Robert Longo Art Seen
by Steven Pollock
Starting with “Men in the Cities,” I imagine Robert Longo’s non-moving pictures akin to the methods of Giuseppe Fiorelli, who in 1860 was appointed Superintendent of Excavations for Pompeii. Fiorelli’s innovation was to make life-like plaster casts of the ashen cavities where the corpses from the eruption of 79 AD had decomposed. The famous sculptures of Fiorelli faithfully recorded the final instant of each living person and animal, a testament to the city’s tragic fate.
Growing up in suburban Long Island, Longo has stated he first explored the world from the flickering cathode ray of 1960s television, rather than reading. As a young artist he immersed himself in the gritty emerging culture of eighties downtown New York, which shaped the style for his breakout series, “Men in the Cities.” Longo credits the final frames of a shootout scene in R. W. Fassbinder’s 1970 gangster film, The American Soldier as the direct inspiration to “Men in the Cities.”
At the Albertina, one can examine the metamorphosis from Longo’s 1980 black and white charcoal drawings, each of which are Untitled (and named parametrically Eric, Cindy, Frank, and Gretchen) leading to 1989’s multi-media Combine, Now Everybody (For R.W.Fassbinder).
In Now Everybody’s monochromatic human-scaled sculpture of an anonymous convulsing man, there are echoes of the gestures of the “Men in the City” drawings. The statue is placed against a monumental polyptych backdrop that has replaced the white ground of Longo’s early drawings. Given the date of creation, the artist may have sourced his background image from Bierut, where scenes of explosive urban ruins set amongst modern buildings were prevalent, but the image could just as well represent Gaza, Ukraine, 9/11—or by 2024 any city on the planet.
