Looking for Robert Wilson
“Drawing is a way to think”: at the moment, the New York-based artist and
director Robert Wilson can be seen in Berlin in a musical
production and two exhibition projects. In an interview Wilson explains
what role drawing plays in the cosmopolite’s work.
Leonce and Lena, Berliner Ensemble, 2003
It
follows that once again
Robert Wilson has hooked up with another musical icon. This time, it’s
Germany’s
Herbert Grönemeyer. Throughout the evolution of Wilson
collaborators and composers, there have been
Philip Glass, whose
Einstein on the Beach is now a distant link to the composer’s more
commercial work, i.e. the score for the film
The Hours; the rock star
Lou Reed, turned Wilson collaborator for
Poe-try; and of course,
Tom Waits, a long-time comrade from the
Black Rider and
Alice as well as
Woytek. The Grönemeyer collaboration brings us to
Leonce and Lena, just opening in Berlin at the
Berliner Ensemble. This is Wilson’s third
Georg Büchner opera.
Leonce and Lena, Berliner Ensemble, 2003
Two
earlier ones include
Danton’s Death from 1992 and Woytek, done in 2000. Wilson seems to
be present everywhere in Berlin: The opening of Leonce and Lena coincides
with the exhibition of the
Armani show he designed at the
Neue Nationalgalerie, and a private gallery is currently showing his
installation
On a Clear Day You Can See Your Mother II.
The hunt for Robert
Wilson can be carried on almost anywhere in the world: Paris, London, and
so on. Back in New York, I meet the curator
Liz Christensen in the lobby of Deutsche Bank. Her list of works by Robert
Wilson in the bank’s collection is neatly catalogued. Soon we’re riding up
and down elevators in midtown Manhattan, looking for the Wilson pieces.
At a glance, his drawings and lithographs appear like stage maps. Seen in the
context of his sets, the works in New York, done for The King of Spain
from 1969, A
Letter for Queen Victoria from 1974, and
Parsifal, 1985, are also fiercely autonomous.
Robert Wilson, Act III scene 1, from Alceste, 1986
Courtesy of Byrd Hoffman and Water Mill
Foundation
Deutsche Bank Collection
As the art critic Robert Stearns noted: “A more conventional playwright begins
with a written script. Wilson begins with drawings and diagrams.” On
stage, Wilson’s work is both opera and theater. He sees “space as
horizontal and time as vertical,” which may account for the constant
presence of columns in his work. A way to remind the audience that history
is constantly being clocked.
The drawings and lithographs are
mostly black and white, although the drawing for Queen Victoria and
The King of Spain are both done in blue ink, probably a fountain pen,
which gives a clue to their urgency.
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The drawings and lithographs are mostly black and white,
although the drawing for Queen Victoria and The King of Spain
are both done in blue ink, probably a fountain pen, which gives a clue to
their urgency. Wilson’s drawings have been called “stage pictures.” While
the architectural quality of his sub-divisions imply a one-to-one
relationship to scale, in the end the drawings and lithographs are about
actions. Eventually, characters will enter. A chair will be occupied or
left isolated.
A Letter for Queen Victoria, 1971/1972
Deutsche Bank Collection
Courtesy of
Byrd Hoffman and Water Mill Foundation
In
Leonce and Lena, the public begins seeing the actors the moment they
enter the theater. Soon the characters will be stationed between columns,
an actor will be jumping up, and others will be silhouetted against an
eerie landscape. While the breakdown in the drawings may recall the
divisions in a
Filippino Lippi,
Botticelli, or even
Piero della Francesca, Wilson’s sensibility is very much informed by his
emergence in the 60s as part of the circle around
Merce Cunningham, working against the tide of minimalism and reacting to
Happenings and
Living Theater. Wilson studied with the abstract expressionist
George McNeil, and this profoundly informed his drawings, but perhaps even
more so his life.
I talked with Wilson about George McNeil and the
evolution of his work from drawing to theatre. Wilson admitted that his
work was “baroque” and that it “didn’t quite fit in or that it still
hasn’t fit in.” He casually concluded that his theater “doesn’t really
quite work on Broadway, it doesn’t work at the Met, it doesn’t work at
Lincoln Center.” As he told me: “I was making art with illusion. I had
19th-century techniques, but I was hiding all the ropes. I was also
working in film, video, drawings, sculpture, and furniture. I mean, it was
all mixed up. I was very much a product of the 60s. My theater was more
formal. It was really about 19th-century behavior seen in the 20th
century, but at the same time it was part of what was happening at that
time.” After all is said, Wilson has spryly crossed into the 21st century,
lugging the 1800s quietly along.
Parsival no. 10, 1985
Deutsche Bank
Collection
Courtesy of Byrd
Hoffman and Water Mill Foundation
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Cheryl Kaplan: Is the drawing the start of the theater process? It
feels like there’s no separation between the drawings and what happens on
and through the stage. Tell me about your studies with George McNeil. What
did you learn from George McNeil and your time with him?
Robert
Wilson: George McNeil was an extraordinary person. He talked about Martha
Graham. He talked about Vladimir Horowitz. He talked about all kinds of
things. He talked about music. He’d talk about how to listen. He’d talk
about structure. He talked about decoration. He’d look at a painting you
would do, but he’d talk about these other things. He was an abstract
expressionist, but he was always looking at nature. That’s what inspired
him. I think it was a deep root in my work. Sometimes I tell an actor:
‘Stand on the stage like a pine tree. Be noble.’ McNeil said the pine
trees were so noble in the forest. So it was formal.
Where were you
studying with him?
I studied with him in Paris. I studied
painting, and then I came to New York and went to school at the Pratt
Institute and studied with him and became his assistant. He had a sense
that he was planting a seed or something in somebody young. I felt he was
always on my side. I wasn’t a very good student. I was not a good painter,
but it wasn’t important.
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