Robert Longo & Avant Arte

For decades, Robert Longo has distilled the image storm of our time into hypnotic drawings. Our upcoming print collaboration celebrates this enduring iconography of Robert's practice. The ancient archetype of the American flag is suspended in mid-air, whilst 80’s New York counter-culture is captured in a freeze frame.

Iconography of the modern world

As a child, Robert Longo avoided reading for two reasons. Firstly, he was dyslexic. Secondly, he grew up in a time when the world was being constructed less out of words and more out of pictures. He recalls spending hours in front of the television watching epic films and the American flag being planted on the moon. Flicking through his parents’ copy of Life Magazine, he noticed that the images that accompanied articles on ‘serious’ topics like war and famine were always in black-and-white. He reasoned, “maybe black-and-white, for me, is about telling the truth” and that belief stuck with him. Over time he learned how to read pictures – studying patterns and symbols to understand what an image is communicating, and how, and why. 

In earlier eras, this study and interpretation of images symbols would have been called iconography. For Robert, this is necessary to navigate the “image storm” that we’re living through. However the opposite has become the norm, we encounter so many images that we don’t stop to consider the meaning, authority and power. Robert wants to challenge that engagement. His enormous black and white drawings are usually untitled. The viewer must read the images – meticulous recreations of photographs we might see on the news or on our social media feeds. Robert admits, “ultimately, I have a desire to share how I see the world.” 

Men in the Cities – the making of a symbol

Robert Longo broke into the lively New York City art scene in the late 70s as part of the Pictures Generation – a wave of artists who, like him, had come of age with the rise of mass media. Influenced by contemporary critical theorists like Roland Barthes and John Berger, they used art to confront the image-saturated culture that surrounded them. Robert remembers, “my generation was a real rowdy generation. We were really eager to replace the people before us.” 

Robert’s Men in the Cities (1979-1983) series became a defining work of the movement, and ricocheted throughout popular culture. When his 13 year-old son’s friend first saw the series at a Met Museum retrospective on the Pictures Generation (2009), she asked him whether he “got the idea from the iPod ads.” In fact, Robert began the series in the late 70s by taking photographs of friends on the roof of his apartment building near Wall Street with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. His models included fellow artist Cindy Sherman, gallerist Larry Gagosian, and dancer Eric Barsness, dressed in “urban uniforms and Film Noir attire.” While taking the photos, he pelted them with various objects to capture the dynamic poses that became the series’ signature.

Although the photographs have themselves become iconic, they were originally just a preparatory stage for the final artworks. Robert projected them onto paper to form the basis of huge charcoal and graphite drawings. He remade the figures in black-and-white, changing details of their clothing, modifying their poses, and removing the background entirely. The abstracted figures became contorted bodies floating in negative space devoid of all context – are they in pain or rapturous pleasure?

For Robert, the answer is simultaneously both and neither. He was inspired by two visuals from the cultural zeitgeist. Firstly, the way people dance to punk rock music. Secondly, the way violent death is depicted in movies. In particular, the death scene at the end of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s neo-noir film The American Soldier (1970) where the protagonist writhes in slow motion after being shot. Robert saw that, without context, the gestures are eerily similar. However, what he wanted to evoke was the moment of impact of some unknown force on a human body.

The works were first exhibited as a series in 1981, and immediately caught the attention of the art world. Robert believes that “all art is an indicator of the time when it happened” and Men in the Cities captured the essence of New York in the late 70s and early 80s. New York was a city full of contradictions – a hotbed of countercultural movements competing with the rise of yuppie culture. Meanwhile the economic boom in Wall Street, real estate and the art market only made the rampant social inequality more evident. This in turn led to the skyrocketing crime rates that gave New York the nickname ‘fear city’. The Men in the Cities are caught in that ambivalence – both falling and flying, rejoicing and dying. Aptly, the drawings hang in the pristine apartment of the fictional investment banker and yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000), a satire on the cultural identity crisis of 80s New York. 

