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Men In The City: The Photos Behind Robert Longo’s Spellbinding Art (1979-1982)
“It’s about that moment when you feel like you’re being pulled in different directions, a kind of metaphoric depiction of the forces acting upon us in modern life.”
– Robert Longo
For his series Men in the Cities, Robert Longo set up his camera on the rooftop of his New York apartment, dressed his friends, including Cindy Sherman and Larry Gargosian, in business attire and captured their movements as he threw various objects at them. Their reactions show them in an apparent state of rapture, captured in the moment of pain, ecstasy and abandon.
Taken between 1977 and 1982, Longo turned his photographs into large-scale, monochrome charcoal and graphite drawings.
“When Robert wanted to make some photographs of people in mid-air to base his drawings on, I was happy to participate. His photos were a means to an end. I don’t think he appreciated how good they were on their own.”
– Cindy Sherman
“But it seemed like the uniform of white western world was a shirt and tie for a man and, you know, a skirt or a dress for a woman. So I chose these images for the drawings, but I channeled through a punk sensibility, which was, like, thinner ties, and thinner lapels, and tighter pants, and sexier, tighter dresses. So I didn’t want them to be those people. At the same time I wanted them to be white doomed people. I was very aware that I was making only white people because they—to me they were like—they were, like, buildings falling down, you know. They were, like, collapsing buildings.”
– Robert Longo
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“I exploded with the ‘Men in the Cities’ (1977–83) series in the late 1970s and early ’80s. They became so successful that they entered the culture in a way that caused me to lose authorship. They became iPod ads, fashion ads. I intended viewers to see ‘Men in the Cities’ as a series of images. I always wanted them to be like a guitar chord in a Sex Pistols song – an abstract symbol.”
– Robert Longo
“When you draw an image… you burn it. It becomes part of every molecule in your body, and then you spit it back out to project it onto a surface. It’s a transmutation.”
– Robert Longo
“When I was making drawings in the beginning [in the 1980s], all my friends were doing photographs and films and videos. I didn’t have any money, so to make a long story short I took home some backdrop paper and just started to draw. I realised I could do with drawing what I wanted to do; I didn’t have to make photographs. I took drawing to this obscene point where I wanted to compete with movies and magazines and television. It’s a weird zone because when I tell people I make charcoal drawings they think I’m making these little, tiny things, but I’m not. It’s amazing to make something out of dust.”
– Robert Longo to Ropac
Screenshot
Via: Smithsonian, Weng, incamera, Frieze
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