“Robert Longo”
at Dorfman Projects, New York.
September 9–October 30, 1999
How does Robert Longo’s work look in 1999? Exactly as it did some fifteen years ago when he briefly assumed the mantle of Eighties art star, although less engaging for its lack of development. In fact, the only things that seem new in Longo’s show of recent multiples and photographs at Dorfman Projects are the dates—all 1999. Longo’s signature figures, torqued and twisted yuppies, are still with us in the four three-color lithographs (in an edition of fifty) of two men and two women which form the backbone of this diminutive show. Anyone who has seen Longo’s previous images of stylized figures in shades of gray, black, and white will find it hard to discern any change of direction or emphasis here.
As if trying to maintain a distinctly Eighties sense of corporate heroism, Longo presents, on a white ground, two women in business attire and two men in suits, all of whom might have been pulled from the film Wall Street. There are some finely drawn details—hair filaments, the crease of a skirt —but the overwhelming impression given by these four lithographs is less of an attentive realism than of a curiously undirected expressionism. Why does the first woman toss her hair back with her arms in the air? Why does the other woman fall back, away from the viewer as though recoiling from a slap? Like those of the women, the men’s gestures