← The Grand Tourist with Dan Rubinstein
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- [00:00]
Robert Wilson
I mean, people said Einstein of the beach, the opera major with Philip Glass was minimalist. It was baroque. You know, 15 repeats of that, 22 repeats of this. Hand gestures. Try to do that alone and then put that with accounts that are totally different with the music. That's not minimal, it's very complex.
- [00:25]
Dan Rubenstein
Hi, I'm Dan Rubenstein and this is the Grand Tourist. I've been a design journalist for more than 20 years and this is my personalized guided tour through the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food and travel. All the elements of a well lived life. Before we get started, don't forget that our first ever print issue is available for order online now@thegrandtourist.net in this 364 page hardcover volume with three beautiful covers to choose from, you'll find originally commissioned photography and in depth interviews on everything we love here at the Grand Tourist. From our and designed to travel and style. Now back to the show. Groundbreaking, enigmatic, experimental, and with a lifelong body of work that's simply exquisite but not always fully understood. That's how I would describe my guest today. A true creative polymath that continues to set a standard for what's possible in the worlds of art, theater and performance. And he's an American genius, Robert Wilson. For those of you not familiar, he's somewhat of a theatrical arts iconoclast. For decades, he's created plays and operas that have legendarily pushed boundaries for their conceptual events. From his best known work, 1976's Einstein on the beach, that he created with Philip Glass and former podcast guest Lucinda Childs, to one of his more recent triumphs, Mary Said what she Said, which was staged in New York this year with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef and Arpels, starring French actress Isabelle Huppert. The production, mostly Huppert on stage, decked out in a restrictive period costume for a rather intense monologue in three parts, is one of those experimental experiences that transforms a regular performance into a physical and spiritual feat of strength. It's classic Wilson. Always challenging the viewer and always delivering something stunningly simple and also simply stunning at the same time. Robert was born and raised in Texas in the most conservative environment imaginable, and later escaped to New York in the early 60s to dive headfirst into a creative life that would take him down a completely unique and unpredictable path. On top of his theatrical career, he's also a painter and sculptor, famously designs chairs for his performances, and on top of it all, founded the Watermill Center, a museum of sorts In a quiet corner of the Hamptons near New York, I caught up with Robert from the Watermill center to discuss his upbringing in Texas, starting his creative life as an architecture student, why he dislikes Broadway so much, why the label of minimalism just really gets in his craw, and much more. As I do with all of my guests. I'd love to start at the very beginning. I believe you grew up in Waco, Texas. Is that true?
- [03:15]
Robert Wilson
I grew up in Waco, Texas and was there until the age of 17 when I went to the University of Texas.
- [03:25]
Dan Rubenstein
Can you tell me your earliest memory of life in Texas?
- [03:29]
Robert Wilson
I think the earliest memory was the backboard of a bed where I slept and where it had scratches. And I still have that image embedded in my mind. And often when I'm making drawings or staging something, that image comes to mind.
- [03:53]
Dan Rubenstein
And what was your family life like? I heard that it wasn't particularly creative.
- [03:59]
Robert Wilson
Well, I came from a very conservative community. Right wing religious fanatics, racist community. You couldn't walk down the street with a black person in junior high school if you'd seen someone sinning during the week. That means a woman wearing pants, someone going to a theater. Going to the theater is like going to a whorehouse. If you see someone social dancing, you could write their name on a little piece of paper. On a Friday afternoon, at 2:30 in the afternoon, you put that little piece of paper in a box and everyone in junior high school had to pray for those names in the prayer box. I saw you send it and I'm going to put your name in the prayer box and we will pray for you.
- [04:52]
Dan Rubenstein
Would you describe your upbringing as sort of middle class or very middle class? And so you know when you're in your late teens and you're deciding on what to do and where to go to school, before you went to New York, you, you studied in Texas, is that right?
- [05:10]
Robert Wilson
I went to the University of Texas and I studied business administration and later went into a pre law program and eventually then moved to New York in my early 20s to study architecture at Pratt Institute.
- [05:29]
Dan Rubenstein
And when you told your parents you wanted to go, forget about, forget about business or anything like that in Texas and you want to move to New York and study architecture, what did they say?
