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Years after achieving the feat of making himself a copy machine, Longo finds the contrast button. Exactly what everyone was asking for, hotter flames, more incendiary images. A further polemicized black and white. It's all so fucking stupid. Militarized images. What the right winger sees as awesome in a big black assault weapon, the liberal sees in these murdered out politics: hyperbole of power's simulacra. "Such exaggeration feels perverse." If this is in fact politics, why are we stylizing it? Enter Benjamin.
This would all be ignorable as so much blue-chip hoo-ha. But the fear here is that a museum is going to buy these so they can hang history, not art, in their museum, an artwork that is really just an exclamation mark for the wall didactic next to it, barely art at all, just a drawing in the shape of a really pointy arrow. Just show the photograph, the history, you actually want.
See too: "Throbbing and stupid. Images of 'power' drawn as massive black portenders. ... they extrapolate out, reuse, clad their look in the same black garb of SWAT, to make you feel small. Mutate their humanitarian subjects into a threat with the Darth Vader aesthetic they purport to critique, Longo's assault drawings, men and their big scary black"
Years after achieving the feat of making himself a copy machine, Longo finds the contrast button. Exactly what everyone was asking for, hotter flames, more incendiary images. A further polemicized black and white. It's all so fucking stupid. Militarized images. What the right winger sees as awesome in a big black assault weapon, the liberal sees in these murdered out politics: hyperbole of power's simulacra. "Such exaggeration feels perverse." If this is in fact politics, why are we stylizing it? Enter Benjamin.
This would all be ignorable as so much blue-chip hoo-ha. But the fear here is that a museum is going to buy these so they can hang history, not art, in their museum, an artwork that is really just an exclamation mark for the wall didactic next to it, barely art at all, just a drawing in the shape of a really pointy arrow. Just show the photograph, the history, you actually want.
See too: "Throbbing and stupid. Images of 'power' drawn as massive black portenders. ... they extrapolate out, reuse, clad their look in the same black garb of SWAT, to make you feel small. Mutate their humanitarian subjects into a threat with the Darth Vader aesthetic they purport to critique, Longo's assault drawings, men and their big scary black"