What do you say, Robert Longo?
“They were in horrible condition, they looked like I had kept them in my shoes.” The photographs of men and women twisting and contorting against the Big Apple’s skyline were only ever intended as source material for Robert Longo’s now-iconic 1979 drawings Men in the Cities. But Longo was intrigued when a friend suggested he showcase the slides on their own, so in 1991, the old images finally made their gallery debut.
“Throwing things at them was a way to get things going.” In order to affect such dynamic poses from the stylish Men in the Cities models, Longo hurled rocks and hard rubber balls at his subjects. Had he not been quite so chummy with the group, the intense rooftop shoot could have taken a turn for the worse. “I think most of my friends got the idea of it pretty quickly,” says Longo. “Very rarely did I work outside my immediate circle of friends, and when I did, it was always very clumsy.” “They have so permeated the culture to the point that ownership doesn’t exist anymore.” Men in the Cities may be over 30 years old now, but Longo continues to have a surreal relationship with the series, which was famously displayed in Patrick Bateman’s apartment in the film adaptation of American Psycho. “The images come up everywhere,” he says. “People keep asking me about that guy falling in [the opening credits of] Mad Men. And when people were falling outside the World Trade Center, they were telling me it was like my drawings.” Apparently, even Steve Jobs has inadvertently stolen some of Longo’s limelight. “When my [youngest] son was 14 or 15 his friend asked me if I got the idea for the drawings from the iPod ads.” “It’s a cross between eye-opening and needles in your eyes.” Longo had a brief turn as a Hollywood director for the 1995 sci-fi flick Johnny Mnemonic, andisn’t shy about sounding off on bigwig film executives—at least not the ones he dealt with. “They tried to amp my movie up and put it on steroids and turn it into something it wasn’t,” he laments. “If anything, it reinforced how grateful I am to be an artist, because I don’t have any of those assholes around bugging me about what to do.” “The record company was getting too fucking weird for me.” Before Keanu Reeves was taking cues from Longo on the set of his cyberpunk flop, bands like New Order, R.E.M. and Megadeth were looking to the art star for music-video direction in the ’80s. But this proved to be another “torturous experience” for Longo. “I have other projects that take care of that wanderlust for me now.” “Black and white is the truth.” As evident from the wall-spanning charcoal drawings exhibited in God Machine—Longo’s heroic solo show in Paris this past April—he has little use for bold Technicolor hues. It seems Longo’s childhood reading material can account for his inclination towards shadowy smudges. “Part of the reason why I’m working with black and white is I grew up with Life and Time—those were my bibles. Most of the time the only colour photography in those magazines was of Hollywood or Las Vegas or the king and queen. And all the black-and-white stuff was, like, Vietnam or the young prostitutes of Calcutta.”
Photograph: Terry Richardson
The New York artist and (very) occasional filmmaker insists he had nothing to do with Mad Men’s opening credits
BY: JENNY CHARLESWORTH
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