Robert Wilson (4 October 1941 – 31 July 2025)
VISIONARY
ONE OF THE FEW OF WHOM IT CAN BE SAID
OF THE FEW
IT CAN BE
SAD
There follows a resource from Time Sensitive, Robert Wilson interviewed by Spencer Bailey. I like it but I wasn't looking for this. I was looking (and I would like to thank Uri Khein for sending me the sad news, and the photo illustrating this sad post) for—perhaps it's in the Robert Wilson book, which I don't have with me—the answer to this question: What is the most beautiful thing in the world?
Robert Wilson answered, Cat's paws.
The picture showed an early production of his, in a proscenium arch theatre, enormous cat's paws were crossing the stage.
I saw Die Goldenen Fenster at the Kammerspiel in Munich, 1982. In those days, and I hope they are still, German audiences (West German, BRD, in those days) were highly vociferous, whether favourably—curtain calls went on forever—or unfavourably. A part came in the show when one of the actors, then others repeating and amplifying it, said: Wir fahren nach Hause.
A large section of the audience beside us rose, and said, Wir auch!
We're going home.
We are too!
It was out of place in our theatrical experiences that year, a year packed with them. Dad was in the BRD on academic exchange, as a theatre director, first learning German in Munich, then in Berlin at the Hochschule der Künste, as it was then, the old Max Rheinhardt school, now Universität der Künste. There, through Dad, I picked up the walking exercise I do with Minus Theatre.
It was out of place, outlandish, in the still-going-on self-flagellatory precession of productions picking over or annealing the wound left by Nazism and representational complicity with it. There were the sealing theatrical ones and the mawkish rubbing-nose-in-it, back-whipping ones, almost kitsch in the sense of the political motivation Kundera attributes to kitsch.
The only solution is only ever art and the Wilson was this but in a way we didn't know how. Or what. Theatre? Wilson tended to prefer the word opera, but from that point we were aware of him and followed him, back and back again to Germany where the money was to realise his visions—it wasn't in LA for the arts festival to accompany the Olympic games, 1987, to realise the CIVIL wars and David Byrne's musically accompanied Knee Plays, joints in the globally produced action. Wilson was jetting between the contributing countries, preparing the composite parts.
The script for Die Goldenen Fenster which was the programme, and the sketches accompanying it, became a treasured item. His work is especially present in mine with Minus Theatre. It's a different theatre but equally outlandish. We will one day when America . . . spits out the poison . . . go to the Watermill.
