Robert Wilson, Theater Director With a Fervent Art World Following, Dies at 83

Robert Wilson, a playwright and artist who cultivated a loyal following in the art world for spare productions that bridged the gap between performance art and theater, died on Thursday in Water Mill, New York, at 83. His death was announced by the Watermill Center, the arts center he founded there, which said he died of a brief but acute illness.

“While facing his diagnosis with clear eyes and determination, he still felt compelled to keep working and creating right up until the very end,” the arts center wrote in its announcement. “His works for the stage, on paper, sculptures and video portraits, as well as The Watermill Center, will endure as Robert Wilson’s artistic legacy.”

Wilson’s work ran the gamut from artworks shown in museums to unconventional stage adaptations premiered in theaters. Much of his work was characterized by an interest in stillness and slowness, qualities that could be found in both his durational performances and his art.

One widely seen series of videos, for example, was meant to act as portraits of its subjects: the singer Lady Gaga taking up the pose of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière in a famed 1806 Ingres painting; the actor Brad Pitt standing in a pair of thin white shorts in a room lit blue; the artist Pope.L lounging on a model of a treed landscape, his skin turned silver. Each of these videos runs around three minutes, though little happens during that span, which was exactly Wilson’s point—to make viewers notice things that may otherwise go unnoticed.

“If you slow things down, you notice things you hadn’t seen before,” Wilson once told the critic Hilton Als, who profiled him for the New Yorker in 2012.

Wilson broke new ground in 1976 with his production of Einstein on the Beach, an opera that tells the biography of Albert Einstein in only the loosest sense, his life narrated abstractly via music by Philip Glass and choreography by Lucinda Childs, who coauthored the libretto with Christopher Knowles and Samuel H. Johnson. Though the opera is nearly five hours long, it contains minimal dialogue in the conventional sense and generally functions more like a piece of performance art, with audience members permitted to enter and exit at will.

The opera was perceived almost immediately as a provocation. “A great deal of this is boring,” wrote Clive Barnes in the New York Times. “But it was Logan Pearsall Smith, at the beginning of century, who pointed out that boredom taken to its ultimate degree becomes, in itself, a species of art. And Mr. Wilson uses theatrical boredom just as Mr. Glass uses his electric organ. They know that, once in a while, it is nice when they stop.”

Now, the opera has become a classic. Many other major theatrical productions by Wilson have followed, including one centering around the life of performance artist Marina Abramović.

For Wilson, much of his work was deeply related to his background in art. He said he saw no division between art in the traditional sense and theater, something evident in the programming for the Watermill Center, which he founded in 1992.

“What interests me about theater is that it brings together all the arts,” Wilson said in a 2022 interview conducted by Hauser & Wirth gallery. “It’s architecture, painting, light, poetry, dance, music and philosophy. All the arts can be found in what we call ‘theater.’ In the Latin sense of the word, ancient theater was ‘opus,’ meaning all inclusive. My early works were called silent operas. And in a sense, they were ‘opera’ in the Latin sense of the word, in that they were all-inclusive works.”

Robert Wilson was born in Waco, Texas, in 1941; his father was a lawyer who met Wilson’s mother while she was working at an insurance company. Wilson had an auditory-processing disorder as a child and developed a stutter as a result. Wilson solved his speech difficulties by speaking at a different pace from most. “If he slowed the process down and took his time,” Als wrote in his New Yorker profile, “he could get the words out. Eventually, he trained himself to do just that.”

He attended the University of Texas as an undergraduate, studying business administration between 1959 and 1962, then moved to Brooklyn to study architecture at the Pratt Institute. Then he drifted toward dance, sitting in on a Martha Graham rehearsal and beginning his first experimental theater pieces. He graduated Pratt in 1966.

Wilson would later on state that studying something other than theater had influenced his approach to his mature work. “Well, if I had studied theater, I would not be making the kind of theater that I’m making,” he once said.

Shortly after graduating Pratt, Wilson returned to Waco and became severely depressed. He attempted to die by suicide and failed, and so was placed in a mental hospital where he began to come to terms with his identity as a gay man. Upon his release, he returned to New York.

In 1967, Wilson moved into a SoHo loft where he founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Birds, named after the person who aided Wilson in overcoming his speech impediments as a child. The space was conceived as a place “to find and to make situations where people of varied backgrounds, interests, and capabilities can come together to develop their own individuality and talents, and contribute their efforts in group situations,” per its description. The first performance staged there, Baby Blood (1967), involved Wilson, wearing nothing but a T-shirt, moving across a plank and covering himself in plastic.

Performances such as this one would go on to gain him a loyal audience of artists, and though Wilson would go on to make his name in the world of theater, he also showed work in galleries and museums. Paula Cooper Gallery has given Wilson nearly a dozen solo exhibitions, including one in 1984 that focused specifically on his drawings. At that gallery, Wilson also exhibited his sculptures, which frequently took the form of angular tables and chairs that sometimes were used as props in his theatrical productions. “Wilson’s furniture and sculptural pieces are born on the stage as a key element, envisioned as performers on equal par with the actors,” the artist wrote on his website.

Wilson took one of the top art prizes in the world when he showed his art at the 1993 Venice Biennale. He won the Golden Lion for sculpture with an installation that consisted of a cracked-earth floor and a creepy figure that seemed to emerge from it. In Artforum, critic Thomas McEvilley called the installation “atmospheric and spooky.”

That Wilson won such an award was surprising to many at the time, considering that most did not think of him as a sculptor, let alone an artist. McEvilley wrote that some were even disappointed by Wilson’s win. But Wilson was used to such a reaction and even seemed to welcome the confusion.

Of his work, Wilson once told the Guardian, “It is OK to get lost! You don’t have to understand every second. I think that’s the problem. Let the audience get lost. It’s OK.”