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| Issue #39, December 22, 2006 |
art commentary
Absolute Wilson Is Absolutely Wonderful
With Marion Wolberg Weiss
That we are fortunate to live in the Hamptons is a belief repeated time and again, the reasons being obvious. For fans of avant-garde aesthetics, there’s another reason we’re lucky: the Watermill Center. A visit to the Center and better yet, the experience of a performance, is not something that’s easily forgotten. Neither is the Center’s founder, visionary theatre artist, Robert Wilson.
The recent documentary, Absolute Wilson, is equally memorable, both as a film and as a provocative portrait about a most astonishing artist and local resident. The movie’s director, Katharina Otto-Bernstein, puts it another way, “This is a film about a full life and art is part of it. It is not a film about art and life as part of it.”
The documentary shows how Wilson’s life has inspired and/or influenced his creative endeavors, how his life experiences are expressed in a myriad of forms, including theatre and dance pieces, music compositions, set designs and various works of fine art.
The point is that while there are many artists whose aesthetic mediums reveal their world-views and personal experiences, there are few who work in such diverse forms and who experiment to such an extreme degree as Robert Wilson.
This theme is reinforced by the film’s structure or form. Thus, content becomes form. Through current interviews and footage during Wilson’s formative years, we are shown an overview of his life as an outsider, derived partly from religious and sociological repression, the Church’s domination and racial discrimination, respectively. He was also considered an outcast because he stuttered.
Juxtaposed with this biographical material, the film also chronicles (and intersperses) the development of Wilson’s themes and styles in various forms. For example, his learning to “slow down” to help his stuttering became the basis of a “groundbreaking theatrical language.” Such language is not always understood as English but consists of sound effects, recalling for this critic Elizabeth Swaddos’ aural compositions.
Wilson’s move to New York City and his professional relationship with avante-garde artists like Merce Cunningham and John Cage accounted for his risk-taking experimentation as well, along with his study at Pratt Institute.
More fascinating, perhaps, is Wilson’s therapeutic work with challenged and hyperactive children, encounters that became not only a healing experience for him, but also evoke more experimentation with movement and language. We would also suggest that Wilson’s non-linear style of storytelling was also influenced by the thought processes of these children.
Wilson’s adoption of a deaf-mute African- American teenager inspired his first international success, Deafman Glance. Again, another example of real - life events controlling Wilson’s creative works.
We wouldn’t be at all surprised if Absolute Wilson is nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary category. It certainly deserves to be.
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