ROBERT WILSON: TROPICAL SPRING
ROBERT WILSON: TROPICAL SPRING
1 March, 2014 – 1 April, 2014
I first heard about Robert Wilson when I was a student at the University of Texas, in the early 1970s. Walking
home from class one day, I spied Professor Willis Pratt reading while sitting on a bench. Never one to pass
up the opportunity to butter up a professor, I stopped and asked him what he was reading. A profile of one of
his students, he said, the only genius he had ever taught, in the current issue of the New Yorker. To be able
to further the conversation on our next encounter, I stopped at the University Co-Op and purchased a copy
of the New Yorker Professor Pratt was reading. I was impressed.
It would be another twelve or fifteen years, however, before I met Robert Wilson. It was at a dinner in Dallas
hosted by Betty Blake and Nancy O’Boyle. I was working for Laura Carpenter at the time, and she was out of
town, so they asked me to come in her stead. It would be yet several more years before I actually saw one
of Bob’s works onstage. The more I came to know Bob and his work and would remember Professor Pratt’s
ascription to Bob of the appellation of genius, I started to become ever more irritated. For what immediately
came to mind was Georges Braque’s response late in life when asked for his evaluation of Pablo Picasso:
“Pablo? Oh, Pablo used to be a good painter; now he’s just a genius.” The better I came to know of Bob’s
work, the more I thought of him as an artist, a profound artist.
I have come to love Bob for many reasons, but one of them is because of what he has taught me. My introduction to modernism was T. S. Eliot. I understood some of Eliot fairly quickly, such as the opening passage
of The Wasteland:
April is the cruelest month
Mixing memory and desire
Stirring dull roots with spring rain
Breeding lilacs out of the dead land
I could understand turning a proverb on its head to make something new.
There were other passages that, while I thought them beautiful, I knew I did not understand. One that frequently comes to mind is from Four Quartets:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Bob taught me to know how “a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness.” This is a lot for one person to give another. Bob has helped me understand so much of poetry and painting and sculpture simply by
my seeing his physical and plastic manipulation of a stage or performance. For this, I thank him.
One my fondest memories was when James Turrell and I watched Bob perform his adaptation of Hamlet and
then the three of us went out for dinner afterward. Chirons both.
HB
Robert Wilson
Clementine Hunter Rocker, 2013
Wood and paint
52 x 12 x 28
Ed. 2/3
Robert Wilson
Scourge of the Hyacinths Chair, 1998
Steet and paint
87 x 37 x 3
Ed. 1/3
Robert Wilson
Headrest for St. Theresa, 1996
Wood, Steel and Paint
9 5/8 x 4 1/8 x 12 3/8
Ed. 7 /12
Robert Wilson
Kafka II Chair, 1999
Lacquered Steel
40 x 12 x 12
Ed. 3/3
Robert Wilson
Bessie Smith Breakfast Chair, 1988
Wood and paint
39 3/8 x 35 1/2 x 17 3/4
Ed. 10/12
Robert Wilson
Never Blue, 2000
118 plaster casts of human fingers
Dimensions variable
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