Robert Whitman Essay

Essay by Lynne Cooke

Robert Whitman's pioneering performances of the early 1960s "alchemically transmuted the most quotidian objects and images into improbably fantastic events [imbued with] a magical, mythic aura."1 Among the earliest in a coterie of heterogeneous artists who adopted the nascent idiom of performance on the cusp of the decade, Whitman soon devised a distinctive signature mode: in contrast to the assertively banal literalism fundamental to Allan Kaprow's Happenings and the louche ambience of street and gutter that was integral to those of Claes Oldenburg, his were distinguished by a poetics grounded in fugitive phantasms. A statement from the mid-1960s succinctly outlines his credo:

I intend my works to be stories of physical experience and realistic, naturalistic descriptions of the physical world. . . . At a certain point, fantasy is an object in the physical world. It is like a street or rain. It is a product of physical events. . . . The fantasy exists as an object, as a central physical entity, and as part of the story that you tell about other objects.2

To distill the illusory as well as the actual into an oneiric physical reality, Whitman employed a variety of projected forms, ranging from cast shadows to slides to film, that mimicked, echoed, or presaged their material counterparts, themselves devised, typically, from makeshift props and improvised antics.

Critical to this hallucinatory vision was the inspiration he gleaned both from originary, atavistic, or visionary forms of theater—forms closer to ritual than to reportage—and from silent film.3 Georges Méliès and Buster Keaton occupy the highest tier in his (otherwise anonymous) pantheon of the elect.4 Lured by cinema's capacity to create a realm of wonder, a waking dream, with structural laws of its own, Whitman, like his predecessors, reveled in the editorial possibilities it offered for overlaying, suturing, and interweaving discrete fragments of the unexceptional with the uncanny.

Whitman's approach to performance was unique in this period in that he "scored" his works to permit subsequent presentation: few were strictly site specific. In place of the frenetic, almost violently aggressive spirit of such early works as American Moon (1960), Prune Flat (1965), his signature piece from the 1960s, is imbued with a lyrical reverie. A "realistic" dream in which the focus has veered from action to image, from the dramatic to the filmic, it probes a cinematic ontology through a cadence of events, actions, and images shorn of all narrative and text.

The momentum propelling this multimedia performance vanguard was undercut once mainstream organizations appropriated its innovations, stifling it in the process. Although Whitman remains committed to creating "theater works" (his preferred term for his performance pieces), in the mid-1960s he began to gravitate toward collaborations of other types. Turning to engineers, scientists, and related specialists, he explored more arcane optical effects and representations than those he had first broached in Prune Flat, still his most renowned theater piece. Among the most elegantly succinct of these is Solid Red Line (1967), in which a piercing light traces a horizontal plane across the ambience of the gallery, then rewinds, erasing itself. Soon, however, his persistent attraction to the transient and mutable effloresced into more diverse and encompassing installations.

The new alliances forged between artists interested in electronic technologies and scientists attracted by the possibility of working collaboratively in interdisciplinary exchanges fueled Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), founded in September 1966 by Whitman, Robert Rauschenberg, and scientists Fred Waldhauer and Billy Klüver. Its legendary 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering, held at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory, New York, in the fall of 1966, privileged innovative processes over resolved staging. The climax of the group's experimentation, however, was the spectacular pavilion commissioned by Pepsi-Cola for Expo '70 in Osaka in 1970, for which Whitman devised a vast mirrored dome—a site of uncanny apparitions, an evanescent realm of pure visuality.5

In 1976 a related but less technically ambitious work, Untitled (Film Images, 1960–1976), had its debut on the occasion of a retrospective of Whitman's seminal performances, "Theater Works 1960–1976," commissioned by Dia. Its definitive form, retitled Spyglass (Film Images, 1960–1976) (realized in 2003), is configured as an octagon whose sides are made from four mirrors interspersed with four screens of the same dimensions on which film images are continuously projected. Multiplied endlessly in a mise-en-abîme of reflections of reflections, spectators lose themselves amid the myriad beautiful but lusciously perverse images: traffic slowly gliding backward across the street; a capsicum burning incandescently without disintegrating; glowing lights unearthed from the soil; matches flaring miraculously in water. The effect is one of a time outside time, "a kind of dream with meaning around the corners."6

