Robert Longo’s ‘Acceleration of History’ at Milwaukee Art Museum

Cinematic is the best way to describe Longo’s velvety black-and-white movie screen-scale charcoal-on-paper drawings.

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Someone recently sent me a TikTok video of a group of middle school students struggling to identify the singers in the 1985 We Are The World video. I’ve been notified since that there’s a whole spate of memes featuring Zoomers and Alphas failing to name all sorts of canonical products served up by their Gen X and Millennial instructors. I’ve had many of my own moments of futility from “Name a famous 19th century novel?” to “who’s heard of Elizabeth Taylor?” It's clear now that the pillars of the old media and cultural systems are slowly eroding, leaving either a new kind of democracy or total enervating chaos in its rubble, depending on whom you ask. 

“Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History” at the Milwaukee Art Museum though February 23, 2025, is both a metonym and a metaphor for this collective transition from media 3.0 to 4.0. His work at MAM provocatively repositions the funhouse of contested popular imagery. And at the same time, he’s a canonical member of a legacy art world which is slowly being buried under the very images he’s investigating. This turns out to be a riveting thriller: one man’s battle against time and circumstances to save the foundation of the society sagging under his feet. Curated by Margaret Andera, running time: variable. 

And “cinematic” is indeed the best way to describe Longo’s velvety black-and-white movie screen-scale charcoal-on-paper drawings. Most will reel from his technical mastery of the medium; however, it’s Longo’s consideration of content alongside craft that is his great achievement. The tripartite relationship between image, object and activity is what fuels the plot in “Acceleration.” Take Longo’s Untitled (Nascar Crash, Daytona) and an adjacent split screen image of the U.S. Supreme Court. One can’t escape the twisting asymmetry between the implied conditions and timelines. One, a snapshot of a dynamic and freak high-speed accident on a racetrack, the other a hallowed vault in custody of a People’s highest ideals. Both painstakingly rendered; both neutral and sober. 

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Reframe his Imagery

Longo heroically speeds up the slow and slows down the hyper-speedy, allowing the viewer to reframe his imagery as necessary. But really it’s not his imagery as much as ours. Every work in the show originates from an utterly familiar place, whether it’s a bald eagle, or a house wrapped in Christmas lights. By turns banal and magnificent, all the while commenting on how similar these terms can be when scrambled by various channels of delivery. Longo’s rendering reframes his subject matter by placing meaning into what some psychologists call a “third space,” beyond cultural associations and biases. That’s not simply psycho-art babble, have one look at Untitled, (Kenny Britt, St. Louis Rams; Hands Up) and you’ll feel the wonderful ambivalence of losing your grip on an image you thought you knew and watching it migrate into a world of alternative meaning. This and an image of riot cops in Ferguson, MO take charcoal, time, and a frozen moment and render them into the closest natural thing to magic on earth. 

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"Acceleration” continues to incrementally build through the second act before climaxing, maybe by design, with an unexpected sculptural twist called Deathstar, a menacing sphere of copper bullets hovering like a conspicuously ornate chandelier in a spare room. The work is obviously more political, and tips Longo’s hand a little. Anyone aware of his history is aware of his politics. The images in the third act end up seeming a little more like a chugging litany of charged images: oxycontin pills, a native head dress, a shredded American Flag. Not quite a visual We Didn’t Start the Fire but flirting with it for sure. Then again, it occurred to me as I had the thought that Billy Joel’s suspect historical pseudo-rap actually holds up better than ever in a particulated and disconnected world. It’s self-important and dismissive at once, taking all of history and rendering it into a droning and repetitive slideshow. Time moving from waves to particles. Hmm, sounds like great contemporary commentary to me. And this is Longo’s greatest achievement: reflections on time itself. 

Agonizingly slow in moments and faster than our comprehension in others. Longo brings all of it and the history those moments represent onto the same timeline, forcing us to reckon with how our civilization’s progress relates to all the pictures that struggle burps up along the way.