Theater director and artist died in 83

Robert Wilson, a playwright and artist who has cultivated a loyal following in the art world to bridge the gap between performing arts and theaters for backup works, died Thursday at the age of 83 at the New York Waterworks.

“When facing the diagnosis with clear eyes and determination, he was still forced to continue working and creating until the end,” the Art Center wrote in the announcement. “His works on stage, on paper, sculptures and video portraits, and the Waterwheel Center will last as Robert Wilson’s artistic legacy.”

Wilson’s work ranges from art displayed in museums to unconventional adaptations premiered by the theater. Most of his works are characterized by an interest in stillness and slowness, qualities that can be found in his lasting performance and in his art.

For example, a series of widely seen videos are intended to serve as portraits of its subject: singer Lady Gaga plays the pose of Miss Caroline Rivière in the famous 1806 Ingres paintings; actor Brad Pitt stands in a pair of thin blue white shorts in the room. Artist Pope. L hangs out on the model of the treed landscape, his skin turns silver. Each of these videos is about three minutes, although it hardly happened during that time, which is exactly Wilson’s point of view, which brings viewers to something that may not be noticeable.

Wilson once told critic Hilton ALS that he introduced him to him New Yorker 2012.

Wilson created the new ground in 1976 Einstein on the beachthe opera tells only the biography of Albert Einstein in its loosest sense, and his life is told abstractly through the music of Philip Glass, who co-wrote Libretto with Christopher Knowles and Samuel H. Johnson. Although the opera is nearly five hours long, it contains the least conversation in the traditional sense and is often more like a performing art, while listeners can enter and exit at will.

The opera was almost immediately seen as a provocation. Clive Barnes in New York Times. “But, at the beginning of the century, Logan Pearsall Smith pointed out that the ultimate degree of boredom became an art in itself. Mr. Wilson was bored using drama when Mr. Glass used his electrical organs. They knew that sometimes it would stop, it was nice.”

Nowadays, opera has become a classic. Many other major dramatic works by Wilson follow, including around the life of performance artist Marina Abramović.

For Wilson, most of his work is closely related to his artistic background. He said he did not see the differences between art in the traditional sense, which was evident in the Waterwheel Center program he founded in 1992.

“My interest in theaters is to bring all the art together,” Wilson said in a 2022 interview conducted by Hauser & Wirth Gallery. “It is architecture, painting, light, poetry, dance, music and philosophy. All art can be found in what we call ‘theater’. In the Latin sense, the ancient theater is “work”, which means my early work was called “silence” opera.

Robert Wilson was born in 1941 in Waco, Texas. His father was a lawyer and met with Wilson’s mother while working at an insurance company. Wilson suffered from auditory processing disorders as a child and therefore stuttered. Wilson solved his speech difficulties by speaking at a different speed than most people. “If he slowed down the process and took the time,” ALS in his New Yorker Profile, “He could say these words. In the end, he trained himself to do it.”

He studied undergrad at the University of Dexas, studied business administration between 1959 and 1962, and then moved to Brooklyn to study architecture at the Pratt Institute. He then danced toward the dance, sitting in Martha Graham’s rehearsal, and began his first experimental theatre work. He graduated in 1966.

Wilson later said that studying something other than drama influenced his approach to working in a mature manner. He once said, “Well, if I had studied theaters, I wouldn’t have made the kind of theater I was going to make.”

Shortly after Pratt graduated, Wilson returned to Waco and became seriously frustrated. He tried to commit suicide and failed and was placed in a mental hospital where he began to accept his identity as a gay person. After he was released, he returned to New York.

In 1967, Wilson moved into a Soho Loft, where he founded Byrd Hoffman Birds, a school named after the person who helped Wilson overcome his childhood speech barrier. According to its description, the space is considered a “scene of finding and enabling people of all contexts, interests and abilities to develop their personality and talents together and put in their efforts in a group situation”. The first show there, Baby blood (1967), involving Wilson, wearing nothing but a T-shirt, through the boards and covering himself with plastic.

Performances like this will continue to attract his loyal audience, and while Wilson will continue to name the world of drama, he also displays his work in galleries and museums. Paula Cooper Gallery has provided Wilson with nearly twelve solo exhibitions, including a 1984 drawing specifically targeted at him. In that gallery, Wilson also displays his sculptures, often in the form of corner tables and chairs that are sometimes used as props for dramatic works. “Wilson’s furniture and sculptures were born on stage with key factors and are considered as performers who are equal to actors,” the artist wrote on his website.

Wilson won the world’s top art award when he showed off his art work at the 1993 Venice Biennale. He won the sculpture of the Golden Lion, whose installations include a cracked floor and creepy figures that seem to emerge from it. exist Artforumcritic Thomas McEvilley called the device “atmospheric and weird.”

Wilson won the award at the time, which was surprising to many, as most people didn’t consider him a sculptor, let alone an artist. McEvilley wrote that some people were even disappointed with Wilson’s victory. But Wilson was used to this reaction and even seemed to welcome the confusion.

Wilson once told him about his work guardian“It’s OK to get lost! You don’t have to know every second. I think it’s the problem. Getting the audience lost. It’s OK.”