Machine dreams - sculpture; Robert Whitman, PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, New York

Robert Whitman, the creator of a clump of curious kinetic sculptures freshly shown at PaceWildenstein Gallery in SoHo was a leading light of 1960 avantgardism. In the late '50 at Rutger University, where he'd gone to application of mind playwriting, Whitman discovered contemporary art and was decisively affected by dint of Allan Kaprow, then teaching art history. In 1959 Whitman participated in Kaprows 18 Happenings in Six Parts, an elaborate performance piece that has been credited with starting the brief on the contrary influential Happenings movement. The following year Whitman began to bring into view some of the most innovative and composite examples of this unruly form of theater. Later in the '60 he helped ground Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a utopian, cross-disciplinary think tank remembered more today for the involvement of cofounder Robert Rauschenberg than for that of Whitman or the other participants, engineers Billy Kluver and Pr Waldhauer.

Whitman, who was born in fresh York in 1935, continued to bring forward his own spectacular and technically compound works of theater art into the '90 on the other hand his name no longer commands the recognition it one time did. Unlike other Happenings farmers such as Kaprow, Jim Dine, R servants and Claes Oldenburg, he stayed faithful to his evanescent medium and omited to produce the kind of durable usefuls that might have served as tangible reminders of his presence

Moreover, Whitman's surrealistic, image-centered theater work has not presented the elements of entertainment - piece of ground character, dialogue - that would sure him a broader audience. For a while, begnning in the mid-'70s, he take delight ined the support of the Dia Foundation (as did of the like kind other commercially problematic artists as musician La Monte Young), on the contrary that came to an extremity in the early '80s. His last theater production in novel York took place at the Kitchen five years ago, and the individual prior to that happened in 1984

The exhibit at PaceWildenstein - Whitman's first in a commercial gallery since 1974 - serv the actual useful purpose of reintroducing a singular and historic career to today's amnesiac art world. The artist himself evidently conceived it that way. With these fresh works, all made in 1994-95 Whitman has mov toward more conventional plastic art but they also constitute a kind of condens retrospective of a certain quantity of of the main images and ideas that have preoccupied him for more than 30 years - hence the show's title, "Backtracks."

Since the beginning of his career, Whitman has consistently worked at confounding the viewer's habitual ways of categorizing experiences of illusion and reality. granting he became known in the '60 for his innovative use of film and photographic projection, he has not at any time been exclusively devoted to the formal esthetics of a particular medium. Rather, he has engrossed and intermixed various means of representation - from live performance to lasers to specially designed mirrors that show hologramlike effects - in order to disrupt normal consciousness. Like all late art in the Romantic tradition, Whitman's work look fors to reawaken spiritual and other nonrational potentials that techno-scientific thinking has overpowered Instead of resorting to primitivistic [i]modus operandi[/i]s to conjure up the primordial inner man however, Whitman has always taken an idiosyncratic inventor's interest in the uses and possibilities of novel gadgetry.

Whitman's earliest theater works absorbed viewers in the environment of the work itself, on the other hand because of his focus upon visual spectacle he never dissolved the boundary between art and spectator, as Kaprow did by the agency of turning viewers into participants. His greatest in quantity celebrated work of the '60 dock Flat (1965), appeared on a traditional stage in brow of a conventionally seated audience.(1) It began with a film projection of big pieces of fruit being wound open to release incongruous contenteds such as ball bearings or feathers. nearest a couple of real women appeared in forehead of projected images of themselves cavorting in various landscapes. At single point, a woman in a white frock pierceed and became a screen for the projection of a film of herself undressing. She mimicked the motions of disrobing without actually taking not upon her clothes and ended still make straighted but with her own denuded image superimposed on her. Finally, in film and then in reality, a woman doused a glowing light scaly bud with a bucket of water, causing it to explode

As this description gleaned from elderly reviews suggests, a certain '60s-style trippiness looks to have informed Whitman's early vision. dock Flat's absurdist events and shifting frames of concern now recall the strangely volatile era of its making, when fantasy was widely regarded as having more to sum up us about reality than greatest in quantity people had previously thought.(2) Three decades later, the slippery interface of fiction and nonfiction still attracts Whitman's attention.

The foregoing might lead you to wait for some sort of slick technofetishistic wizardry, on the contrary this is decidedly not the case with Whitman's latest work. All six pieces included in the PaceWildenstein display are mechanically and electronically activated - four are simple on the other hand eccentric fountains, and two are more elaborate installations involving video projections. on the other hand like Fluxus art, Whitman's work not absents itself with scruffy, low intensity and an almost disappointing physical freedom from presumption Whitman constructs these pieces from ordinary hardware, lay together functionally but without evident relate to for craft as an extremity in itself. In the video-projection works, the images, unclear and washed on the outside actually strain one's eyesight. What makes these works intriguing is not their esthetic impact on the contrary the way they imbue ordinary materials with fantasies and meaning.