Brochure, Robert Whitman, Passport.Pdf
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Robert Whitman Passport April 16 and 17, 2011, 8 pm Riverfront Park, Beacon, New York www.diaart.org Robert Whitman Passport Robert Whitman's Passport was co-commissioned by Dia Art Foundation and Peak Performances @ Montclair State (NJ). Simultaneous performances are presented at Riverfront Park, Beacon, NY, and Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair, NJ. Coordinating Producer Julie Martin DIA ART FOUNDATION PEAK PERFORMANCES @ MONTCLAIR STATE Curator Executive Director Yasmil Raymond Arts & Cultural Programming Curatorial Associate Jedediah Wh eeler Jeanne Dreskin Executive Producer " Audio-Video Technician Jill Dombrow ski Patrick Heilman Associate Producer Assistant to Coordinating Producer Jessica Wa silewski Hedi Sorger Production Manager Production Manager J. Ryan Graves Will Knapp Cultural Engagement Director Stage Manager Carrie Urbanic Jenni Bowman Media and Marketing Specialist Light Designer Thomas P. Miller Frank DenDanto Technical Director Master Electrician Jack Brady Greg Goff Audio and Video Engineer Scenic and Prop Fabrication Andr ew Lulling Chad Bowen Production Coordinator Kurt Diebboll Rachel Malbin Curtis Harvey Light Designer Jeremy Lydic William Grown ey Dia Art Foundation's presentation in Beacon is supported in part by Lisa and Richard Caleb Taggart Video Production and Editing Baker, Heidi Olson and Roger Duffy, and The Pace Gallery. Additional support is provided Video Networking Systems Designer Katelynn Altgilber s by the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency. Shawn Van Every Gianluca Bianchino Audio-Video Assistants Klimentina Jauleska The presentation at Montclair State University is made possible in part by a grant from the Brian Loatman Chris Luongo Association of Performing Arts Presenters Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program, Dan Masterson Scenic and Prop Fabrication Emily Shepard funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundat ion. Supported in part by the National Andrew Boyle Dan Wolfe Timothy DiGregorio Endowment for the Arts. Flying effects at Montclair State University provided by Flying by Foy. •.J Performers at Dia:Beacon Elizabeth Flynn Ashley Brocious Joseph Geitner Special thanks to Steve Gold, Mayor of the City of Beacon, and the Beacon City Council, Nick Djandji Jeremy Lydic City of Beacon Parks Department, and the citizens of Beacon. Curtis Harvey Jesse Monahan '1 Josh Hurt Christopher Sant illi Rayvawn Johnson Video Networking Systems Designer The artist would like to express his thanks to Katelynn Altgilbe rs, Andrew Atkinson, Kit Messick Shawn Van Every Gianluca Bianchino, Klimentina Jauleska, Chris Luongo, Julie Martin, Elizabeth Reese, Jenna Otter Performers at Montclair State and Hedi Sorger for their contributions to the project, as well as the staff at Dia and Nick Ruiz Tony Bordonaro Robert Vincent Smith Peak Performances and all the volunteers whose generous help and support made this Klimentina Jauleska Hedi Sorg er production possible. Eric Stalow ski Horse courtesy Chat eau Stabl es, Inc. Dana Thomas Dani Vialpando Front cover: Production Run Crew Robert Whitman, Passport.Rehearsal photo, Hudson River, Beacon, NY, November 20 10. Corde ro Acevedo Photo: Ben Bloom. Andrew Boyle Christopher Santilli Robert Whitman Passport A daring frankness and irreverence toward aesthetic convention and refinement mounted in the woods of Staten Island, and in A Walk in the Park (1981 ), performed have been prominent traits of artist Robert Whitman's theatrical work. An outstanding in the Undercliffs area of Palisades Interstate Park. Whitman's notion of an expanded proponent of the robust multidisciplinary activities that flourished during the 1960s, stage that incorporates the spontaneity of nature-the random sounds and presence Whitman sought to radicalize presupposed definitions of medium to conceive of an of animals, the possibility of wind and rain, for example-partially determines and artistic program that integrated painting and sculpture with Jive actions, collage and 1 constructs the work's choreography. drawing, slides, and Super 8 film projections. Emerging alongside artists such as Unlike prefabricated footage, which can be strictly controlled, the visual imagery and George Brecht , Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Lucas Samaras, sound tracks of Passport engage a repertoire of chance when projected in real time he orchestrated-through loosely organized scores that notated action in sequences at the respective sites, thus rendering a landscape of opposing realities. The two of uncanny imagery-e vents performed by amateur actors against backdrops of ad locations negate any primacy of source; each site is both source and receiver, hoc props. as the artist states, 'a