Artist Robert Longo on AI, Keanu and his vast mirrorball of death ‘What can I say? We saw the future’

By Stuart Jeffries

I’m a mortician,” says Robert Longo, 71, clad in black and sporting a luxuriant grey bouffant. “I have an idea, then kill it by making it. Then I dress it for a funeral.” This may seem a strange way to describe your first British solo exhibition in seven years, but Longo’s “job” is even weirder than that. After he’s arranged the funeral, he has to do the eulogy, telling the media why what he’s done is worth seeing.

We’re sitting in the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Mayfair, London, before the corpse. In front of us is Untitled (Pilgrim), a multimedia installation consisting of five huge panels. Longo’s conceit is that each image has the same proportions as a mobile phone screen. “You swipe right through each image,” he explains. Its size suggests that Longo remains true to his mentor, sculptor Richard Serra. “Richard taught me in the 1970s and whenever I would see him later he’d say, ‘Still making big art?’”

The first panel is a photorealist charcoal drawing of a sculpture: Saint Teresa writhing in ecstasy in Bernini’s Roman altarpiece. Longo first saw it in the early 1970s after quitting his internship as an art restorer in Florence. Its erotic charge stayed with him. “Bernini didn’t spend much time on the drapery,” Longo says. “You can see he spent more time and effort on getting her expression just right. Look at the tilt of her head, exactly the right angle for the ecstasy he wants to express.”

Longo has long been interested in how the human form twists and bends. His breakthrough works, Men in the Cities (1977-83), were vast suites of drawings of writhing people, based on photographs he took of friends in New York dressed to resemble suited Wall Street drones. He cites as influences 1970s New York punk band James Chance and the Contortions, Michelangelo’s slave sculptures and the way, in Sam Peckinpah movies, shot bodies would get blown through doors.

Men in the Cities has since become iconic. In the 2000 film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, three Men in the Cities hang on the Manhattan apartment walls of yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman. “I had a bit part in the movie,” Longo chuckles.

In 2009, Longo visited New York’s Metropolitan Museum to see The Pictures Generation, a retrospective about a group of American artists – including Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Longo – feted for critically analysing media culture. In the lobby were three framed images from Men in the Cities. “My son’s girlfriend asked me if I got the idea from iPod ads. I said I did them 30 years before the iPod was invented.”