VIDEORGY: Dubbed as “a poet of urban...

VIDEORGY: Dubbed as “a poet of urban life,” Robert Longo is one of the hotshots of the New York art world, a much-celebrated young multimedia painter whose works are already in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. So what’s he doing directing music videos, including New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” and rising young heavy-metallers Megadeth’s “Peace Sells--But Who’s Buying.”

“They’re kind of like my student films,” said Longo, whose “Men in the Cities” exhibit was at the University Art Museum of Cal State Long Beach last spring. “The videos supply the stills for my art work and my art work supplies the ideas for my videos. It’s a real cyclical thing. One of my new 3-D paintings, ‘Machines in Love,’ uses a huge still from a video I did with the Golden Palominos.”

Longo’s nightmarish Megadeth video is already a MTV staple, full of fragmented, disturbing images of rampaging metal fans, political protests, war footage and police actions. “Heavy metal is the real avant-garde today,” he explained. “It’s the true underbelly of the arts, the stuff people don’t want to even know about. The problem with most music videos is that they’re basically sloppy illustrations of a song. But I tried to come up with more open-ended images that didn’t pass any judgment. We asked a lot of questions, like what’s the difference between violence for fun and violence directed at people.

“I think video is a great way to make an artistic statement that’s accessible to a large audience. I know people are afraid of being disturbed today, but I think you can create disturbing images that are very hypnotic and compelling. It’s all a matter of sucking people into your art instead of turning them off.”

Thanks to a grant from Elektra Records President Bob Krasnow (“He gave me some dough and said, hey, make some art for me”), Longo is at work on a half-hour film that will eventually play film festivals and be released in home-video form. Titled “Killing Angels,” Longo said it will feature such “underground crazies” as performance artist Eric Bogosian, novelist Richard Price (“The Wanderers”) and screenwriter E. Max Frye (“Something Wild”), as well as a possible appearance by the Replacements, doing a cover version of Iggy Pop’s “Here Comes Success.”