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Germany’s all-time literary giant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, once suggested to Caspar David Friedrich he should paint landscapes that systematically depicted each type of cloud identified in a famous treatise. Friedrich, by all accounts, was horrified at the suggestion. Being attracted by the freedom and mutability of clouds, he resisted the idea of placing them in neat categories. To reduce nature to a mere mechanism was to diminish the power and glory of the Creator.
I thought of Goethe when looking at Robert Wilson’s Moving Portraits at the Art Gallery of South Australia. In his unutterably boring novel, Elective Affinities (1809), a group of friends amuse themselves by organising tableaux vivants– staged versions of famous paintings. A lot of organisation results in a brief moment in the spotlight, when the amateur actors stand as still as wax dummies.
Wilson’s video portraits are a new type of tableau vivant for an era of globalised culture and digital media. They are as highly structured as anything Goethe conceived, but with more variety and oblique humour. Neither are they completely still. Taking hours to shoot, each piece has been condensed into a few minutes that repeat on a loop. Although the subjects adopt fixed poses, there are slight movements, such as the blink of an eye, which remind us these are videos, not photographs.
Robert Wilson’s Princess Caroline, Princess of Monaco; Lady Gaga: Mademoiselle Caroline Riviere; and Jeanne Moreau, Actress.Credit:Courtesy of RW Work Ltd
One of the world’s most celebrated directors of large-scale theatrical projects, Wilson has been making these portraits for more than 50 years, initially for public TV. During the past two decades, taking advantage of advances in HD technology, he has produced a succession of works, squeezing photo sessions into those rare times he is not preoccupied with the theatre and opera. His commitments are prodigious. At the age of 80, Wilson currently has more than 20 productions being staged in different parts of the world.
Born in Texas, and based in New York, Wilson is in constant demand in Europe, where he spends a large part of every year. He never made it to Adelaide last week, being holed up in Berlin where he is recovering from a back operation.
A feature of Wilson’s theatre is his ability to work across different platforms. A trained architect and designer, his productions regularly include elements of music, choreography and the fine arts. He is known for his attention to lighting and language, not to mention the extreme precision of his sets.
Robert Wilson’s Robert Downey Jr, Actor (2004). Credit:Courtesy of RW Work Ltd
The video portraits may seem like much simpler propositions, but each one requires an enormous amount of preparation. Wilson and his chief collaborator, Noah Khoshbin, research the subject thoroughly and take infinite pains with costume, make-up and sets. As many as 60 people can be involved in a single shoot, and the editing process can stretch out over weeks.
Many of Wilson’s subjects are what we’d call “celebrities”, mainly actors and singers, but he also includes images of writers and artists and people in more common walks of life. One of his sitters in this selection of 23 portraits is Norman Paul Fleming, Auto Mechanic (2006), who sits stiffly at a plain wooden table, wearing a flannelette shirt and denim dungarees, staring out at us suspiciously.
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