Artist Robert Longo and Henry Rollins speak during The Un-Private Collection: Robert Longo and Henry Rollins, an art talk presented by The Broad museum and held at The Orpheum Theatre on Tuesday, May 17, 2016, in Los Angeles, Calif. | Photo: Sandoval Media/The Broad. | Click the image to watch the full conversation. In partnership with The Broad: The Un-Private Collection is a talk series, featuring unexpected pairings of cultural leaders and influential artists in the Broad collections, taking place at venues around Los Angeles.
As part of The Broad Museums The Un-Private Collection series, renowned artist Robert Longo chatted with his long time friend and musician/ journalist Henry Rollins in Downtown Los Angeles on May 17, 2016. They discussed Longos Men in the Cities series and his artistic process.
What follows is a condensed transcript of their conversation.
Henry Rollins: Robert, I know you've been asked about this series like a hundred times but I'll make this really brief. Many of you have seen these images of these well-dressed men and women who look like they've been hit by some massive invisible fist or they're having some kind of glorious seizure. You're the creator of this work so I would like to ask you what's your intent and what you wanted to get across in the Men in the Cities series.
Robert Longo: The thing is as an artist you have to figure out what are the images that you're going to make. One of the things that was interesting as a kid growing up was watching how James Cagney died in a movie just by going, Uhh. As a kid, I played a game called Who Could Fall Dead the Best. That was a game where one guy pretends to have a gun and the other kids run at you and you shoot. Whoever dies the best gets to be the guy with the gun. You following me?
Anyway, we were part of this thing called the Pictures Generation, [creating] some bullshit appropriations. I found this image from a still from a [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder film called The American Soldier. It was this image of a guy being shot and I made a cast aluminum relief of it. It was in this show called Pictures. This piece got an enormous amount of attention.
I realized people were paying attention to that piece, and they weren't paying attention to the bands I was playing in, the performances I would do and things like that. So I decided to dump everything else and really focus on Men in the Cities, which the title comes from a combination of Alice in the Cities, the [Wim] Wenders' film, and the record called In the City [by The Jam].
Artist Robert Longo and Henry Rollins speak during The Un-Private Collection: Robert Longo and Henry Rollins, an art talk presented by The Broad museum and held at The Orpheum Theatre on Tuesday, May 17, 2016, in Los Angeles, Calif. | Photo: Sandoval Media/The Broad.
I couldn't find any pictures in magazines anymore, so I thought instead what I'll do is start photographing my friends. The clothes that we were wearing at the time were much more severe than the traditional punk stuff that everyone was wearing. Basically, like shorts and ties then lapels, stovepipe pants and things like that. I got my friends to wear basically the stuff they normally wore and I would take them up on the roof of my studio that was down by the Brooklyn Bridge and I would throw stuff at them and take photographs of them.
I would shoot tons of pictures to find one picture that was really great. The thing was I was looking for a psychotic impulse.
HR: I have a question, two questions actually about your process and I want to bring up a photo called The Bullet Hole and Broken Window which from what I understand was taken from the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. What I want to ask you is what is your process, your emotional commitment to going from a photo of something that awful and having to spend hours, days, weeks, bringing that to bear? What are you going through in this process?
RL: As an artist, I don't want to be political by choice. I mean, I feel I'm compelled to. When I saw this image I thought about the great tradition that happens in art, of people making great art from catastrophes.
I thought how history hasn't changed that much but I saw this image and I thought about the moment of impact versus how long This became an issue of how long did it take to draw a bullet hole versus how long it took to make the bullet hole. The idea of seeing beauty in this thing was really important to me and at the same time, I wanted to deal with the shock of it. I wanted you to look at something and think it was really beautiful and at the same time realize, Holy shit. This is really crazy. I mean, that was really important to me.
What happens is I end up, for lack of really horrible way of describing it, I tend to beautify it. I try to make it even more beautiful than it is because I want to make it more seductive for you to get into it so that then you go, Whoa. What the fuck am I looking at? I think that's really important that you have this moment where you all of a sudden go, I'm thinking this bullet hole is really beautiful. I think it's really important to me and this happens a lot when I work.
Robert Longo, Untitled (Bullet Hole in Window, January 7, 2015), 2015-2016. Charcoal on mounted paper. 193 x 363.2 cm. (76 x 143 in.) | Image: Courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.
HR: The great writer, Hubert Selby Jr. once characterized himself as a scream looking for a mouth. Have you ever had a situation where you had a feeling or some artistic compulsion but you had no image to attach it to? You're just looking for a place to put that energy but you had no image to affix that intent to. If you had that situation, how do you get out of it?
RL: [Laughs] Then I'd be really fucked.
HR: Has that ever happe
