Robert Longo was one of several important artists in the 1970s who pioneered new forms of art by appropriating cinema and combining it with painting, drawing, and photography. His work Untitled (Men in the Cities) was inspired, in part, by films featuring death scenes that involve a high impact, causing bodies to jerk in dramatic ways. Although Longo further developed the series after he moved with Cindy Sherman to New York in 1976, the idea originated in Buffalo around 1975. In 1976, Longo photographed his friend and Hallwalls collaborator Kevin Noble mimicking death scenes from films. Later, in New York, Longo threw things at his models to make them flinch or contort their bodies. He translated the photographs into drawings by tracing them using an overhead projector, often changing the subjects’ clothing or slightly altering their poses or body types to create, as he has said, “a kind of rhythm that translates through the body, abstract notations of movement and tension.”

Label from Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde in the 1970s, March 30–July 8, 2012