Robert Whitman
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Robert Whitman (born 1935 in New York City) is an outstanding American artist who is best known for his seminal and continuing work in creating new, non-narrative, imagistic theater pieces. His theater works are rich in visual and sound images, and incorporate actors, film, slides, sound, and evocative props in environments of his own making. Whitman was the first artist to use film in his theater works and in his sculpture pieces.
He studied literature at Rutgers University from 1953 to 1957 and art history at Columbia University in 1958. He was a member of the group of visual artists -- Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg,who in the early 1960s presented theater pieces on the lower east side in Manhattan. Whitman has presented more than 40 theater pieces in the United States and abroad, including American Moon, E.G. and Mouth at the Rueben Gallery. Night Time Sky was his contribution to the First New York Theater Rally in New York in 1965; Prune Flat was first presented at the Cinematheque in New York in 1965 and has been performed numerous times since.
A retrospective, Robert Whitman: Theater Works, 1960-1976 held in 1976 sponsored by the Dia Foundation and presented six earlier works and the premiere of Light Touch. His theater works have been presented at Galerie Maeght Festival in France, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Walker Art Center, Vera List Art Center, MIT and many more.
Whitman has had numerous one-person exhibitions of his sculpture and installation pieces at museums like: The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hudson River Museum, of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm; and has had one person gallery exhibitions at PaceWildenstein in New York. He has been included in many group exhibitions.
In 1966 Whitman was one of the 10 New York artists who worked with more than 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories to create works that incorporated new technology for 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performances presented October 13 - 23, 1966, at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York. For this piece, 'Two Holes of Water- 3', Whitman used seven automobile on the floor of the Armory, from which were projected film, over-the-air television programs, and closed-circuit television projections of live performances and actions, including images from one of the first fiber-optic miniature video cameras.
Whitman was one of the co-founders of Experiments in Art and Technology, along with engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artist Robert Rauschenberg, to provide the contemporary artist with access to new technology as it developed in the research institutions and laboratories.
He has collaborated with engineers on installations and works that incorporate new technology: laser sculptures, including Solid Red Line, in which a red line draws itself around the walls of a room and then erases itself; Pon, a sound-activated mylar mirror installation shown at The Jewish Museum in New York in 1969.
His long collaboration with optics scientist John Forkner began with a mirror, light and sound installation for the Art and Technology exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1971. They developed an optical system that allowed real images to float in space, to appear and disappear in an environment made up of a wall array of 6-inch corner reflectors in which the visitors saw mulitple images of themselves.
Whitman was one of the core artists for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70, Osaka Japan, a project administered by E.A.T. One of the main features of the interior of the Pavilion was the central performance space in a 90 ft diameter 120 degree spherical mirror made of aluminized reflective mylar, which produced real images of the visitors hanging upside down in space.
Whitman, working with E.A.T in the early 1970s, developed and participated in a number of innovative communications projects : - Anand Project: he was part of an interdisciplinary team to develop methods for instructional television programming for rural Indian villages; - Children and Communications, open environments for children to work with a variety of communication equipment; - Telex: Q&A: a world-wide person-to-person question and answer opportunity using telex equipment in New York, Stockholm, Ahmedabad, India, and Tokyo; - Artists and Television, artists’ programming on New York cable channels.
In 1972 Whitman produced his first telephone piece, NEWS, in which participants, using pay phones, called in reports which were broadcast live over radio station WBAI. NEWS was performed later in Houston, Minneapolis, and other cities over a two- or three-year period.
A later performance in Leeds, England in 2002, utilized cell phones, and the calls were broadcast in real time on large speakers in a public square in the town. A recording of the performance was made available by the sponsor, Lumens, at UBUweb.
Ghost, his most recent theater performance, was staged at PaceWildenstein Gallery in October 2002.
In 2003, Dia Center for the Arts, New York presented, Playback, a large-scale retrospective exhibition of Whitman’s works. The exhibition travelled to Porto, Portugal, and opened at the Museum of Cotemporary Art in Barcelona in September 2005. A major book, Playback, a comprehensive study of his work, accompanies this exhibition
Whitman has received many awards: Guggenheim Fellowship; Creative Artists Public Service Grant; Citation of Fine Arts, Brandeis University; Creative Arts Award Xerox Company Grant.
