Robert Longo, Artist and Curator
By Julia Brzozka, Winter/Spring 2021 Curatorial Intern
“From the Archives” is a series that spotlights The Kitchen’s history. As a complement to our Archive Website, these posts offer focused reflections on the artists, exhibitions, events, and institutional practices that have defined and shaped The Kitchen since its founding in 1971.
WHEN AN ARTIST BECOMES PART OF AN ART INSTITUTION, they often bring in other artists with whom they have established connections in the past. For instance, Robert Longo served as Acting Video Curator at The Kitchen from fall 1977 to spring 1978 and, during that time, was able to organize programming with artists from his own communities, many of whom were associated with what have come to be known as the No Wave and Pictures Generation movements. Longo’s choices in inviting these artists to present at The Kitchen had a significant impact on programming, as evinced by the fact that many returned in the years after his tenure, and he went on to present several of his own works at The Kitchen as well. Longo’s identity as an artist is crucial to understanding his programming choices as a curator: his familiarity with both positions allowed him to curate in a way that reflected his own artistic interests and promoted the types of work he saw as most influential.
Longo’s involvement in curatorial work began while he was a student at Buffalo State College. During this time, he became acquainted with artistic spaces such as The Kitchen, Artists Space, and various galleries when he began taking trips with artist Charles Clough to New York City, hitchhiking or taking the bus to visit and speak with artists. These experiences not only allowed him to begin building connections with these spaces, but also inspired him in 1974 to work with a group of artists including Clough to co-found and direct an alternative art space of their own called Hallwalls in the hallway between their studios in Buffalo. Longo and Clough invited artists from New York to create installations at Hallwalls, and Longo began to form relationships with many of them. The artists featured in the gallery ranged from more established figures, such as Vito Acconci, to younger artists who were just beginning their careers. For instance, the last show Longo curated at Hallwalls in 1977 included his New York-based contemporaries such as Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, David Salle, Matt Mullican, and Paul McMahon.
Despite the fact that many artists repeatedly returned to Hallwalls, and that the art scene within Buffalo was growing and gaining popularity during this time, Longo’s history as a curator in the city had been getting in the way of his passion for creating art himself. In an oral history conducted for The Kitchen, Longo notes that many of the artists he was surrounded by in Buffalo saw him solely as a curator and were reluctant to accept him as an artist. By 1975, Longo had begun to look into moving to New York, as he felt that might allow him to focus on his own art and to develop further his relationships with the New York artists he had gotten to know through his position at Hallwalls.
While running Hallwalls, Longo was also developing his own work, experimenting with various mediums, including performance art. In 1976, he produced his first performance piece, Artful Dodger, at Hallwalls and presented a piece entitled Seven Seals for Missouri Breaks at the Western New York Art Show at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The latter piece is an aluminum cast relief focused on memory and cinema, inspired by the Arthur Penn film Missouri Breaks (1976). Upon seeing Seven Seals for Missouri Breaks, curator Douglas Crimp chose to invite Longo to take part in Pictures, an exhibition he was organizing for Artists Space that would take place the following year. Pictures would also feature many artists that Longo had worked with at Hallwalls, including Brauntuch, Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Philip Smith. (The exhibition’s title is the reason that the associated movement came to be known as the Pictures Generation.) This invitation to participate in the exhibition was the final push for Longo to move to New York City in 1977, about three years after his graduation from Buffalo State.
Because Longo had developed friendships with fellow Pictures artist Brauntuch during his time at Hallwalls, he was able to sublet Brauntuch’s Fulton Street apartment that summer while he was away in California. In addition to his arrangement to take part in Pictures (which was on view from September–October 1977), Longo also had plans in place to perform at The Kitchen that September. Longo had prepared himself to live and work in New York, drawing on connections he had made while in Buffalo to institutions in the city in order to help him exhibit his work and be taken seriously as an artist rather than being pigeonholed as a curator.
UPON LONGO’S ARRIVAL IN NEW YORK, however, it became clear that his time in the city would unfold differently than he had initially expected. His arrangements to stage his performance at The Kitchen in September of that year happened to align with the Video Director at the time Carlota Schoolman’s plans to travel to India, and she was searching for someone to take on her position while she was away. Schoolman was aware of Longo’s previous experience at Hallwalls, and Rhys Chatham, who was Music Director at The Kitchen during this time, also knew Longo, as he had performed at Hallwalls himself. Because of her familiarity with Longo and his past curatorial work, Schoolman asked Longo to manage her role overseeing video programming at The Kitchen for the next few months while she was abroad. Schoolman had already scheduled the programs that were to occur in her absence, and she arranged with Longo that he would be able to present his performance upon her return. Although Longo had left Buffalo largely to escape being known as a curator, he chose to take the curatorial position in New York to help support himself financially. After a few months in the role, the nature of Longo’s work shifted, since Schoolman did not return to The Kitchen as anticipated, and her program schedule had run out. This meant that Longo was able to begin curating programming himself, making choices that reflected the interests and relationships he had built throughout his time in both Buffalo and New York. This was aided by the existing relationships Longo had coming into the Kitchen, particularly with Chatham, with whom Longo was connected to both in friendship and on a professional level through their previous collaboration at Hallwalls.
