The Ghost of Robert Whitman
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Robert Whitman. Prune Flat, 1965, performed in 1976. Photo: Babette Mangolte. 64 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.25.64 by guest on 01 October 2021 Plastic Empathy: The Ghost of Robert Whitman BRANDEN W. JOSEPH If [the bourgeoisie] wanted to achieve virtuosity in this kind of enjoyment, it could not spurn empathizing with commodities. It had to enjoy this identification with all the pleasure and uneasi- ness which derived from a presentiment of its own determination as a class. —Walter Benjamin [T]here’s nothing about empathy, except in terms of plastic empathy, which has to do with image. —Robert Whitman On September 20, 1966, at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Robert Whitman participated in a panel discussion devoted to the newly emergent art form “expanded cinema.” Moderated by the ubiquitous Henry Geldzahler, the symposium consisted of Whitman, John Gruen, Ken Dewey, and Stan VanDerBeek.1 Although Whitman had previously been considered one of “the Happenings Boys,”2 the debut of Prune Flat at the Expanded Cinema Festival in 1965 moved him prominently into this new field. Central to the emerging definition of expanded cinema was the interaction between performers and their images, and Prune Flat was repeatedly cited as exemplary of this phenomenon. Richard Kostelanetz’s description was typical: Whitman’s “masterpiece,” as he called Prune Flat, was “an exercise in the ambiguous identity of film image and reality. [H]is structure and theme are the same—the possible confusion between image and reality.”3 That afternoon, VanDerBeek—host of a festival-sponsored visit to his recently completed Movie Drome—proved the most enthusi- astic participant, frequently speaking on behalf of the entire “move- ment.” As a means of succinctly explaining his viewpoint, he proclaimed that painting, and by implication its medium-specific boundaries, was “dead.” And supposedly dead along with it were all the ascetic separations and negations by which the arts had been theorized in three decades of formalist criticism. Unconditionally renouncing artistic distance or autonomy, VanDerBeek affirmed: Grey Room 25, Fall 2006, pp. 64–91. © 2006 Branden W. Joseph 65 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.25.64 by guest on 01 October 2021 [T]o simplify the issues here I would say something to the extreme that, for instance, painting is dead and that just recently we’ve grown out of our kind of industrial puritan background and our romantic aspects and are now quite seri- ously and enthusiastically embracing our technology. I would say that probably artists working in uniting themselves with their culture and technology is the most important cul- tural step that we are about to take.4 For VanDerBeek, the expansion beyond medium boundaries was part of a much larger expansion of art, as a mode of communication, across the globe. Technology was to open a virtually unlimited sphere of instantly transmittable imagery, “an expanded cinema that quite literally circles . the world.” “[T]he most important medium we have right now,” he contended, “is light and the transfer and storage of images by light,” or, as he put it, “basically television.”5 VanDerBeek’s rhetoric was beholden to Marshall McLuhan’s cel- ebration of the capacity of electronics to effect a “global village.” VanDerBeek’s term was culture intercom, and the Movie Drome was to be a proto- type of an image communication system that would “reach for the emotional denom- inator of all men, the non-verbal basis of human life, thought, and understanding, and . inspire all men to goodwill and ‘inter-and-intro-realization.’”6 Rather than seeing electronic technology’s capacity to “outer” the central nervous system (as McLuhan put it) as a means of questioning a centered human subjectivity, VanDerBeek characterized it as a vast, almost narcissistic 66 Grey Room 25 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.25.64 by guest on 01 October 2021 inflation of the ego.7 The individual’s prosthetic, electronic cathexes were to be folded back to create a new, expanded unity wherein those communicated with were internalized—first within the Drome and then within consciousness—as images. As he stated the previ- ous year, We are on the verge of a new world—a new sense of art, life and technology—when artists shall deal with the “world” as a work of art, and art and life shall again become the same process. When man’s senses shall expand, reach out, and in so doing shall touch all men in the world.8 The twentieth-century global village was thus to be a vast subjec- tivization, “the metaphor of man who is really multiman,” more dynamic but every