In 1986, an LA Times reviewer wondered whether Men in the Cities “will survive their popularity, but so far they haven’t faded with overexposure.” Robert’s relationship with the series was also complicated by the fame – “they became so successful that they entered the culture in a way that caused me to lose authorship.” Because of that, he spent years “running away” from it but looking back he sees that it is “an important part of his history.” With Men in the Cities, Robert began his now famous process turning photographs into detailed drawings at the scale of classical paintings. It also established his practice of working in years-long series that explore “the lifespan of an idea.” Above all, Men in the Cities more than achieved its original purpose –  “I always wanted them to be like a guitar chord in a Sex Pistols song – an abstract symbol.” 

Over time, Robert has shifted his attention towards symbols that are already ubiquitous in culture. His practice interrogates the way media images alter our reality, and our understanding of truth and power. Even though Robert now draws from existing photography rather than creating his own, he often edits the source photograph to construct an image that feels ‘more true’ to the idea that he wants to convey. Like the Men in the Cities floating in negative space, the motifs become “abstract symbols” – shorthand for something much greater than themselves like fear, love, death or rebirth.

Falling Flag – America in the age of hyperreality

Reflecting on half a century of making art, Robert realises “when I look back on everything I’ve done, it all somehow makes sense to me. But it doesn’t make sense when you’re actually doing it.” As well as the drawings that made his name, he also works in photography, sculpture and his mixed media combines. Regardless of the medium, he says, “I consider what I am making to be hyperrealistic images.” There are two meanings of the term ‘hyperrealism’, the one that immediately comes to mind when looking at Robert’s art is the way that he renders objects in greater detail than the naked human eye would see. The second meaning speaks to the postmodern condition of truth being inseparable from fiction. This results in a heightened experience of reality that is shaped by the media we consume. 

Robert engineers “moments of hyperrealism” in his art by focusing on motifs connected to heightened emotional states such as sex, violence, birth, and worship. It was one such image that had transformed his worldview. In 1970, Robert saw the dead body of a former classmate in a photograph that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. John Paul Filo’s photographs show the chaos and bloodshed of the Kent State Massacre, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of students protesting the US invasion of Cambodia. In the public consciousness, the images became symbolic representations of the anti-war movement and first amendment rights. For Robert, the photographs inspired a lifelong interest in both media images and political organising. 

Although motifs of “the American dream, power, and protest” have circled his work since the very beginning, current affairs over the last decade have drawn them into sharp focus – namely, protest movements like Black Lives Matter, mass migration, climate change, and the renewed threat of world war. Robert sees parallels between the present and the era of the civil rights movements and the cold war that he came of age in. 

In representations of the United States, the flag is a symbol par excellence. To Robert, “flags are an ancient archetype” that evoke strong emotional responses. The American flag code that advises on its proper care and display, also contains the often recited pledge – “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

In the early 1990s, Robert cast the stars and stripes into heavy bronze for his Black Flags series – emphasising the metaphorical weight of the symbol. Meanwhile for Protocol Verso, he draws billowing flags with such detail that you notice the material composition of each, right down to the slight variations in the stitching. In doing so, Robert presents the flag as both a universally recognised ideal and a tangible manmade thing. This duality mirrors his view of the USA:

This idea of a diverse democracy is quite brilliant. I still think the idea of America is somewhat hopeful. The problem about America is that there are a lot of Americans that don’t want to change it.

In the digital age, critical engagement with media images is more important than ever. Robert responds to that urgency by slowing down – “the amount of images that inundates us daily has required me to navigate images with more intention.” In the eye of the image storm, reality is intensified and emotions are heightened making it impossible to separate fact from fiction. Robert hopes to “motivate people to keep engaging, keep mobilizing during a time of crushing uncertainty” by deconstructing the symbols that make up our world. These complex emotional, social and political dynamics are epitomised in Untitled (Falling Flag). To Robert, “the image of the falling flag is about revealing a void. It’s a curtain falling, and nothing exists behind it.” It is an invitation to look beyond the appearance of a symbol, and reckon with the meaning, power, and authority that underpins it. 

The pair of silkscreen editions launch in support of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, where the first comprehensive exhibition of Robert's work in Scandanavia is on display. Find out more about the exhibition which contains a number of works from Robert's long-standing career.

Photography: Ollie Tomlinson
Set Design: Michael O'Connell