Robert Longo (b. 1953). Rick, from Men in the Cities, 1994. Lithograph on Arches paper. 4...

Description

Robert Longo (b. 1953)
Rick, from Men in the Cities, 1994
Lithograph on Arches paper
46 x 30 inches (116.8 x 76.2 cm) (sheet)
Ed. 87/170 (aside from 30 artist's proofs)
Signed, editioned, and dated in pencil along lower edge
Published by Greenpeace, New York

By 1981, the streets of downtown Manhattan felt like they might split apart. Reagan had taken office; Wall Street started puffing its chest again. Rent climbed; suits multiplied. Somewhere between Mudd Club and the Bowery, between Black Flag and the Business Section, a new kind of rebellion took shape. Robert Longo watched the whole thing happen, not from the margins, but from inside the noise. He did not just understand punk - he lived it. He once said punk was not about the music; it was about the decision to be against things. Men in the Cities is that decision in visual form.

Rick, like the rest of the series, wears the enemy's uniform: the black suit; the crisp white shirt; the loose tie, just undone enough to suggest a loss of control. However, Longo never lets the viewer mistake this for a moment of polish. Rick throws his body back like he is taking a hit - or, perhaps, delivering one. There is no apparent cause, no origin point of violence; his body is just in the moment of rupture, and that is precisely the point. Dancer-like in his contortion, the figure looms. However, Longo did not draw dancers; he photographed his friends - musicians, performers, artists - throwing themselves around rooftops, being yanked by ropes, and collapsing under direction. The drama was not abstract. It was personal. Bodily. An emotional outburst dressed in the drag of Wall Street.

What punk did - what Longo understood - was take the codes of power and short-circuit them. You wore the suit because it was what they feared seeing you in. You looked like a banker from thirty feet away, but up close you smelled like sweat and rage. The suit became armor, but also irony. In Rick, that irony turns elegiac. The figure does not just wear the uniform - he performs its failure. His posture reads like someone caught in the crossfire of conflicting identities: masculine, corporate, performative, exhausted. There is something tragic about it - something theatrical. You can almost hear the drum machine stuttering beneath him, the guitar squealing out feedback as the lights cut.

Longo's genius lies in his ability to translate that era's instability - cultural, emotional, political - into images that still vibrate with urgency. Men in the Cities does not aestheticize collapse; it renders it with precision. Longo knew that punk was more than posture - it was a reckoning. The scream had to be stylized because it was the only way anyone would hear it over the noise. And in Rick, we see not just a man in motion, but a system buckling from within. The body speaks before the mouth can. The suit cannot hold him together.


More information about Robert Longo. See also: Longo, Robert Artist.

Estimate: $15,000 - $25,000.

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