Kill Your Darlings (Primary Title)

“I think I can inject a quality of hope in my work through the oppressive reality of it all. You can objectify your fears.”  —Robert Longo

Longo is fascinated by theses of power and authority, including both the tyranny and potential of mass media. He first became known for Men in Cities—life-size graphite drawings of suited figures contorted in strange positions as if dancing or writhing in pain. Kill Your Darlings belongs to his Combines series, named for Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages of found materials that are part painting, part sculpture. Similarly Longo’s combines present mash-ups of materials culled from a variety of sources and rendered in two and three dimensions. They are socially engaged and politically charged works, transforming recognizable imagery into theatrical commentary on social perils.

The work’s unusual titles comes from famous literary advice—variously ascribed to William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch—to cut courageously those elements that you love but that do not contribute to the whole. An account by Longo in the VMFA files describes the work’s meaning:

“The image is symbolically a dead bird. The eagle is the head of the bird and is rendered as if it isn’t there . . . The metal archway forms the wings of the bird and is derived from a gate in Munich, a city whose architecture perverts Italian renaissance building for a romantic ideal. . . . A woman crying is the breast of the bird and represents. . . . all mothers who have lost sons in the many wars fought in Europe. Finally there is the field of flowers, taken from a postcard, which is the tail of the bird. It portrays European manipulation of nature, of how Europe for centuries has redone nature and as such is able to create its own nature. . . . As the eagle has traditionally been the symbol of European power it is also a symbol of America. Therefore, the piece speaks not only of the eclipse of European power, it acts as as a warning: what has happened in Europe could happen to America.”