s photographs of the anniversary battles are not merely
documentary pictures, he creates a historical paradox in them: because
of their graininess, colour, and aesthetic, they actually look like
contemporary photographs from the era they depict, but at the same time
Longo uses the cinemascope format and framing that is very similar to
film stills. With this artistic method, Longo visualises one of the
most famous sentences from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle:
“Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a
representation”. (1)
In addition, the time intervals, in which
the entertainment industry takes historical and especially tragic and
war events and makes Hollywood films or computer games out of them, are
getting increasingly shorter. The aim of Longo’s works is a critical
appraisal of America’s world of symbolism as the mirror-image of war
rhetoric and nationalist emotionalism.
Anke Hoffmann
(1) Guy Debord: Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels. Berlin 1996, p. 13 (The Society of the Spectacle, New York 1994
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