- [05:41]
Robert Wilson
Well, I actually wanted to study painting and it had been in my mind for a number of years, but I knew that my father wouldn't approve and so I thought architecture sounded more serious. And so I told my father and he said, son, to study architecture's not serious. You have to Study engineering. But anyway, I studied architecture. I decided that I would do it on my own. I had no money, and my father gave me a little money to. To study in New York at Pratt, and I sent it back.
- [06:30]
Dan Rubenstein
How did you support yourself?
- [06:32]
Robert Wilson
I first worked in an Italian restaurant. I was a waiter. I was not a very good waiter, and they fired me. And then I got another job at another Italian restaurant, and the manager says, you're not very good at doing this, but we desperately need a dishwasher. So I was the dishwasher. And then quite early on, I worked with children with learning difficulties, hyperactive children considered, quote, brain damaged. I worked in and around New York. I worked at Goldwater Memorial Hospital, an island in the middle of the east river with people in iron lungs that were catatonic. I worked as an educator and preschool programs in Harlem, Bedford, Stuyvesant, private schools in New Jersey. And that's what I did in order to support myself.
- [07:39]
Dan Rubenstein
And did any of those. Any. Did any of that time with, you know, children with disabilities or anything like that? Was any of that attached to your schooling?
- [07:48]
Robert Wilson
No, it was. Was independent. I became interested in going to museums to see works that I had never had the advantage of seeing. Growing up in a small town in Texas, I went to the theater. I disliked it strongly.
- [08:12]
Dan Rubenstein
Really? Why did you dislike. What kind of shows were you seeing back then?
- [08:15]
Robert Wilson
I saw Broadway shows and didn't like them so much and still don't like them so much. And then I went to the opera and I had a really strong dislike. It was so. It was hideous. It was acting. The scenery, the light makeup, costumes were grotesque for me. And then I saw the work of George Balanchine in the New York City Ballet and neoclassic choreography or classical construction. And I like that very much, and I still do. To me, he was mozart of the 20th century. And I liked especially the abstract ballets of Balanchine, that it was a time space construction absent of psychology.
- [09:16]
Dan Rubenstein
What about it appealed to you?
- [09:18]
Robert Wilson
I like the way the dancers behaved on stage, how they danced for themselves first and the audience was allowed to go to them and they weren't pushing too hard for the audience attention. Later, I saw the work of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and I liked that very much as well. And what was particularly interesting about Cage and Cunningham is that often the music of Cage was put with the dance only on the first night. So what I was seeing is what I was seeing, and what I was hearing was what I was hearing. And in this dualism, in this Parallelism. It was interesting how they could reinforce one another without illustrating one another. And I found that really interesting and fascinating. And looking back now, I think one reason I didn't like the theater I saw in New York, that what I saw was always decoration, was always illustrating what I was hearing. Later, when I developed my own work, I was very much influenced by Cage and Cunningham and Balanchine and the formal construction, classical formula of the megastructure of the work. My work was different than Cage and Cunningham in that although I rehearse separately what I see and what I hear, it's not by chance when I put them together that I make a decision. So I'm interested in what I'm seeing is one thing, but what I'm hearing can be different. But how does it consciously reinforce one another? So it's not a collage. It's a constructed way of organizing time and space with something like a radio play. So if you have radio play, you can imagine what does Dan look like? You know, what does Bob look like? What does the room look like? If you turn the sound off in the tv, you begin to notice things you wouldn't normally see. You know, a little twitch or something and a movement of a finger. We began to read a body language that we're not necessarily conscious of when we are listening to the sound, you know, so that Martha Graham said, the body doesn't lie. And later I adopted a deaf mute boy, and he had never been to school. He didn't know any words for the most part, and he understood the world through body signs and signals. And often thought of Graham when she said, the body doesn't lie.
- [12:33]
Dan Rubenstein
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- [14:22]
Robert Wilson
I spent a summer in Arizona working with Paulo Soleri. He was a dreamer. He was designing bridges in outer space, he was designing cities. He would take a stick and start drawing in the desert earth, sand and make a shape or a form and then we would excavate it and take that excavation and make it into mud and became a mold for something else. But the important thing that I learned from Soleri was that he could think on an enormous scale. And later in my studies at Pratt, I was a student of Sybil Moholy Nagy. She was been married to Laszlo Moholy Nag, the Bauhaus architect. And she the best. It was a five year course, the best class out of the five years. In fact the best class I ever had in my formal education was in the middle of the third year out of five. She said, students, you have three minutes to design a city. Ready? Go. Wow. You had to think big quick.
