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

Whitman uses color film again in Shower. In this life-size rear projection on a screen that forms the back wall of a real metal shower stall, a young woman (Mimi Stark) is filmed as she steps into the running water of a shower. An actual, transparent shower curtain in the real shower stall beads with real water that runs into the drain in its floor. The woman appears in profile as site soaps up and rinses, then she bathes again, anticipating by nearly 40 years the many onstage showers of artists to come, including the tableaux vivants of Marina Abramovic and Skip Arnold. In the projected shower scene, there are passages that depart from the literalist documentation of the woman's actions: there is an extreme close-up of skin, then of the showerhead, and as the woman bathes the water turns black, then red, then yellow, then blue. Dia curator Lynne Cooke writes of the familiar motif of the nude bather in Western painting and Whitman's expression of that painterly tradition in the pigmented water of the shower. However, Whitman's greater interest, she continues, is in the voyeuristic role of the camera. (4) Viewers may recall Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), in which the water is stained with blood.

The reconstructed Window consists of an ordinary window frame inserted into a wall giving onto a shallow, real space dressed with foliage and branches that enhance the impression of depth, while Whitman's rear projection, like the one in Shower, conveys a sense of real time. The narrative is simple and bucolic, and Cooke describes it as another art-historical commonplace, the pastoral. (5) A young woman appears both clothed and unclothed in Whitman's filmed woodland. Dressed in a black shift, she wanders, partially disrobes, takes off her high-heeled shoes, lies down, rises. She moves about in black underwear, removes her brassiere, steps beyond the frame. She reappears suddenly and lowers herself to the ground, picks up a handful of leaves and disappears again. As experienced in a gallery or represented in stills, Window, with its female nude in a trompe l'oeil, three-dimensional landscape, seems to offer a direct allusion to Marcel Duchamp's Etant Donnes, although the Duchamp tableau was not publicly exhibited until six years later, in 1969.

A Whitman exhibition titled "Dark," presented at Pace Gallery in 1967, consisted of three discrete light works that confirmed the artist's growing interest in the interface of art and science, which led him to his association with E.A.T. Of these, Solid Red Line, installed in its own blacked-out room at Dia:Chelsea, is as startling in its apparent simplicity today as it must have been when first presented. It continued Whitman's preoccupation with the experience of space and time. (6) The work consists of a chest-high transmission tower at the center of a dark room. The tower houses a laser projection device that gradually describes a horizontal line of red light on the gallery walls and then erases itself. The line appears out of nowhere, moves haltingly, as though in response to intrusive motion, and seems intent on circumnavigating the room and establishing a plane within it before returning to begin again. Unless the viewer manages to move ahead of the line's progress, the completion of its 360-degree circuit is interrupted when it is obstructed, as though a shadow has been cast upon it. Sculptor Forrest Myers, who experimented with similar equipment at the time, recently observed that with this projected light sculpture, Whitman devised a way to open and close space with nothing but light. (7)