ROBERT LONGO
The much-talked-about “Men in the Cities” drawings are life-size images of corporate youth: people in their 30s dressed in the standard business attire of the 80s, in contortions and staggering as if having seizures. The large size of the figures and their placement against a completely white ground make for a stark, potent visual effect. It’s like sitting too close at the movies, or standing a few feet away from a billboard, face-to-face with a person who appears to be suffering uncontrollably.
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As in many of Longo’s works, the process is convoluted, seemingly to legitimize the product–guarantee it be considered fine art, and not just photographs of his friends, say. In the catalog that accompanies the show are pictured some of the photographs Longo used to make the drawings. The disturbing, intriguing quality of the images is only increased by seeing an actual person in agony against the New York skyline. Making these images into drawings means they lose some of their original punch–the photographic form of reproduction might have served the artist’s intentions better. Though Longo may be attempting to add expressiveness by ritualizing the process of making the work, the result is that he takes some of the steam out of a lively idea.
With Ornamental Love, Longo has juxtaposed, in a cool and confident way, disparate images and subjects to create both terror and passionate exhilaration. The sheer size and simplicity of the work give it ample power, while the individual parts have been rendered sufficiently well to contribute to rather than distract from the work.
All You Zombies, like Now Everybody, manifests the comic-book approach to the figure: loaded with accoutrements, including a half-Viking, half-Nazi helmet and a snarling expression, it has no spine or any implication of a bone structure, nor does it withstand the same gravitational pull as those who view it. The last straw is an explosion of lightning bolts, emanating from its rear end, that’s located in the wrong spot. All You Zombies provides only a fantasy costume, in which a frat boy might spend a night terrorizing his friends.
Another of Longo’s interesting and poignant statements is in a piece called End of the Season. In it, a red cross hangs upside down in front of a black rectangle. From the bottom edge of the black ground, seven chrome-plated footballs hang from their points, like carcasses strung up by the hooves for slaughter. Longo takes some considerable risks here, not only by putting a cross and footballs together but by making it all look dead and disgraced. Although the objects–the cross and footballs–are literal, Longo leaves room for interpretation, possibly because he is more comfortable about his position as an artist in this later work, from 1987.