- [16:01]
Dan Rubenstein
And to this day, are you someone who can think big quick?
- [16:07]
Robert Wilson
I try to. So I directed Goethe's Faust Part 1 and 2 in German. And I had five dramaturgs trying to talk to me about this golden cow of German literature, Faust. And it was so complicated I couldn't understand anything. But I had to make it very simple. Could I tell myself in one minute, what was it? What is it? And that's the reason we work as artists is not to say what something is, but to ask what it is. We ask questions and if we know what it is we're doing, there's no reason to do it. So the reason to work is to say, what is it? Sybil gave her in the five year course of architecture she had in back of her projections this early 60s of images of Byzantine mosaic, a Renaissance painting, a chair of Frank Lloyd Wright. And these were changing rapidly. And she spoke her lecture from little violin chords and her lecture had nothing to do with the imagery in which we were seeing. As far as I could understand, her structuring of ideas was counterpoint. In the second year, there were three lectures in the autumn on Bauhaus architecture. First lecture was October 1st, second lecture October 20th, and the third, October 27th. And she was usually formally dressed. And she entered and stood at a podium, and she had a black leather handbag. And she put it on the floor and opened it up and took out a fish. And she put the fish on the podium and she spoke about Bauhaus architecture. I'm still thinking about that dam fish. I mean, she never explained. And October 20th, we had Bauhaus. She puts the handbag on the floor and opens up and takes an orange out and put it on the podium. She never said anything about the orange, but it's still in my head. Yeah. After five years of seeing this montage of images, was she meticulously organized?
- [18:43]
Dan Rubenstein
That is some real. Some surreal stuff.
- [18:46]
Robert Wilson
It seemed to me that they first of all were presented with theme and variation and. But she never explained. But you became familiar having seen images repeating. During the course of five years, you began to know something about them. And she had a tremendous influence on all of my work and how she could think on a very large scale. Design a city in three minutes. So you don't think about where to put the toilets. You don't think about the detail. What is the big idea? So in all my work, whether it was a play that was seven hours long, a play that was 12 hours long, a play that was 24 hours long, I even made one that was seven days long. I can tell you less than three minutes, what the structure was. The big picture. Einstein, the beach. The first day I met Philip Glass, the opera I made with him, Einstein on the Beach. I said, why don't we make an Opera? It's in 4x with three themes. Act 1, A and B, Act 2, CNA, Act 3, B and C, Act 4, ABC. Together. Theme and variation. So I can tell you less than three minutes. What was five hours long.
- [20:23]
Dan Rubenstein
And what. I'm just curious as. As a sort of young guy in New York, you know, you're. You've graduated from school. Where. Where did you. You saw theater, you didn't like it. And what was your sort of aspiration when you started to work in theater yourself? Like, what was going through your head?
- [20:40]
Robert Wilson
What kind of work? I was very confused. I had no idea. I didn't do anything. Well, I was the worst student in school. I was always the Last in my class difficulty, spelling, reading difficulties. I couldn't do well, whatever all the other kids were doing.
- [21:02]
Dan Rubenstein
I also read that you had a. As a child you had a stutter and that maybe helped you to slow down.
- [21:07]
Robert Wilson
Yes, I stuttered until I was 17 years old. And I met a woman who taught dance to. In Waco, Texas. She taught ballet to young students. She also had a very strong belief in the body healing itself. She worked with athletes with injuries or people in car accidents. And she looked at me and I was stuttering. My parents had taken me to St. Louis, Chicago, various places in the country to overcome the stuttering. And she said, bob, take more time. Slow your speech down. Slow your speech down. And I went home and privately did it. And within about six weeks I had more or less overcome the stuttering. It was if I was speeding in place. So that was I named later. I established a foundation and I named it after her, the Bert Hoffman Foundation.
- [22:29]
Dan Rubenstein
So you weren't a very good student. You had overcome a stutter. You're in New York, you don't like the opera that you see and you don't like the Broadway shows. And so you were confused.
- [22:42]
Robert Wilson
I was very confused. I met Martha Grimm, a friend of mine was dancing in her company. And she said I was, I think 21 or 22. And she said, and Mr. Wilson, what would you like to do in life? And I said, I don't know, Ms. Graham, I have no idea. And she said, well, if you work long enough and hard enough, you'll find something. And that's very simple statement somehow stuck with me. And nine times out of ten, you know it doesn't work. And then suddenly something does work.
