Robert Wilson, Johnny Depp, 2006
Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum Sackstr. 16, 8010 Graz Austria Autriche
The works by Robert Wilson (born 1941 in Waco, Texas, lives in New York) combine a wideranging variety of artistic media such as movement, dance, light, stage design, sculpture, music and text to a perfect whole. All his experiences as an image and object artist, as a stage designer and director, as a choreographer and curator have been concentrated in his "VOOM"-video portraits since 2004. The portrayed subjects - e.g., Johnny Depp, Isabella Rossellini, Jeanne Moreau, Salma Hayek, Brad Pitt, Willem Dafoe, but also unknown people and animals - refer to their own biographical as well as to cultural-historical sources. They are both construed and authentic, both biographical and sociographical, portraits of a life as well as of a medium or an era. As the portrayed persons are inscribed in our visual memory, the portraits not only tell about the life of the depicted subjects, but also about our history. The portraits are history. As well as the poets and musicians Wilson cooperated with, such as William S. Burroughs, Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, Marianne Faithfull, David Byrne or Lou Reed. In the history of portraiture and of photographical portraits, especially staged photography, Wilson's staged video portraits represent not only a maximum of perfection, but also a seminal method. His innovative image language creates a world, between the Chaplinesque and the Kafkaesque, but always "absolutely Wilson".