Word: longo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...work of Robert Longo, 32, painting resolves itself as large-scale montage, like film itself -- a chilly, imposing screen of images. Works like National Trust, 1981, fluctuate between the catastrophically private (contorted figures that might come from a disco, or might just have been felled by thrombosis or a bullet) and the blandly public (the face of a building, rendered in aluminum and fiber-glass relief). Longo's art is rooted in the mid-'70s conjunction of performance art, minimalism and video; it tries both to engage one's sense of one's body through melodramatic or newsy postures...
With other artists of Longo's age, there are two main patterns of appropriation. The first is literal copying with intent to "deconstruct" the original, as done by Sherrie Levine, 38. Levine rephotographs photos by "classic" figures like Walker Evans and does small, exact, curiously loving copies of paintings by noted early modernists like Kasimir Malevich or Arthur Dove. The aim is to make people think about the status of originality; the work has a real and precise, if muted, aesthetic dimension...
...intense, humorless Sardinian born to an aristocratic family, he rose through party ranks, was elected to parliament in 1968, and took over effective party leadership from the ailing Luigi Longo in 1969. In pursuit of his ultimate goal-inclusion in the government- Berlinguer rejected Soviet Communism as a model and approved Italy's membership in NATO. In the 1976 elections, the P.C.I, gained its greatest popularity, with 34.4% of the vote. But Berlinguer was denied the "historic compromise" of a coalition partnership with the long-dominant Christian Democrats, and his party's vote totals gradually declined...
...Crimson's domination continued into the diving events where freshman Fernando Longo surprised everyone with a first place in the one meter diving. Senior Karl Illig took the three meter diving with a dive which carned a nine from two judges and a nine-and-a half from another...
...scale, however, he is convincing. Perhaps the best work in the show is Pressure, 1982-83: the white face of a worried, singlet-clad mime in the lower half and, above it, the cold, oppressive ziggurat of an art deco-style New York building. The film noir dramatics of Longo's work are tuned down, and a subtler pathos comes through, the surprise being that Longo was able to extract it from such obvious cliches as the Urban Clown and the Faceless Skyscraper...