- [23:20]
Dan Rubenstein
When did it first work for you?
- [23:23]
Robert Wilson
May I wrote a play that was seven hours long and it was silent. And I showed it in New York. It was not very successful. Most people Left was not well received by critics of New York Times. Said, nothing happens. Just some animals crawling around in a barn.
- [23:46]
Dan Rubenstein
What was it called?
- [23:48]
Robert Wilson
It was called Deaf Man Glance. It was based on visions, dreams of the deaf boy and ideas I had. It was performed by all the people from the various communities where I was working. I was working in New Jersey with. At an art center with housewives. And they became my actors. I included a homeless man. I included a man who lived on Park Avenue in a townhouse. It was a mixed bag of people. Jack Lang, who at that time in the late 60s, early 70s, was head of the Festival of Nancy in France. And he invited me to show it two times and I did, and much to my surprise, I had a tremendous response. Louis Aragon wrote a letter to Andre Breton, his friend who had been dead for some years, and said, dear Andre, I've seen the most beautiful thing of my life. Max Cern said it was the most unforgettable experience. Many people from the French art community and social community, Alain Ro Grier, writers Margaret Duras and others were very supportive. But being having it presented at the Festival of Nancy, it was an international festival, so people from Italy, from the Far east, people from in Europe had a chance to see my work. I was invited to do something at the Staats Opera in Berlin. I was invited to do something at the Piccolo Teatro in Milano. Even La Scala offered something, but I don't know theater and I didn't feel qualified. Seven Brecht asked me to direct the three penny opera on Broadway. I said I couldn't imagine doing something on Broadway. I didn't have the background, the skills or knowledge. But I continued to work. Next big work I did was a man named Michel Guy, who became the Minister of Culture in France. But at that time he started the Festival of Autumn, this was 1972. And he said, I would like to commission you to do a work for the opening of a festival which is still going on. And one of the big cultural events in France each year is the Festival of Autumn. And I did. The inauguration was a 24 hour play for one performance only at the Opera Combique. And it was silent. And that was a prologue to a seven day play that was commissioned in Persia by Frei Diba, the Shabanu of Iran. And so I created this work on outdoors on seven foothills leading to Persepolis. And we had 586 people from all over the world performing at it. I brought housewives from New Jersey, I brought people from Latin America, North America, from Japan, from all over to participate. And this international work that lasted seven days and nights, one performance only.
- [27:45]
Dan Rubenstein
And when you had all this critical success in Europe, did you. How did you think about that? Would you ever like, hey, you know what?
- [27:52]
Robert Wilson
I'm going to be a painter. But I was not a very good one. My real ambition, I said, okay, I'll just do another work in the theater to make some money until I have time to have a studio and do paintings and that. I was about midlife, going through a crisis, really. Do I want to work in theater the rest of my life? And I wasn't sure I did. And a man named Paul Leperk said I was complaining that I still wanted to be a painter. And he said, to be honest, I don't think you'll ever be a great painter, but you're a great theater maker and do what you do is best. And so I thought about it and then I. Later on, I still had reservations about continuing my work in the theater. And I had moved to New York to go to school. And it was a great education just to be in New York and to be exposed from people all over the world, to get in an elevator with so many different people, to go to Chinatown, to go to Little Italy or a Polish community or whatever was so enriching.
- [29:17]
Dan Rubenstein
I had recently seen Mary Said what? She said New York, which was truly fantastic. And congratulations on that.
- [29:23]
Robert Wilson
Well, thank you.
- [29:24]
Dan Rubenstein
It's incredibly hypnotic. And for those who haven't seen it, it's a mainly one woman show with the French actress Isabel Hubert. Tell me a little bit about this. This play is based off of sort of a short story of sorts, like a novella.
- [29:44]
Robert Wilson
It's based off of the life of Mary, Mary Queen of Scots. And it's in the final moments of her life. So it's a kind of reflection on her life and the people in her life, the dogs in her life. It's the amazing thing about Isabella. I think she's one of the most intelligent actresses we have today. She can think abstractly. So.
- [30:21]
Dan Rubenstein
How so?
