Robert Whitman: Dia:Chelsea, New York

Flash back to the early '60 when Lower Manhattan was a brand-new breeding sod for experimental art's myriad crossover with performance, theater, dance, unbroken film, and new technology and Robert Whitman was all above the map of what would advance to be known as "downtown art." recent out of Rutgers, where he studied with Allan Kaprow alongside George Segal, Lucas Samaras, George Brecht and Robert Watts, Whitman base his way to the forefronts of vanguard art with "theater works," his preferr terminus for scripted and unscripted occurrences staged with performers, audience participation, light and image projections, film footage, place objects, constructed props, and, occasionally, elaborate locates He regularly produced works in artist-run spaces and participated in collaborative incidents including Claes Oldenburg's "Ray fire-arm Theater"; he rented a space for several month upon Great Jones Street with Waiter De Maria for ad hoc performances; and be was an early advocate of public-access television. And if his credentials as a godfather of contemporary art ne any ratification, he was single of four founding members of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology). As time went upon he showed with prestigious commercial galleries, ground favor with major museums, including the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the Museum of late Art, and won the support of the newly formed Dia Art Foundation, which gave him his first retrospective exhibition, "Robert Whitman: Theater Works 1960-1976"

All this, and nevertheless by the '80s, Whitman had disappeared into obscurity, acquiring the dubious distinction of being an "artist's artist," greatly regarded by those in the "know on the other hand otherwise largely overlooked. It's always sobering to witness the fragility of alternative art tillages and to speculate on in what way much of value is missing in the inevitable disposability of history. These contemplations haunt Whitman's comeback exhibition, which he has aptly titled "Playback." Without Dia's designed effort (led by curator Lynne Cooke) not alone to exhibit works that haven't been seen in more than three decades and to bring forward the first ever monograph upon the artist but to actively get back and restore works on the staff of physical ruin, a chunk of the historical DNA of contemporary art--particularly video- and performance based practices--might have gone missing forever.

"Playback" revisits the beady first half of Whitman's career, his greatest in quantity prolific period. It opens with the beguiling "Cinema Pieces" of the early '60 at hands the never-before-exhibited suite of twenty seven double-sided Dante Drawings, 1974-75 and includes his to the full finally realized, multifilm projection--and--mirror installation, Spyglass (Film Images, 1990-1976) 1976/2003

Four of eight "Cinema Pieces" produc in the early '60 were brought together here. A paper shopping bag, an aged shower stall (plumbed with running water), a bathroom sink and mirror, and a casement window are each animated with grainy film nooses that complete their sculptural containers in a certain quantity of logical or fanciful way. In Garage Bag (formerly Shopping Bag), 1964/2003 the progressive contents--from groceries, to prepare for the tableed food, to garbage--are projected onto a "screen" that fits the bag's opening. Bathroom Sink, 1964/2003 is loaded with a noose of film clips projected onto the mirror showing tree of Whitman's cinematic muses as she washes, applies makeup, and dresse Looking [i]or[/i] part of to the other a plastic curtain and streaming water in Shower, ca, 1964 we diocese the life-size image of a young bather as she obtains wet, lathers, and rinses. In Window, 1963/2003 we direct the eye through panes of glass to view a young woman undressing in a woodland setting.

The dominant temper of the "Cinema Pieces" is playful, on the other hand there's more here than adapteds the eye. In Bathroom Sink, Whitman casts the film loop onto the mirror above the sink; the mirror, in make go round reflects the image onto the opposite wall, in like manner that the viewer is able to literally go into the special cinematic environment that exists in quasi spaces between the mirror, the film, the wall, and the woman. While entirely exposed in this work, the mirrors in the other "Cinema Pieces" are completely concealed, intercepting and reflecting the images as they play upon the margins of perception. thump double, reverse, reflect, repeat--it's as admitting Whitman were staging the viewer's unwitting entrance "through the looking glass" into an imagined dimension where the real and the not quite real are indistinguishable.

Mirrors are plenteous more prominent in the octagon-shaped installation ,Spyglass, in which four projection protections alternate with four wall-size mirrors to create hallucinatory circuits of nonsynchronous imagery--streaming pictures of everyday life, cinematic consequences and a personal inventory of percepts subjects, and actions culled from footage assembled above fifteen years of looking at life [i]or[/i] part of to the other the lens of a Bolex Sandwiched into this continuously running chronicle of Whitman's world are the mirrors, which twist reflections of the viewer's material substance and vagrant snatches of film into reveries of distortion and pulsating visual infinities.