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

RELATED ARTICLE: Light Touch (1976).

Light Touch was commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation in 1976. The work requires, as a setting, a warehouse with a loading platform or a garage door opening to the street, such as the one at Dia:Chelsea's annex. The audience sits within the space, facing the street. When the performance begins, mounds of crumpled red paper at the base of the closed overhead door scuttle off to the audience's left as the door rises and reveals the street beyond a scrim. A tall box rolls into view. An actual burning sack is conflated with the projected image of a burning bag. The scrim is raised, and the business of a warehouse-gallery district after closing time continues on the street beyond.

We see strollers, people on bicycles and cars, and in an apparently unchoreographed moment, a car backs up as if film were being played in reverse (a classic Whitman touch). A large rental truck backs up to the open door; its open interior functions as a stage with a projection screen inside it. Images are projected of various objects--a sink, a cup, a cinder block--whose actual, physical referents are carried by two workers onto the truck's bed. These images are also projected more faintly on a dark screen hanging to the right of the open garage door. There are clips of a pear, a pepper, an apple, as the actual fruits are lined up next to each other on the truck's tailgate. There is an almost Pentecostal sensation to the specifying and enlarged illumination of these things.

A moonlike disk appears, projected inside the truck, and a large hand seems to grasp the disk from above (an image that recalls the Georges Melies film Trip to the Moon [1902], from the early years of motion pictures). Then the godlike hand cups the effulgent disk from below. The boxes are removed from the truck. A rock seems to float like an asteroid in the sky in the back of the truck. The truck's gate closes, the truck pulls away and the scrim descends, lofting in the night breeze. The moon reappears; for a while, the ball of light remains, the hand above, and then the scrim is raised to reveal the dark city as people and trucks go by. The lights come up.--E.L.

RELATED ARTICLE: Ghost (2002).

For three evenings in September 2002, Whitman captivated audiences at PaceWildenstein (Chelsea) with Ghost, a new performance piece involving projected images, live and recorded sound, and special properties and effects. Whitman's mise-en-scene occupied a freestanding, unadorned, white-walled stage, purpose-built in the gallery's second room, where a seated woman and a galvanized washtub resting on a stool were positioned at opposite ends of the stage parallel to the theater's "invisible wall." To the rear of the stage, projected ghostly figures strode about, their amplified footsteps resounding as the audience settled in. The room darkened. In the course of the performance, projections above the stage suggested a nightscape of starry fields and woods reflected in still water.

Among other demonstrations of the nature and contingency of everyday life, a large, projected image of a glass of red wine appeared above the stage, the liquid tilting at an improbable diagonal and spilling over. A voice whispered twice, "Could you do me a favor?" as though initiating the events that followed. Stage lights came up. A red ribbon emerged from the seated woman's mouth like a serpent or a flattened tongue and rolled out across the floor, recalling the overflowing wine that preceded this ambiguous gesture. The voice whispered, "I forget." The ribbon moved across the floor until it reached the opposite wall where it disappeared. The performer stood and lifted her arms, her sleeves extending twice the length of her arms in cruciform. "Let me think," the voice continued. The sleeve extensions dropped. She resumed her seat. Like the zip of a Barnett Newman painting, a black ribbon emerged from a wall as the voice whispered, "Next." Through crackling static, a broadcast of meteorological data from the National Weather Service was heard. The ribbon traversed the wall and slowly disappeared. The illusion of an imploding window appeared in the upstage wall. A woman's voice said, "Now," and a man's voice said, "Don't." Lights dimmed.