Whitman's 1976 retrospective of theater works ended with Light Touch, a new commission. In reviving the spare vocabulary of simple props and costumes particular to Prune Flat, it too drew inspiration from its venue (a truck depot in this instance, an actual cinema in the case of its predecessor), which it made integral to the staging and the thematic of the piece. Charac-teristically, it is at once disarmingly simple yet psychically deep-rooted. Projected images of familiar commonplace objects—a brick, a cup, a burning paper bag—are "unloaded" from the back of the real vehicle pulling into a loading dock and carried through the space to be stacked neatly nearby, as, shortly after, are their physical counterparts. Once again, Whitman's abiding precept was to collaborate with the space, neither hiding it nor being governed by it as in site-specific work: "I either find some place to perform a piece [which requires] specific architecture, or I make a particular space consistent with the image of the work," he declared.7

For Whitman, issues relating to vision, whether figurations of visuality or modalities of perception, are not historically delimited but are constantly available for reexamination. "Optics is age-old, the Greeks knew about optics," he said in 1979, reflecting on his governing concerns.8 In consequence, "hardware" has only ever been for him a means to an end: whether a work employs advanced technological equipment or makeshift secondhand materials, whether it involves transient actions or is confined to paper and graphite, is never significant in itself.9 What counts, he contends, are the underlying abstract relationships that specify and individuate an experience—color, form, rhythm, the deep structure of time and space, condensed and distilled into what he has defined as the implicit "image" of any work.

Notes

1. Sally Banes, "Dream Time in a Warehouse," The Village Voice, November 23, 1982, p. 105.

2. Robert Whitman, "A Statement," in Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965), pp. 134, 135.

3. Parallels have been made between Whitman's practices and Antonin Artaud's theories on theater. Although Whitman did not read it until much later, Artaud's La théâter et son double (The Theater and Its Double), 1938—first published in the United States by Grove Press in 1958—was widely acclaimed by others close to him.

4. See Mimi Crossley, "Artistic Image-Maker Robert Whitman Bringing Visual Theater to Houston," The Houston Post, November 26, 1977, p. 126.

5. See Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Technology, eds. Billy Klüver, Julie Martin, and Barbara Rose (New York: Dutton, 1972).

6. This suggestive phrase was coined by Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh with respect to American Moon (1960), Whitman's first important performance, which they found "mysterious out of all proportion." See Janis and Blesh, Collage: Personalities, Concepts, Techniques (Philadelphia: Chilten, 1967), p. 276.

7. Whitman, typescript, n.d., Dia Art Foundation archive. For the 1976 retrospective, American Moon, Prune Flat, and the four additional works on the program were adapted to the temporary site, a Lower Manhattan warehouse, in anticipation of their future relocation to a dedicated performance venue purchased and converted by Dia at 512 West Nineteenth Street in Manhattan, today the home of The Kitchen: Center for Video, Music, Dance, Performance, Film, and Literature.

8. Whitman, quoted in Barbara Rose, "Interview with Robert Whitman," in Robert Whitman: Palisade (Yonkers: The Hudson River Museum, 1979), n.p.

9. Whitman had first conceived a project based on Dante's Divine Comedy while a student at Rutgers in the mid-1950s. Focusing on its part Paradise, the Dante Drawings, 1974–75, were finally realized concurrently with his performance retrospective. Featuring an iconography of elementary, even rudimentary, motifs that relates as much to the romantic Sublime as to the visions of outsider artists, this unprecedented suite of twenty-seven double-sided sheets reprises Whitman's abiding fascination with the speculative, the mysterious, and the wondrous. The fantastical dreamworld of sublimated desire—sometimes atavistic, sometimes futuristic—that gave his early work its indelible magic is transformed here into a mystical meditation on Dante's account of what he experienced in a state of "Pure Vision," a state that in being beyond time and space almost defies recollection and communicability.