Last Tuesday night we stood in front of the Orpheum Theatre quickly eating a slice of Two Boots pizza watching Keanu Reeves talk on the phone while he smiled and ate an apple. You’d think that would have been enough excitement for the evening but the main event that night and the reason Keanu graced us with his presence was the 11th program in The Broad’s “Un-Private Collection” series—this one being a conversation between renowned artist Robert Longo and musician/journalist Henry Rollins.
Robert is known for marrying the power of photographic and filmic images with large-scale artworks that often escape categorization as strictly painting, sculpture, or media art. In Longo’s recent drawings, he has addressed pressing social issues from gun violence and police brutality to religious conflict. The Broad collection has eight of his works spanning the breadth of his career. Henry on the other hand is a punk rock icon, spoken word poet, actor, author, DJ, longtime advocate for the arts, a downright Renaissance Man—and apparently a good friend of Robert’s. The pairing promised a lively conversation that ended up being one of the better artist talks we’ve been to in awhile.
While settling into our seats we soon realized this was going to be a packed house. The crowd was a mix of mostly eager 20- to 30-somethings, a few of whom were still trying to figure out the correct pronunciation of Broad (rhymes with road), and most who were voicing excitement about seeing Henry speak. Joanne Heyler, founding director of The Broad museum, gave a quick introduction breaking down The Un-Private Collection series while reminding us that we can and should tweet our questions for the Q&A.
In true Henry Rollin’s fashion the talk opened with a mini comedy bit…
In preparation for this, one of his assistants wrote me, she said, “I’d like to send you some of Robert’s books.” I said, “Is he still sleeping in the park?”… I said, “He still owes me 40 bucks” and she said, “We’ll send it in nickels.”
and went on to include a slideshow of Robert’s work screened to a soundtrack of songs recorded by Robert’s son that was played through Robert’s iPhone straight into his mic onstage. Naturally.
The rest of the talk anecdotally touched on Robert’s ideologies, processes, and techniques surrounding some of his most notable works like his series, “Men in the Cities.” A favorite moment from the evening came when Henry asked Robert about how he drew the thousands of individual people in his monumental Untitled (Mecca) piece, emphasizing the amount of stamina it must have taken. When Longo replied, “I hired a couple of other guys,” the crowd, including Henry and Robert, erupted into laughter.
At one point Henry heard the audience laugh at the mention of the 1995 box-office bomb Johnny Mnemonic. Henry had been in the movie, Robert directed it, and we then understood why we had seen Keanu earlier. The talk ended with Henry suggesting that Robert put his art on mushroom cloud thongs and shark onesies leaving Robert swearing off fashion collaborations and leaving us thankful this wasn’t another sleepy artist talk.
The full video of the talk is available for your viewing pleasure here:
Is Beverly Western a pseudonym? Seems like it…