Robert Whitman, who was at the centre of the New York ‘happenings’, has died. Living and working in milieu that included in the early 1960s Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine and Red Grooms, Whitman’s work mixed installation, performance and multimedia.
American Moon (1960), featured a series of mimed action amid an explosion of detritus, including old textiles, crumpled paper and industrial planks of wood. The audience was segregated into discrete groups so few people’s experience was the same. ‘I don’t suppress some of the bolts holding the work together. I want the audience to be aware that this is done by people. I want the tension between the rational mind and the will that wants to become one with the performance. At the end, you have the fusion of the will and the rational mind,’ the artist explained.
Whitman pursued a greater interest in new technology than many of his counterparts, with works such as Bathroom Sink (1964) featuring screens and video elements, rarely witnessed in performance previously. The following year he took that further, performing Prune Flat on a series of proscenium stages, in which actors interacted with vast projections that often verged on enveloping them altogether.
Receiving positive feedback, he went on to form Experiments in Art and Technology with the artist Robert Rauschenberg and engineers from the Bell Labs, a non-profit project promoting the intersection of the disciplines.
Whitman’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; and other institutions.