A major part in this exchange of ideas between these two figures was Chatham’s role as both a curator and as an artist himself in the community making what came to be known as No Wave music. Around the late 1970s, as Chatham began creating No Wave music, Longo started an experimental band called Menthol Wars with Richard Prince. Both artists developing interests in such experimental styles promoted a flow of ideas between them in their curatorial work, and prompted them to bring other artists with similar affinities in to perform. Prior video programming at The Kitchen had not typically included works in the No Wave style.
James Nares was just one No Wave artist that Longo helped bring into The Kitchen. In January 1978, Nares gave her first performance at The Kitchen, titled Desirium Probe. The work consisted of Nares wearing headphones and facing a television screen, which the audience could not see or hear. For hours, she changed channels, and the only way that the audience was able to experience the television broadcasts was through Nares’s voice and body as she interpreted or mimicked what she was seeing and hearing. The unique style of this piece reflected the interest Longo had in the creation and presentation of experimental approaches to performance and music. Nares, like Longo, was able to blur the lines between various mediums.
In addition to those artists involved in the No Wave scene, others associated with the Pictures Generation were included in The Kitchen’s programming during this time and presented their work during or shortly after Longo’s tenure. Longo left a significant enough impact on The Kitchen that people who were close to him or who, like him, came to be known as Pictures artists, continued to appear in the programming even after his departure from the institution. One such artist is Cindy Sherman, who had also attended Buffalo State and had collaborated and exchanged ideas with Longo while they were students there. Much of her art from this time focused on the interpretation of film and media, as did Longo’s. While Longo created pieces like American Soldier in 1977— inspired by a scene from Rainer Werner Fasbinder’s film, The American Soldier (1970)—he was also assisting Sherman in taking photographs that would later be presented in her series of Untitled Film Stills. This series was later exhibited at The Kitchen in 1980, presenting scenes that imitated those in films, highlighting the mystery of what may be going on beyond the still.
GIVEN THAT LONGO ORIGINALLY LEFT BUFFALO with the intent of breaking out of his role as curator, it is clear that Longo’s curatorial role at The Kitchen was not a part of his long-term plans. In 1978, just months after bringing Nares into The Kitchen, Longo departed from his position of Video Curator in order to pursue his artistic career in New York. Around the time of his departure from The Kitchen, in the spring of 1978, he presented at Franklin Furnace the first version of Sound Distance of a Good Man—the performance he had initially planned to do at The Kitchen. The piece was set up in a unique, boundary-breaking fashion, presenting two shirtless men wrestling on a revolving platform beside a woman singing opera, while a film consisting of one image is projected in between them. The setup created a feeling of stillness despite the fact that the piece was constantly moving and changing.
In the following years, Longo had several opportunities to return to The Kitchen to present new works. In 1985, The Kitchen presented Performance Works: 1977–1985 in collaboration with The Brooklyn Museum, coinciding with the presentation at the museum of his installation Temple of Love (1985). For this performance event, Longo performed Sound Distance of a Good Man (1978) and Surrender (1979), a film and performance piece, as well as a newer work, Empire: A Performance Trilogy (1981). Performance Works is particularly significant in displaying Longo’s evolution as an artist, as well as his work and relationship with The Kitchen. This event juxtaposed past performances created during his tenure at The Kitchen with a new piece and an installation that encompasses the wide variety of mediums and experimental methods that Longo uses in his works.
Over the years, Longo has continued to collaborate with The Kitchen and the artists he worked with in his role as Acting Video Curator. For instance, he performed in two of Chatham’s performances at The Kitchen, Drastic Classical Music for Electric Instruments (1981) and Rhys Chatham: A 15 Year Retrospective (1989). Additionally, Longo continues to be associated with the Pictures Generation through exhibitions such as The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. During this exhibition, Longo and Chatham performed. The continued recognition of Longo’s work, as well as the work of other artists with whom he collaborated while at The Kitchen, allows him both to maintain relationships with the scenes and organizations he was a part of many years ago and to revisit them from new perspectives.
Images: 1) November 1977 calendar of programming, The Kitchen. Detail. To see the full calendar, click here. 2) Postcard for James Nares, Desirium Probe at The Kitchen, January 24, 1978. 3) Ticket stub for Robert Longo, Performance Works at the Brooklyn Museum, April 13, 1985. 4) Press release for Rhys Chatham, Drastic Classical Music for Electric Instruments at The Kitchen, April 17, 1981. Detail. To see the full press release, click here.