ARTnews: Robert Wilson Debuts Viewing Room for Mesmerizing Video Portraits, Featuring Lady Gaga’s Severed Head and Other Oddities →

By Andy Battaglia

Robert Wilson is in Berlin, in a state of isolation like so many of us, but the storied experimental theater director has found himself in surroundings that allow for simple pleasures far away from his home in New York. “I’m staying in a house in private quarters surrounded by a garden and facing a lake, so I can go for walks in nature,” he said of the temporary location where he and his assistant are holed up. “No one is here. I don’t go out.”

He has, however, opened a portal of sorts in the form of a new online viewing room populated with mesmerizing video portraits he’s made over the years—including one of a Japanese kabuki dancer and another with Winona Ryder as a strange character in a Samuel Beckett play. More will be added in time, all in an effort to make accessible a vein of work that dates back, directly and indirectly, to a prescient vision Wilson developed in the early years of the Sony Walkman.

032c: “Architectural, Not Decorative”: Wilson on Mapplethorpe →

Recent discourse around the surge of multi-hyphenates in the creative field – of the Virgil Abloh or Kanye West professional hybrid – position the trend as the fruit of a flattened modernity. But we all know multi-hyphenates have been around for a while. Theater and visual artist Robert Wilson has consistently done it all for more than 40 years: he’s made visual art, directed and written plays and operas, convened happenings, created sculpture and lighting design, and founded and helmed the Watermill Center artistic residency program in Southampton, NY. While experimental, Wilson’s work is coherent: good theater, he believes, like good visual art, is mathematical at its core.

Wilson’s most recent project, however, is curatorial, revisiting the photographic oeuvre of the late Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 – 1989). One of the most influential, exhibited, and controversial portrait photographers of the late 20th century – and a First Amendment cause célèbre – was also Wilson’s friend and collaborator. Recently opened at Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin-Mitte – then swiftly closed, along with other exhibitions in the city – “Robert Mapplethorpe: Selected by Robert Wilson,” proposes a similarly structural view of the New York icon’s photographic thinking. Now, the exhibition is viewable in 3D, digitally and the show, up through May 9th, can still be visited by individuals on appointment. Fortunately, we spoke to Wilson IRL, just before mass isolation, to discuss a collaboration that remains intimate, long after Mapplethorpe’s death.

Town & Country: Where Creative People Go to Get Things Done

Robert Wilson & Cristina Grajales, artist and gallerist, weaving their magic in his studio

“You looking for Glamour Closet?” was not the first thing I expected to hear when I arrived to meet Robert Wilson, but it was oddly fitting. The avant-garde director occupies a singular position in the art world, and he chose to set his home, and the operational arm of his Watermill Center, not in a loft in Soho or a warehouse in Red Hook but in the no-man’s-land of the Garment District. On the 10th floor of an otherwise ordinary building, he is surrounded by objects collected over a lifetime: Han Dynasty sculptures, an ancient Burmese basket, dozens of chairs. “It’s Bob’s mind,” says his friend, the art dealer Cristina Grajales, who recently persuaded him to create a collection of glassworks, his first love (the pieces were produced by the Corning Museum). Wilson likes to say he can work anywhere (“comfort is a state of mind”), but it’s here that he gets to play Prospero, the sorcerer at the heart of a creative universe.

Source: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/style/ho...

Los Angeles Review of Books: Hilton Als on His Playwrighting Debut: Robert Wilson, Race, and the Avant Garde

Critic, photographer and artist, Hilton Als joins Kate and Medaya to discuss his debut play, Lives of the Performers, which tells the story of actress Sheryl Sutton, one of the lead actors in Robert Wilson’s ground-shattering troupe in the 1970s. Als, the former theater critic at the New Yorker, also discusses his fascination with twins, writing a play, and the role race has played in the history of the avant-garde.

The show also includes a spirited debate among the hosts about this year’s soporific Golden Globes: are woke actors enough to keep you awake?

Also, legendary film critic J Hoberman returns to explain why his favorite film of 2019, Mary Harron’s Charlie Says, was a superior take on the Manson Family saga than Quintin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Listen to the full interview here.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/hilton-als-...