massive center for images that come in from somewhere else Whitman's earliest performances, which were originally staged in New York at artist and show something completely else." 2 The variability of the projected settings-the run collaborative spaces such as Reuben Gallery, 9 Great Jones Street, and the backdrops at each location for Whitman's improvised and unpredictable actions gallery at Judson Church, transcended the boundaries of traditional theater and ques underplay the meticulously engineered technology that channels the unedited footage tioned the disciplinary restraints of the visual arts to offer spectators an unrelenting from one site to the other. Whitman has consciously integrated advanced technologies experience driven more by staged action than by narrative simulation. In such works in his work since 1966, when he, together with Billy Kluver, Robert Rauschenberg, as The American Moon (1960), Flower (1963), and Hole (1963), Whitman opted to and Fred Waldhauer, founded Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT.). The suspend mimicry in exchange for immediacy and informality. 'A lot of what I do comes technology implemented in Passport makes possible the fusing of actual and virtual out of the traditions of entr'acte theater, the performances given between the acts of events and the transformation of ordinary rituals from everyday life into make-believe a play," the artist recalls. 'And it comes directly out of Buster Keaton and silent films." 1 apparitions on the borderline of the phantasmatic and miraculous. The construction of a theater of intermissions and transient imagery introduced new Whitman's corporeal improvisations and complex imagery exposing an intimate and liberties that subordinated the rigidity of a tightly woven script. primal state of reflection invites visual cognition. A calibrated and irreproducible event, Passport, Whitman's most recent theatrical work, is to be performed simultaneously Passport is a democratic play in that it introduces a dialogue between the optical in two settings, one indoors and another outdoors, located sixty-five miles apart. The and the experiential, granting both equal footing as presence. The events unfolding doubling of location and audience registers Whitman's concerns for questions of indoors as well as outdoors demand a perceptual exercise that surpasses dichotomies presence and transmission-issues also recently explored in Local Report (2005). of reality and fiction, truth and lie, mirror and shadow to investigate time beyond the Performed against a backdrop of projected images generated in real time and medi limits of geographic demarcation. By integrating live footage, Whitman bids the volatile ated through audio and video broadcasting, webcasting, and digital transmission, l and random and relinquishes discrete narratives in favor of a production in which Passport deploys a plethora of impromptu and arbitrary actions linked by a set of multiple messages collide to form a myriad of relations between objects and events. twenty-two events that revive some of the artist's signature motifs, including water, Yasmil Raymond, curator fire, a horse, white shirts, a boat, and the moon. The score, developed from a series of ink sketches with few notations, focuses on various elements of the performance, such as the bodies of the performers , objects, and the enigmatic scenarios to be enacted in the Kasser Theater in Montclair, New Jersey, and on the Hudson riverfront notes 1. Robert Whitman, quoted in "Chronology,' in Robert Whitman : Playback (New York: Dia Art Foundation, in Beacon, New York. The outdoor mise-en-scene renews Whitman's predilection for 2003), p. 204 . natural settings, like the ponds and parks of the earlier theater works Stound (1980), 2. Robert Whitman, artist statement, February 10, 2011, archive of Dia Art Foundation. biography selected bibliography Robert Whitman was born in New York City in 1935. He received a BA in English New Realisms: 1957-1962: Object Strategies Between Readymade and Spectacle. Ed. Julia Robinson. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Soffa, 2010. literature from Rutgers University in 1957 and studied art history at Columbia Robert Whitman: Local Report. Berkeley, NJ: Experiments in Art and Technology, 2007. University in 1958. He began in the late 1950s to present performances, including Texts by Julie Martin, Bettina Funcke, Shawn Van Every, and Hans-Christoph Steiner. the pioneering works The American Moon (1960) and Prune Flat (1965), as well Robert Whitman: Turning. New York: PaceWildenstein, 2007. Interview by Coosje van as to exhibit his multimedia work in some of New York's more influential venues Brug gen. for showing new work, such as the Hansa, Reuben, Martha Jackson, and Sidney A Theater without Theater. Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007.