Whitman's expanded theater: a traveling survey of works by vanguard cross-media artist Robert Whitman offers film-and-object installations from the 1960s, along with some never-exhibited drawings from the '70s - Biography

Art in America, Jan, 2004 by Edward Leffingwell

"Robert Whitman: Playback," six years in gestation, was organized by Dia to make the early works available for the first time to a large public, including a new generation of artists. Because of the increasing fragility of Whitman's materials over the years, the works have had a relatively small and diminishing audience. He participated in the reconstruction and restoration of the seven key works included in the exhibition, as well as the presentation of the theater works.

Four early Cinema Pieces, together in a small room, open the show. They are Window (1963), Garbage Bag (1964), Bathroom Sink (1964) and Shower (1964). All are illuminated by 16mm film loops that have been transferred to DVD. Also included in "Playback" are Spyglass (Film Images, 1960-1976), 1976/2003, an environment of film projections on suspended mirrors and screens; a laser installation called Solid Red Line (1967); and Dante Drawings (1974-75), a series of 27 suspended, double-sided drawings.

Garbage Bag, a 2003 reconstruction of a work earlier titled Shopping Bag, is a memento mori for a life consumed if not recycled. An ordinary brown paper bag less than knee high is tucked into a corner; a number on an installation map marks its slight presence in the world. A color film loop projected onto a small screen fitted into the top of the bag silently reveals its inventory and condition over time. There are cartons of edibles, freshly wrapped hamburger, heads of lettuce, stew meat, potato chips, celery, green peppers, all of which soon seem to float on water. In an indistinguishable jump cut, hands appear to unpack a bag of brand-name noodles, cheese, yogurt and more, until the bag empties. Then it is filled with refuse: eggshells and gnawed corncobs, celery tops, an orange peel, empty cartons. A match is extended toward the contents, a fire begins, the garbage burns, rinds and greens sizzle, leaving only the charred remains of some citrus on a bed of ash. As the cycle resumes, the work seems to anticipate the estheticized time-lapse still lifes of Taylor-Wood, a recent variation on this classic theme.

Hanging on a nearby wall, Whitman's Bathroom Sink advances an oddly potent image more recently seen in the plumbing fixtures of Robert Gober and Cildo Meireles. A silent color film is projected through an oval cut in the wall onto a mirror above the sink, which in turn reflects the imagery back onto the opposite wall beneath the projector. An almost anxious reverie on the subject of the intimacy of ablution and cosmetic transformation, the filmed sequences include a vastly magnified fingernail, fingers massaging flesh, a woman in a brassiere smoothing cream onto her face, brushing her teeth vigorously and applying blue eyedrops (a French pharmaceutical favored by models of the '60s). There are close-ups of false eyelashes, the brushing of hair, water streaming from a faucet. Whitman's actor sensuously washes and dries her hands, massages her face, combs her hair, applies lipstick and mascara, and then washes her face to begin again.