bit as solid and self-present as the unified bour- geois subject of the nineteenth.9 While VanDerBeek’s high-speed image overload, or “visual velocity,” may seem distinct from Whitman’s more deliberate theater events, both culminated in a similar, to quote VanDerBeek, “inte- grati[on]” of “image material . with live actors and performers,” Opposite, top: New York a multimedia art encompassing “drama and experimental cinema- Film Festival–sponsored visit to Stan VanDerBeek’s 10 theater.” Although Whitman, as George Baker has argued, ulti- Moviedrome in Stony Point, mately would not embrace the complete dissolution of medium New York, 1966. Photo © specifics, he nonetheless endorsed and extended VanDerBeek’s Elliott Landy/Landyvision.com. blanket dismissal of traditional mediums, declaring to an amused Opposite, bottom: Stan VanDerBeek. Inside the audience at Lincoln Center, “I also think along with paintings that Moviedrome, c. 1965. movies (laughter) are dead.”11 Elsewhere, Whitman promoted the Below: Robert Whitman. instantaneous communicative capacities of electronics. “I am after Two Holes of Water, No. 2, a work around the stability of a film image and the immediacy of 1966. Performed at the newsflash,” he stated about his performance Two Holes of Water New York Film Festival. Lincoln Center, New York. No. 3 (1966). “Television is a great way to collect stuff; besides what’s Photo © Elliott Landy/ on the air, a camera on anything brings it in live—a local newsflash.”12 Landyvision.com. Joseph | Plastic Empathy: The Ghost of Robert Whitman 67 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.25.64 by guest on 01 October 2021 VanDerBeek, in other words, did not entirely misrecognize affini- ties with his colleague. The rhetoric of expanded cinema would culminate four years later in the discourse surrounding the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World Exposition. By all accounts, Whitman proposed the mirror dome that filled the pavilion’s interior.13 Its parabolic surface produced not only normal reflections but apparently three-dimensional “real images” that seemed to hover freely in space. Echoing earlier descriptions of Prune Flat, Architectural Design reported that in the dome “It is often impossible to interpret what is ‘object’ and what is ‘image.’”14 Because it continued the goals of connecting real and image, even (or especially) while apparently eliminating projective technology, the pavilion was cast by Gene Youngblood as the apoth- eosis and “future of expanded cinema”: An astonishing phenomenon occurs inside this boundless space that is but one of many revelations to come in the Cybernetic Age: one is able to view actual holographic [sic] images of oneself floating in three-dimensional space in real time as one moves about the environment. Because the mirror is spherical no lenses or pinhole light sources are necessary: the omni-directionally-reflecting light waves intersect at an equidistant focal point, creating real images without laser light or hardware of any kind. Interfaced with perpetual fog banks and krypton laser rainbow light showers at the World Exposition, the mirror indeed “exposed” a world of expanded cinema in its widest and most profound significance.15 Left: E.A.T. (Pepsi) Pavilion, 1970. Inside the mirror dome It was not by chance that the pavilion provoked such a response showing “real image” reflec- tion. Photo: Harry Shunk. among those, like VanDerBeek and Youngblood, who understood expanded cinema in terms of subjective amplification. For as reported Right: E.A.T. (Pepsi) Pavilion, 1970. Osaka World Exposition. by Elsa Garmire, Photo: Harry Shunk. 68 Grey Room 25 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.25.64 by guest on 01 October 2021 A unique experience occurs at the center of the spherical Mirror; no matter where you look into the Mirror, you see only yourself. If you are brightly lit, you cannot see any other parts of the floor as images. You see all your own images and, in fact, no one else can see them but you. Your image world is filled solely with yourself. This egocentric viewpoint is unique to a spherical mirror.16 It was this that led Barbara Rose, in a passionately McLuhanesque defense of Pavilion, to characterize it as “a secular temple of the self,” its “fluid and protean character an analog of contemporary consciousness.”17 | | | | | No doubt, it was the centrality of Whitman’s work to the emergence of such a discourse that led Annette Michelson, three days before the Lincoln Center panel, to single Whitman out for ad hominem critique in “Film and the Radical Aspiration.” “The emergence of new ‘intermedia,’ the revival of the old dream of synaesthesia, the cross-fertilization of dance, theatre, and film, as in