Longo, Robert: Now Everybody (to R. W. Fassbinder) (1982–83)

Robert Longo is an American artist and filmmaker whose work reflects on issues of mass media, social roles and expectations, and power. He was strongly influenced by the work of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, to whom he dedicated his work “Now Everybody”. Longo had already evoked the closing scene of Fassbinder’s Der amerikanische Soldat (The American Soldier, 1970) in his earlier works. The protagonist of the film is a Vietnam veteran who returns to Germany and commits murders on behalf of the police, until he is trapped and shot. In the last few minutes of the film, we see in slow motion the moments of the shooting, the fall and his death, underpinned by a melancholic farewell song. Longo first sculpted the falling figure from Fassbinder’s film in a relief in 1977. In his 1980 series of drawings Men in the Cities, he freezes the movements of his contemporary urban models, which can be frozen scenes of falling, but also of dancing and ecstasy. “Everyone Now”, 1982–83, is part of the so-called “Combines” series, where Longo combines set-like paintings and graphics on an almost cinematic scale with sculptures and reliefs. In “Everyone Now”, he places a life-size sculpture of a man on the run in front of a four-part black-and-white picture of a street scene in Beirut, with ruined buildings in the foreground. The man who has been shot dead is dressed in a way that indicates that this is not a specific war situation, but a more general scene: everyone’s (“Jedermann”) turn comes – the work captures the moment of the transition from life to death, the final reckoning. Krisztina Szipőcs