- [30:22]
Robert Wilson
Well, that most actors are trained to think psychologically are, are trying to illustrate what it is that they're saying. Most actors are. They want you to identify with the situation. Oh, you know, that's like my Aunt Sally or that's. So Isabel has a way of speaking text and a kind of transparency. It's like the weather in the room or something. The most important thing is that it gives time to. To think. And I'm now absolutely sure the reason I didn't like so much Broadway shows, I didn't like the opera. There is no time to think. So in my work, which is simply a time space construction, this is quick, this is slow, this is rougher, this is smoother, this is quieter or quiet, and this is louder or whatever, what's most important in this space time construction? Do I have time to think? Do I have time to dream? Wow. When can we go to theater to have time for reflection? We live in cities with busy life or even here in the country where I am in Southampton, you know, there's so much activity, so Isabel for me is able to speak a text. And the way we work with the direction is to give space and we forget that there's so much space in the world. A few days I'm on an airplane, I'm going to China, working with young actors who don't speak English. But you look out the window of that airplane, you say, wow, there's so much space in the world, and we forget it. So I think that's very important is can we have time to think when reasons for moving from New York and to have the Watermelon center here on Long island is. Have that space, a studio of trees and skies and light, give you time for reflection.
- [33:14]
Dan Rubenstein
And part of the. Of Mary said, what you said is Isabelle is in this sort of period costume. It looks quite restrictive and with a corset and, you know, collar and the whole thing. And she's speaking so quickly and with such precision for so long. It's almost like a. Just the performance itself is this, like, athletic performance that's so admirable. And it made me think of the work of Lucinda Childs and who also had been on the podcast, who is known for this sort of athleticism in a performative way. Is that how do you do you create the work and then just expect the performance to kind of meet that, you know, jump through that hoop and to kind of meet that expectation? Or is the athleticism sort of a part of the concept itself?
- [34:07]
Robert Wilson
Well, the stage is like a battery of energies. You know, some are quicker, some are slower again, some are rougher, smoother. Some need more energy. So I try again to what is the big picture real quick? You know, where do you need your most energy? I was very fortunate when I was young and had no idea I'd ever have a career in the theater. I was with Rudolph Nureyev and Margo Fontaine after they dance a Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden. And there was a dinner afterwards, and Fontaine said to Nureyev, if you ever partner me that way again, I won't perform with you. And she says, what do you mean? He said, what do you mean? We've had a triumph. We had 25 minutes standing ovation. She said, I'm 43 and you're 23. I can't jump the evening the way you can. I have to save my energy to jump here, maybe for 15 seconds. I have to save my energy here to once again a jump, maybe for 20 seconds. And towards the end, I have to save my energy for 10 seconds. Those are my columns, and you have to help me get there. So she was looking at. At Sleeping Beauty, the whole line of where she needed the energy, how to Conserve her energy and where to go. And Isabel said recently some Manassas said, oh, what is it like to work with Robert Wilson? And she said, oh, he just gives me points. And then I tried to find them. So I tried to make an overall structure mariet divided in three parts. And there are only two lines in the world, only two. There's a straight one and a curve. That's all. So Isabelle, if we start with a perpendicular line to the audience near, far away, do you. Let's do it silently. Can you walk silently from the back of the stage to the audience in 30 minutes? And can you hold my attention? No text, no music. So my work is again, it's a little bit like putting a silent film together with a radio play. And then I sometimes with Isabel, I said, well, in all my work, but Mary, I turn all the lights up. I say, can you just speak the text? So I. I concentrate not on what I'm seeing, but to hearing her, listening to her. Or then I add music or sound or other things in this dualism. How can they reinforce one another? So it's conscious construction, time and space.
- [37:31]
Dan Rubenstein
Looking at a lot of your works, sort of over time there's a tendency to. You have, of course, this ability to boil things down to their sort of essential roots. And it's something I think any, an architect or a designer could really identify with as a true skill. And thinking about Mary said what she said. I was looking at some old photos of Madame Butterfly from. From a. You know, I believe it was the early 90s. Do you appreciate this concept or the word of minimalist or minimalism? And I know you wouldn't. No one does.
- [38:11]
Robert Wilson
People said Einstein of the beach sale, probably major with Philip Glass, was minimalist. It was baroque. In the second scene of the first act, I mean, you have. It's mind boggling. I mean, doso, doso, doso, fa. Doso, doso, fa. You know, 15 repeats of that, 22 repeats of this. Hand gestures, not following the music, a gesture, a pattern, repeats 5 times, then 10 times, then 5 times, then 20 times, then 5 times, then 25. Try to do that alone, the gesture. And then put that with accounts that are totally different with the music. It's not minimal, it's very complex.
