HYPEBEAST: Robert Wilson Features Lady Gaga, Winona Ryder & More in Moving Video Portraits →

By Gabrielle Leung

While self-isolating in Berlin, American experimental theater director Robert Wilson has launched an online viewing room of mesmerizing video portraits. After an influential meeting with Sony executive Akio Morita in Tokyo in the 1970s, Wilson has continued to create subtly moving video portraits with artists, actors, athletes, royalty and more. The online viewing room showcases an appreciation for stillness that has been an integral part of Wilson’s work for decades, ranging from portraits of Japanese kabuki dancers to Winona Ryder as a character in a Samuel Beckett play.

Key pieces that can be experienced in the viewing room involve Lady Gaga dressed up to mimic historical paintings in the Louvre’s collection. Wilson recreated portraits of Jacques-Louis David’s famed painting The Death of Marat (1806) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière. The last portrait, titled Flying, is not rooted in the Louvre’s collection, but instead references the ancient art of Japanese rope bondage, Shibari. Under the supervision of Shibari master David Rickman, Lady Gaga underwent an hours-long bondage performance.

In Memoriam Hal Willner

2020-04-09 Hal.jpg
Lovis Dengler, Hal Willner at The Watermill Center

Lovis Dengler, Hal Willner at The Watermill Center

Lovis Dengler, Hal Willner at The Watermill Center

Lovis Dengler, Hal Willner at The Watermill Center

Lovis Dengler, Hal Willner at The Watermill Center

Lovis Dengler, Hal Willner at The Watermill Center

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...