“To me this building looks like a city bank, you know, in the suburbs,” say the American artist Robert Longo of Berlin’s Capitain Petzel gallery, where his new exhibition “Stand” is being shown. “Or a BMW car dealership. I kept on thinking how the outside is the inside. You can’t avoid the outside, you know?”
You certainly can’t – at least or not since Longo got hold of it: by masking the gallery’s entire façade in an enormous black & white American flag he successfully managed to transform a once-bright and airy space into a darkened cocoon – the perfect setting for the dark drawings inside.
“Stand” is one of Capitain Petzel’s largest exhibitions to date, though Longo appeared calm and relaxed amid the preparation for what is also his first solo show in Berlin. It’s an ambition he’s held for years (Longo splits his time between Brooklyn and Charlottenburg, and is married to the the German actress Barbara Sukowa). “Berlin is just so relaxing compared to New York” he says, leaning back in his chair. “I come here and I wake up, pick up a paper, get a coffee, go to the Bio Markt and then I sit on my balcony.”
Rather than organic food and coffee, the themes of power, authority, and US politics have been central to his work since the Eighties when he produced a series of black-dyed American flags. That series was itself 10 years after his seminal “Men in Cities” work, which presented large-scale charcoal and graphite drawings of businessmen in contorted movement.
Even though his work often focuses relentlessly on American iconography, Berlin nevertheless played a formative role in how oeuvre, and that’s perhaps most visible in his drawing series, ”Peep Show of American Pornography” (also included in “Stand”), where Longo draws from his experiences of the Berlin peep shows of the 1980’s. “I remember the first time I came to Berlin, and I went to these porno places where you go look through the windows”. Those furtive memories fed into the 25 drawings of his “American Porno” series which includes realist documentary imagery of McDonalds, the Ku Klux Klan, Monster Trucks, Michael Jackson impersonators and Kim Kardashian.
It’s dissonant, provocative stuff, but that’s the point. “I’m not interested in collage, I’m not interested in pastiche, I am interested in collision,” he says, confident in knowledge that “Stand” would never see the light of day in his home country.
“No way,” he says. “It either wouldn’t be shown or it would be seen as preaching to the choir”. AB