- [39:07]
Dan Rubenstein
Do you think it's because people look at it and they just think of minimalism in terms of like, just the scenery or like.
- [39:13]
Robert Wilson
Yeah, but, you know, the surface, the mysteries on the surface. What makes the surface mysterious is what is beneath the surface. So your body, you have skin and that's what's sexy and attractive. But beneath that you have meat. And inside the meat you've got a bone. So you have three layers of structure. Skin, meat and bones. So on the surface, all great work. And my way of thinking is simple. What is King Lear, Shakespeare's great tragedy? A man divides his kingdom. The center line of Lear. I shall go mad, says the king. And then he goes into nature. The first half's in a man made environment. The surface structure is not important for me in the long run. I can't work without structure. But it's what you experience, that's what's important. But I start with structure. And so you have a mega structure. An architect builds a building. So you're in a building now, in a studio right there, probably other rooms in the building and other functions in the building and other ways of decorating and filling in the other rooms. But the architect has made the megastructure the building. So that's what it's like making theater. You have a overall structure, a megastructure, and then you can begin to fill it in. So if I work with Isabel, if I work with a sound designer, if I work with a costume designer, if I work with a composer, we start with the megastructure. And then everyone can participate in filling in the megastructure to their likes and their dislike. So that's what a good stage director does. That's what a good architect does. Paris is a beautiful city because it has a beautiful plan. And so Frank Gehry can build a building and it still works because there's overall megastructure that has been thought out by an architect.
- [41:33]
Dan Rubenstein
And even though you said that you were a terrible painter and that that didn't work out for you, I'm interested in learning a little bit about your sort of video portraits.
- [41:43]
Robert Wilson
Well, I learned to paint in other mediums. So I learned, actually I very early on was fortunate to watch Visconti direct an opera. And he was sitting in the back of the theater. This was in Spoleto in Italy. And he said, oh, put a little more yellow over there. It was lighting. Oh, no, no, no, it needs a little more green. No, no, it's too much. Put a little violet. He was painting with light. Wow. And he came to see one of my early works. And he said, he complimented on my light. And I said, oh, Mr. Bisconti, wow. I cried. So I began to do on stage what I couldn't do or was frustrated trying to do with on a canvas. And then later, with video portraits with light and positioning, framing of images was more successful than what I was trying to do with paint on the canvas. It was painting on a different medium.
- [43:07]
Dan Rubenstein
What was your first video? Do you remember the first person who sat for.
- [43:12]
Robert Wilson
Yeah, I do. I went in the. Well, I went in to CDF TV channel in Germany and asked if they would commission a series of video portraits. I had an idea of having a hundred episodes at that time. TV signed off at midnight and didn't come on until 6 in the morning. And I wanted to play them all night. In the beginning they said no. Eventually they did do it. And then I had the idea of going to Sony. I went to Mr. Morita, who was head of Sony, and I had met him through a friend of mine who had the idea of Walkman and presented it to Morita. And I talked to Marita. I said, can we change the format of the TV screen? Right now it's this box. It's more horizontal than vertical. Can we change it to a vertical format that is in proportion to the human body, like a Whistler painting or. And he said, yeah, we could do it. And then I had the idea of making video portraits. And I went out to the Sony plant just outside of Tokyo and met with him. He said, you should explain to the company your idea. And I did. And it was about 9 o' clock at night. And I said, I cannot imagine that everyone's working here at 9 o' clock at night. He said, oh, yeah, they are, because they work for Sony. We're a family. One of the guys asked me a question. I said, why don't we make a video portrait right now of Mr. Morita? So I said, stand on the staircase for 10 or 15 minutes. Try to think. Nothing. So we videotaped it and I took the monitor and turned it on its side and put tape on the side of the monitor. And for a number of years he had it in his office on the wall of this. So that was the first video portrait. And later I had the idea that I did portraits of movie stars, of people from the street. I did animals, royalty, various portraits, but on flat screen, high definition. At that time now they had become available or popular. But the original idea was to have the video portraits in bus stops, train stations where people were queuing, and grocery stores and banks. I wanted to have them on the face of wristwatches. I went to Rolex and asked, can we have a video portrait on your wristwatch?
- [46:22]
Dan Rubenstein
And what do they say?
- [46:23]
Robert Wilson
No.
