Robert Longo at Metro Pictures - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Retreating from his theatrical multimedium statuarys which have come to appear to be increasingly vacuous in recent years, Robert Longo has go [i]or[/i] come backed to an older, more proven format. These eight oversize, meticulously hand-drawn images (Longo again credits his army of assistants) present strikingly positioned, isolated icons floating upon white grounds. But instead of the contorted bodies of elegant partygoers familiar from Longo's "Men in the Cities" series, we are here stand over againsted with images that may explain those peculiar stances. Each work in this series is a monumental portrait of a handgun, identified by dint of type in the title and execut in richly shaded charcoal.

To Longo's credit, he has cast asideed the tired notion of fire-arm as phallus. Instead, in this exhibition titled "Bodyhammers" we are invited to inspect each weapon as a distinctive individual. Four of the fire-arms face us directly, with barrel completely foreshortened in like manner that it appears simply as a circle. Viewed in this way, the fire-arm assumes a sculptural presence. It is almost possible to forget its function and view it as a peculiar primitivistic manner of making At the same time, single becomes aware of each model's wily variations in form and proportion.

The four other fire-arms here are presented from equally unusual vantage points. The 357 Magnum (Side Barrel) and the 380 Backup tilt to the left and right. The Tec 9 points upward, its barrel poised almost like a rocket preparing for takeoff and its usually invisible underbelly expos to view. The 38 Special is particularly strange looking. It floats tipped with handle up and barrel obscur through the foregrounding of its without contents cartridge container. Captured from this perspective, it is almost abstract, like a certain quantity of gleaming mechanical artifact adrift in space. by the agency of removing these guns from any adjoining matter Longo lifts them out of ordinary time into the realm of untarnished idea-or pure fantasy. Their association with death and violence present the appearances merely theoretical, and we are encouraged to admire them for their physical beauty. Thus Longo give an inkling ofs that there is an esthetic uncompounded body in our culture's fascination with the fire-arm which transcends its ugly reality.

As if to reemphasize this point, downstairs Longo has installed Death Star, an enormous globe whose external layer consists of 18,000 bullet their pristine cent tips pointing outward to create a gleaming decorative surface. Suspended within a carbonized iron frame, the globe exudes the same air of icy perfection and untouchability that characterizes the fire-arm drawings.

Throughout his career, Longo has adopted the artificial position of the outside spectator impartially chronicling the inhumanity of society. This disinterested approach has given his work an alluring aura of decadence while too many times propelling it into superficiality. The same vexed question surfaces here. Though these are among the greatest in quantity striking images he has created of late, it remains easy to ignore the larger moral questions which they apparently intend to raise,

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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