„...American conviction that the inalienable rights of all mankind transcends borders and blood ties...
America’s nationalism was always internationalist at its core“
Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation
Capitain Petzel proudly announces the first solo exhibition by the American artist Robert Longo at the gallery. STAND is a site-specific installation. Longo has activated both the outside and inside of the unique Capitain Petzel gallery space on Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin. All aspects of the installation transform and complicate the gallery space. The outside of the building becomes a sculptural drawing, brandishing the American flag in black and white, filling all its windows.
Located inside on the main floor of the gallery is Longo‘s homage to the Hans Haacke piece Hommage a Marcel Broodthaers (Oelgemaelde, Hommage à Marcel Broodthaers, 1982). Longo, with the consent of Haacke, has
updated the style and content to reflect a more current issue by portraying President Obama in context with Tea Party protesters. On the upper balcony, surrounded by a black curtain is a series of studies based on what Longo calls a “Peep Show of American Pornography“, while in the basement the viewer is confronted with remnants of a performance based around the classic, and a genetic code of America — Herman Melville‘s “Moby Dick“.
As an American and a part-time resident of Berlin, Longo weaves the political and personal threads in and out of both his work and the gallery space with an assertion of power, politics, ambivalence, history, and the desire to look forward.