- [46:26]
Dan Rubenstein
I think I knew the answer to that one. But I mean, maybe now, you know, maybe now with digital phones, you never know.
- [46:33]
Robert Wilson
Now it's all happening.
- [46:35]
Dan Rubenstein
But I don't know if Rolex would do it now, but I'm sure Apple would in some way.
- [46:40]
Robert Wilson
Maybe. Yeah.
- [46:41]
Dan Rubenstein
Yeah. You know, you've done, you know, Brad Pitt is a famous one and of course, all the ones you did with Lady Gaga. And, um. Is there a difference between doing a video portrait with someone off the street and doing one with an actor, like a film actor?
- [46:57]
Robert Wilson
I don't think so. A good actor is someone who's comfortable with themself. So all my early work, which is performed with non professionals, if someone is comfortable with themselves on stage, they can more easily relate to a public. And that's the same with an actor. And then in my work, you saw Isabel and Mary, actually, she's quite awkward in the beginning, but she's tireless and repeating. So Andy Warhol said, I want to be a machine, and freedom is becoming a machine. So the more mechanical we become, the freer we are. I once, early years and watching Balanchine, there was a beautiful dancer named Allegra Kent. And I used to go to see Balanchine, especially to see Allegra. And I asked her once I saw her in her bookshop. I didn't know her, but I went up to her and asked her about a certain movement she did in one of Balanchine's ballet. She said, oh, I have no idea, but when I'm doing it, I know it was in the muscle. The mind is a muscle becoming mechanical, you become freer. Charlie chaplin was sometimes 350 takes of a scene. So the first time you do something can be spontaneous. But to learn that again, to go back through the painful time it takes, I was here, I went there, I did that, and then I went here and then I did that. To learn that again, to put it together, takes a long time until it becomes free again. So contrary to what most people think, the more mechanical one becomes the freer.
- [49:07]
Dan Rubenstein
You are not really related to that, but I guess you could, you could. You could probably say that it is. You've done a lot of work over time designing chairs and you collect chairs. And there's also a show at. I believe it's. It's closed now, but there was a recent show at Resonate Gallery in New York of your chairs. There's also a new book from August Editions by our friend of the show, Young. No, um, why chairs? What. What. How did that sort of love affair begin? Was it literally Just creating a chair for work.
- [49:42]
Robert Wilson
I had an uncle who lived in Albuquerdo, New Mexico. And I went at Thanksgiving when I was about, I don't know, maybe 11 or 12 years old. And he was a recluse. He lived in the white sand desert in Alamogordo, New Mexico. And an adobe house that he had painted white and this white building in a white desert. And he had in one room a mattress on the floor with a cover of a Navajo chieftain blanket. The next room is a series of pots, Native American pots on the floor. But in another room there was a chair, only one chair, rather thin, narrow chair. And I said to my Uncle Sherrod, I said, that's a very beautiful chair. And the following Christmas, he sent it to me as a present. And so I wanted to live like my Uncle Sherrod. I wanted to move everything out of my bedroom and the family home in Waco and have only this chair. And I somewhat was successful. And then I was leaving to go to the University of Texas. And my freshman year, I was 17, my cousin, my uncle's son, wrote me a letter and said, my dad gave you this chair. It's mine and I want it back. So I sent it to him. He lived in California. And that was the beginning of my interest in chairs. And I think of what Gertrude Stein said. They said, oh, Ms. Stein, what do you think of modern art? She said, I like to look at it. So that's what I think about chairs. I like to look at them. And as a child at my family home, I used to take the chairs away from the wall. They roll, shove it against the wall and put them out in space. They were like sculpture. I could walk around them.
- [51:54]
Dan Rubenstein
What's next for you? What does Robert Wilson do for summer?
- [51:58]
Robert Wilson
I'm planning a program with children's art. And we have. We're going to show hundreds of works of children drawings. And it goes back to my deep interest and commitment to education. And a group of very interesting artists are giving us works or donating works to support this exhibition of children's art.
- [52:31]
Dan Rubenstein
Thank you to my guest, Robert Wilson, and to everyone at the Watermill center and Van Cleef and Arpels for making this episode happen. The editor of the Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don't forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, the Grand Tourist curator@thegrandtourist.net and follow me on Instagram danrubenstein and you can purchase the first ever print issue of the Grand Tourist online now on our website thegrandtourist.net and don't forget to follow the Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. And leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Till next time.